Not Enough Chinese
For years, we've endured the nonsense about the "population explosion." You know the litany: too many people on the planet, not enough resources to sustain them all -- in fact, that very word, "sustain" and its creepy twin, "sustainability" have become ubiquitous -- and the prescription is always the same: population control, contraception, and inculcating a culture of Less and Smaller and Diminished Expectations.
Here's Long's Law: whenever the assembled experts agree that a Certain Thing is a Major Problem, they're not only wrong, but exactly wrong.
We don't have too many people on the planet. We have too few. At least, too few young people. Old people, apparently, we're lousy with. And that's a problem.
From Phillip Longman's piece in the latest Foreign Policy:
...birth rates are dipping below replacement levels even in countries hardly known for luxury. Emerging first in Scandinavia in the 1970s, what the experts call "subreplacement fertility" quickly spread to the rest of Europe, Russia, most of Asia, much of South America, the Caribbean, Southern India, and even Middle Eastern countries like Lebanon, Morocco, and Iran. Of the 59 countries now producing fewer children than needed to sustain their populations, 18 are characterized by the United Nations as "developing," i.e., not rich.
The only part of the population that's growing is the elderly one. Which is bad news for us. Social Security benefits, pension fund draw-downs, health care costs -- all of these will be borne by a small-and-getting-smaller group of younger wage earners.
But if the news is bad for us, it's really bad for China:
China, for now, continues to enjoy the economic benefits associated with the early phase of birth-rate decline, when a society has fewer children to support and more available female labor for the workforce. But with its stringent one-child policy and exceptionally low birth rate, China is rapidly evolving into what demographers call a "4-2-1" society, in which one child becomes responsible for supporting two parents and four grandparents.
Asia will also be plagued by a chronic shortage of women in the coming decades, which could leave the most populous region on Earth with the same skewed sex ratios as the early American West. Due to selective abortion, China has about 16 percent more boys than girls, which many predict will lead to instability as tens of millions of "unmarriageable" men find other outlets for their excess libido. India has nearly the same sex-ratio imbalance and also a substantial difference in birth rates between its southern (mostly Hindu) states and its northern (more heavily Muslim) states, which could contribute to ethnic tension.
That's right: there are one billion Chinese, and that's not enough.
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Comments :
Jul '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Muslim fertility will take care of any population shortage wherever they are allowed to migrate.
Jul '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
"Due to selective abortion, China has about 16 percent more boys than girls, which many predict will lead to instability as tens of millions of "unmarriageable" men find other outlets for their excess libido."
Wow! There's a huge market opportunity here, for entrepreneurs with bold vision.
By the way, has anybody figured out how to clone Pandas? They're awfully cuddly....
Feb '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Kenneth: "Due to selective abortion, China has about 16 percent more boys than girls, which many predict will lead to instability as tens of millions of "unmarriageable" men find other outlets for their excess libido."
Wow! There's a huge market opportunity here, for entrepreneurs with bold vision.
Well, you're late to the party. There is quite the international market in brides from even less fortunate countries like Vietnam, for the less desirable men (mostly, those who live in the countryside) in countries like China and Korea.
Jul '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Busy System Admin
Kenneth: "Due to selective abortion, China has about 16 percent more boys than girls, which many predict will lead to instability as tens of millions of "unmarriageable" men find other outlets for their excess libido."
Wow! There's a huge market opportunity here, for entrepreneurs with bold vision.
Well, you're late to the party. There is quite the international market in brides from even less fortunate countries like Vietnam, for the less desirable men (mostly, those who live in the countryside) in countries like China and Korea. · Oct 12 at 8:00am
But Pandas are low maintenance. Give them a basket of bamboo shoots and they're happy little campers.
Import one of those foreign brides and next thing you know, she'll be demanding shoes.
Jul '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Here's a bold vision:
http://www.i4u.com/11134/chinese-blond-female-humanoid-robot
Aug '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Rob Long:
Here's Long's Law: whenever the assembled experts agree that a Certain Thing is a Major Problem, they're not only wrong, but exactly wrong.
I agree. And since I'm not an expert on this concept - and I am not assembling with any experts, my agreeing with Long's Law won't lend to it being wrong, let alone exactly wrong.
But what happens if the assembled experts here at Ricochet all agree with Rob???
Jul '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Songwriter
Rob Long:
Here's Long's Law: whenever the assembled experts agree that a Certain Thing is a Major Problem, they're not only wrong, but exactly wrong.
I agree. And since I'm not an expert on this concept - and I am not assembling with any experts, my agreeing with Long's Law won't lend to it being wrong, let alone exactly wrong.
But what happens if the assembled experts here at Ricochet all agree with Rob??? · Oct 12 at 8:15am
Not to worry. We never agree with Rob.
Hollywood squish....
Jun '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
The problem, yet again, is socialism. Since when is it written in stone that people have the right to retire and live in idleness on the public dime? "But I worked hard all my life for this!" No, you probably didn't, mom. Not if you retired at 62 and have an expected lifespan of 84. The actuarial tables have become so skewed since social security was introduced that the system needs an overhaul taking into account that people can be productive longer than in the past. The free market answer to retirement is that you can do so when you can afford it. "But, jeepers, that might take personal financial discipline and actual planning." Yeah. Or we could continue to leave it up to gubbermint.
May '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Speaking as a youngster, I agree with Paules. Retirement, like adolescence, is something human beings generally did without through most of history. It's a luxury.
A lot retirees I've known go back to work, anyway, either to escape boredom or to compliment their retirement checks. A guy I worked with at a Home Depot years ago had retired from NASA. I'm sure there was a rocket hidden in the storage room somewhere.
Steyn mused in America Alone that Russia and China might strike some sort of deal, since one has too few women and the other too few men. Of course, he also mused that China might decide to annex Siberia, in which case there would be much frolicking in the Ural Mountains.
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Kenneth
Songwriter
Rob Long:
Here's Long's Law: whenever the assembled experts agree that a Certain Thing is a Major Problem, they're not only wrong, but exactly wrong.
I agree. And since I'm not an expert on this concept - and I am not assembling with any experts, my agreeing with Long's Law won't lend to it being wrong, let alone exactly wrong.
But what happens if the assembled experts here at Ricochet all agree with Rob??? · Oct 12 at 8:15am
Not to worry. We never agree with Rob.
Hollywood squish.... · Oct 12 at 8:21am
So true. And that's my job, here.
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Rob, absolutely right, my friend. When I was working for the Far Eastern Economic Review in Asia, for our 50th anniversary I went through all our volumes from its founding in Shanghai after the war. It was highly illuminating. All the population experts then complained that Japan was overpopulated. In the 1970s, it suddenly shifted to China. For the last two decades Japanese have seen their governments raising taxes Japanese families are not having enough babies to meet pensions, etc in the future.
I remember one Japanese contributor in the 1950s who got it right: He said, maybe the problem is not that our population is too large but that our economy is too small.
Jun '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Sadly, being in Taiwan and HKG quite a bit, children are seen as a burden by many. And the single child family is the preferred mode. Maybe a lack of god, maybe too much emphasis on Prada, or maybe the people are just a little spoiled. But in every asian nation, including the Philippines and Indonesia birthrates are falling. In the Phils it may be 3 down from 5, In taiwan 1 down from 3, but in last 30 years kids have become less popular.
Sad....
Jun '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Wasn't it Mr. Steyn who said that China "will get old before it gets rich"?
I'd like to suggest the "Tabula Rasa Corollary to Long's Law": "And when the experts try to solve the non-existent Major Problem, they will create one or more actual Major Problems."
May '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
There are more women in China than you think (the one-child policy has been widely ignored outside of the major cities, and a small fine is the only penalty), and today in many cases, daughters are preferred, because they are more likely to stay home and take care of the parents. The 16% number is almost certainly inflated. But the surfeit of young, restless, single, er, erotically-focused men is a potential problem.
But if you read my prior comments here at Ricochet about China, I have been predicting that the Chinese economic behemoth would fade just as Japan did for the same sets of reasons. At some point not too far out, China will be forced to institute some kind of pension system to deal with the aging and alone population or there will be a political implosion.
Aug '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
16 percent of Chinese males won't find a wife. Put 'em in the Army, after imagine the kind of destructive tendencies of testosterone charged, frustrated guys with guns !! They'd be unstoppable. Considering the long vision, that may have been the point for the one child policy in the conniving central planning committees of old. Or that they see the males as breadwinners and anticipated the 4-2-1 as being better supported by the one being a male.
They make a nice phone though.
Ethnicity is going to die hard, but necessarily so as these guys put on their best clothes and go put down the money for a Vietnamese bride in these places that understand life in the country. They'll end supporting the poor rural folk in neighboring countries as well when they buy their daughters.
Sep '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Can we apply Long's Law to the Absolute Bi-Partisan Certainty that obesity is a Major Problem? Because to me it's a sign that we have succeeded in eliminating the ancient scourge of hunger. Kind of ties in with Poulos' post above about the Analgesic State, in that everyone seems worried it's the function of the state to mitigate the potential danger to the collective public health of individual decisions to be chubby. I would submit it is not.
May '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
China's government, the most reliable source for Chinese demographics, has an interest in skewing the numbers to suggest an equal number of men and women. They want to promote a perception of harmony, right? The trend you describe is probably real, but I'm not sure how trustworthy any specific figures are.
Jul '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Miss Conduct
Can we apply Long's Law to the Absolute Bi-Partisan Certainty that obesity is a Major Problem? Because to me it's a sign that we have succeeded in eliminating the ancient scourge of hunger. · Oct 12 at 12:05pm
Yeah, that would seem reasonable. But never underestimate the ability of pushy interventionists to manufacture problems. I give you Oklahoma, which is simultaneously the nation's 6th fattest and 4th hungriest state.
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20100913_11_A1_ULNSoe957958
May '10
Re: Not Enough Chinese
Aaron Miller
China's government, the most reliable source for Chinese demographics, has an interest in skewing the numbers to suggest an equal number of men and women. They want to promote a perception of harmony, right? The trend you describe is probably real, but I'm not sure how trustworthy any specific figures are. · Oct 12 at 12:25pm
The Chinese government doesn't have a clue what the actual numbers are, Aaron. And any jiggering can have impacts in either direction. The answer is that we just don't know a while lot, but the conventional wisdom of the unstoppable colossus is almost certainly wrong. It's just never that simple.