I am not an expert on China and I don’t pretend to be one on TV. That said I’m probably more an expert on China than 97% of Americans. I wanted to call attention to this op-ed at the Washington Post by Nicholas Eberstadt:
China is in the midst of a quiet but stunning nationwide collapse of birthrates. This is the deeper, still largely overlooked, significance of the country’s 2022 population decline, announced by Chinese authorities last month.
As recently as 2019, demographers at the U.S. Census Bureau and the United Nations were not expecting China’s population to start dropping until the early 2030s. But they did not anticipate today’s wholesale plunge in childbearing.
Considerable attention has been devoted to likely consequences of China’s coming depopulation: economic, political, strategic. But the causes of last year’s population drop deserve much closer examination.
China’s nosedive in childbearing is a silent alarm. It signals deep disaffection with the bleak future the regime is engineering for its subjects. In this land without democracy, the birth collapse can be read as a landslide vote of no confidence in President Xi Jinping’s rule.
My immediate reaction to the piece was “now do the United States”. Here’s the U. S. birthrate:
and the U. S. marriage rate:
The statistics for the native born are actually somewhat worse than that—the birthrates of immigrants are slightly higher than for the native born.
If declining birth and marriage rates signal pessimism and a loss of confidence in the government in China, what do they signal here in the United States?
The neocons eat this stuff up—China is dying!! But the real story is that every country outside sub-Saharan Africa has the same exact problem. Japan’s population has bee falling for a few years. There are several countries in Europe that are in worse shape than China. Their birthrate is only half replacement, and their hinterlands are filled with abandoned villages. There are a couple of YouTube videos showing villages taken over by wildlife, including wolf packs.
The US’ predicament is masked by our very large immigration flow, but our white population is actually shrinking, and it is a minority in the under 15 cohort.
The world’s population will peak around 2030, and then decline for the rest of the century. The problem facing every country is how to keep the economy functioning with an aging, declining population. The dependency load (non-workers) is already an issue, but actual laborer shortages, and especially shortages of critical skill is a bigger issue. All economies will shrink, and some will collapse.
The CO2 lunacy is already damaging many economies, and adding that stress to falling populations bodes well to give us Hell on Earth.
Our Ruling Caste may well toss nuclear war into the mix.
Pretty much every country sees fertility decrease when incomes go up so not really sure that decreased fertility is usually or even commonly a sing of lack of confidence in the future.
Steve
It is observed the only groups to have stable and sustained marriage and consequent fertility rates above replacement are ones that have rejected modernity in toto — the Amish and Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
But in the long term (in timespan of centuries), given the mechanics of evolution; the conflict between modernity and fertility rates will be resolved, and I’m not betting people will disappear.
One last comment, China’s one child policy is far more responsible for the birth rate then despair about the future. It turns out the one child policy was the ultimate form of borrowing from the future — and well, the future has arrived and is demanding payment.
I think another factor is that women of childbearing age are highly sought after as workers in China’s factories, particularly for precision work.
BTW, I do think that stable marriages are a cultural issue. My siblings and I are all married and none have been divorced. Their children are all married; one has divorced.
It is more than culture.
When you have cultures around the world; Western (including protestant, catholic, orthodox, and post religious), East Asian, Southeast Asian, Indian, Islamic (including Shia, Sunni), all have below replacement fertility; despite vast differences in cultural values, it points to something even stronger.
“Modernity” (industrialization, urbanization, and technologies such as family planning) requires societies to adapt (gender equality, individualism, consumerism) and that adaptation breaks fertility rates.
See here. The people who should be getting and staying married aren’t. Our present situation is perverse.