that was a really great explanation. and one that talks a bit about decreasing poverty and increasing access to - not enforcement of - contraception as a means towards population stabilization.
( human rights for all humans. go figure. )
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I’m still stuck on idea that there is some necessary “golf courses per person” that is needed, so the only way to reduce the number of courses is to reduce the number of people. I am pretty sure that is not how this works, you know?
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Without a bunch of elder care robots things could get pretty desperate for the older generations in China. They’ve already got a serious shortage of affordable in-home elder care folks.
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ive always found this a bit curious. surely you need less than one person on average to care for any other one given person?
like if hospitals needed a one to one ( or greater than one to one! ) ratio of doctors to patients we’d all be dead already
or if a parent were unable to generate enough surplus resources to feed more than one child how would multi person families survive?
and yet, it seems a common statement that you to have a growing population to be able to care for the elderly. it doesn’t track for me
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Nobody is saying that the population needs to be expanding forever, it obviously needs to stabilize at some point. But right now in China the birth rate is roughly half the population replacement rate, so their demographics are very swiftly shifting to be weighted towards the elderly to a degree that no large human society has ever experienced, at a time when people are living longer on average than ever before. The reality is that this will cause major challenges that will need to be solved. What proportion of the workforce can realistically be devoted to the elder care and health sector? We’re going to find out.
Also, keep in mind that even though they’re a (nominally) communist country China doesn’t really have a social security system for retirement, as children are traditionally expected to take care of their aging parents. And now that most children are single children, that means that each worker is often supporting 2 to 4 retirees (if one spouse stays home) on top of raising their own kid(s), if any.
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I suspect it’s more that China doesn’t really have an old-age care health system, it has the age-old familial system: parents are looked after by their eldest son in their old age, especially in more traditional areas.
Which is one reason why sons were so important: daughters when married off became part of their husband’s family, and she would be looking after her parents-in-law. If you’ve only got one child, and he’s a son, then you might be OK. Hope he stays around and doesn’t die. If you’ve got one child and she’s a daughter, then hope she’s got enough overhead to look after two sets of parents in their dotage at once.
As I understand it, the CCP likes to emphasise Confucianism for its threads of “look after your parents, look after your neighbors, obey authority and don’t make a fuss”. But with that comes the “and a child’s duty is to look after their parents”, which implies that with a shrinking and aging population, will remove more and more labor capacity from the economy as they’re taken up with caring duties with fewer people to share the work around.
Note well: This is my deeply oversimplified understanding of the culture of a huge, disparate, heterogenous place which I am not from. When presented with contrary information, ignore me.
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one benefit of a low birth rate is more resources for elder care. it just reverses the direction of care. and it’s got to be cheaper than college… ( or heck, at this point: cheaper than kindergarten )
and one good thing about the longer life spans: people are more active and healthy. so self care also becomes a bit easier too
yeah, i think that’s definitely true. and is maybe the key.
pretty much everything about these modern times are unprecedented and a potential crisis 
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I suspect (no economist, me) that the catch lies in needing resources in excess of need to care for the growing elderly population. If you have a working age population that can only just take care of itself with minimal left over, caring for the elderly gets pretty tough. The more excess that exists, the smaller the ratio can be.
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