> China's population is purportedly set to halve by 2100.
75 years is a long time. At lot can change.
75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement
Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy".
> increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted.
Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.
True, but population collapse specifically is a tough headwind. You can't make more 2055 30-year-olds unless they've already been conceived today, and those will be the parents of the 2100 45-year-olds. While a lot can change, it's unrealistic to assume a birth rate will skyrocket all of a sudden (China's at 1.18 per woman and US is only at 1.6). The painful part, the bad worker:retiree ratio, is already set in stone, by the tininess of the millennial and Z generations, especially in China.
That said, I hedge my bet by saying that if AGI arrives and happens to have a wildly positive impact on human lifestyles, I can grudgingly accept the possibility of an unprecedented baby-boom in a decade, fueled by a complete end of scarcity. Wouldn't bet on that catalyst though.
I think any boom would be the result of the average amount and, relatedly, price of energy and land and stability available to a member of a given population sharply increasing.
Millennials are having less kids because they proportionally have less access to energy and resources. I am 30 and we just bought our first home at 200x its original value in the early 20th century, and 4x what its previous owners payed 25 years ago. And the ratio of wage to housing costs in the US is the worst its ever been.
I notice how many less things I and my friends have compared to our parents and grandparents at my age. I know I'm significantly less of a materialist than the post-WWII generations, but the discrepancy is massive.
I want kids, but currently my significant other does not, nor does her sister. My significant other cites concerns about economic and mental stability in our rapidly evolving political climate. I cite concerns about the need for fostering resilient communities through effective child rearing. The majority of my similar aged friends today are childless. Comparatively, my mother birthed me at 21.
In the late 90's and early 00's, you could be a full-time meth head and still afford property in the suburbs and some cities. Now, sober post-graduates are living in their cars working an impenetrable gig economy at the behest of big tech, the new oil industry. In this sense too, we could also measure an individual or community's health by how much influence an individual can exert on their increasingly digital lives. The app economy has eroded our rights and turned us into cattle. Even if they can't articulate it, my peers feel this and are continuing to put off kids, at risk of becoming infertile from waiting too long.
Even if later generations pick up the slack, there are still unavoidable bumps in the road ahead due to what is happening right now with my generation. If things do not improve, birth rates will only continue to go down and possibly even nosedive, given some catastrophic global event that leads to an extended reduction in supply chain resiliency.
If I understand correctly, you're proposing sex-selection (terminating males?) as a hack to theoretically produce more child-bearing women in the next generation, who would, I assume, just reproduce promiscuously or form polygamous relationships?
I have to admit, it's an outside-the-box idea, but it would still take 25 years to start bearing fruit (no pun intended).
> culturally
Yeah, honestly, especially in Asia where they de facto did the opposite for so long, all those "extra" males seem to mostly just be alone. I'd worry that the generation with way too many women would reproduce at a disappointing per-woman rate, with the women choosing to roll the dice and either land a monogamous husband to maybe have kids with, or to just pursue their career, rather than be a 'side-piece mom.'
> If I understand correctly, you're proposing sex-selection (terminating males?) as a hack to theoretically produce more child-bearing women in the next generation,
Yes. Both my belief in the the technical possibility and my reason to doubt the cultural acceptability are on the grounds that it looks like the people were already doing so in the opposite (more male births) direction due to the one-child policy.
> who would, I assume, just reproduce promiscuously or form polygamous relationships?
Why do you have the maximalist outlook that population must grow. All developed nations are looking at population crunches. All of them, and China and Russia as well. Reducing it to a Chinese problem is reductive. It’s a collective choice, and how is China doing better or worse than its peers?
It's probably good for the planet if we depopulate. But the problem which comes with that is that socioeconomic policy and infrastructure has massively evolved over the course of the industrial and digital revolutions, boosted in the US by WWII, etc. A sudden decline of population makes things that were touted as viable or stable suddenly less viable or stable.
For example, the dependency ratio changes, especially in an aging population. Look at what Japan's going through. A working married male in Japan might be taking care of both their immediately family and both their parents and their significant other's parents. It's a significant economic load and leads to significant issues around mental health and work-life balance.
We can also look toward Japan as a test bed too, as their GDP and standard of living does continue to rise despite an ongoing population decline. This is not an impossible situation to manage, but it does require strong and thoughtful leadership
There's also the lost of trade skills and workers in general needed to maintain current service-based infrastructure.
In the case of China, their population of nearly 1.5bil is projected to be halving within 75 years. This is a massive difference that will require recalibration of policy and infrastructure, whereas other countries might experience a significantly lower ratio of decline.
I don't, I'd be perfectly happy with a stable population too. Infinite growth is a dumb goal and I don't support it as a goal (at least until someone demonstrates space colonization).
But a society where generations get dramatically smaller is screwed. You need a balanced (or better) ratio of workers to retirees, mainly. If you took the US and teleported a representative (by age) sample of 80 million people by age to another planet, our society here wouldn't collapse, everything would be pretty ok, we would still have the same basic economy, and the fewer kids and elders to take care of, the reduced consumption, would balance out the loss of the workers. But if they took 80 million people between 30 and 65 instead (that's probably most of that age group), things would go really badly for us, because there aren't enough 20-somethings and 65+ workers to do all the things that keep the kids and retirees fed. If we simply wait 30 or 40 years, China (among others) will be in a situation like that. US is not much better and I can certainly imagine it getting much worse in the US. And I can confidently predict a maximum number of 30 year olds we'll have in 30 years because every one of them has already been born. Even extreme measures can at best only make more 2055 29-year-olds.
> how is China doing better or worse than its peers?
As I stated, China has one of the worst birth rates -- numerically it's doing worse. I don't have a beef with China. I hope they and the rest of the West can figure out how to improve the birth rates soon.
I think you're underestimating the scope/magnitude of the problem.
But first: Governments can't function if they're not the top power — sovereign — in their territories. If they don't effectively block the growth of criminals, they always lose, and then the criminals replace them. This argument also applies to foreign governments intelligence agencies interfering locally.
For scope, consider: if some government was actually serious about road traffic laws, how long would it be before everyone that drove in their jurisdiction was banned from driving? I think the answer is between a week and a month.
If the UK fully enforced just its heroin laws and gave up literally everything else, the net effect is it would triple their prison population. If they tried to enforce all drugs laws, they'd bankrupt themselves building prisons.
A true panopticon government cannot function without commensurate liberalisation.
75 years is a long time. At lot can change.
75 years ago, China was just finishing its civil war, with the losers retreating to Taiwan. Land reform had an "estimated death toll ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Reform_Movement
The infamous famine was only about 65 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Now, I won't claim confidence that they will solve anything; but they are a dictatorship and they deliberately had a "once child" policy for a bit to prevent massive over-population, so it's absolutely conceiveable that their leadership sees too few children per woman and says "ok, new rule: if you want a kid, first one has got to be a girl, mandatory screenings during pregnancy".
> increasingly relying on invasive, pervasive surveillance as a tool of short-term stability, just like the US.
Given how cheap surveilance is, all nations faced a choice before GenAI made it even weirder: Either the police does this, or criminals do it for blackmail. Only solution I can see is extreme liberalisation, where personal behaviour most of us find repugnant is not just legally permitted but also socially permitted.
Now that GenAI is in the mix, we need someone trustworthy to document reality and say what has even really happened. Insert your own jokes about the intersection of "government" and "someone trustworthy", but the need exists.