I’ve covered Peter Zeihan videos on China’s crashing demographics before. We already knew China was “the fastest aging society in human history, with the largest sex imbalance in human history.” Now he’s dug into new some new data.
It’s much worse than he thought.
“We’ve gotten some new data out of the Chinese that has made it way to the U.N, and so the updates have allowed us to update our assessment, and oh my God, it’s bad.”
“Here is the new data, and as you can see, the number of children who are under age 5 has just collapsed, and they’re now roughly twice as many that are age 15 as age 5.”
“What happened back in 2017, well before Covid, is that we had a sudden collapse in the birth rate, roughly 40% over the next five years among the Chinese, the ethnic Han population, and more than 50 percent among a lot of the minorities. And that is before Covid, which saw anecdotally the birth rate drops considerably more.”
“We’re never going to get good data on death rate, or at least not anytime soon, because the Chinese, when they did the reopening, just stopped collecting the data on deaths and Covid and everything because they didn’t want the world to know how many Chinese died, so they don’t know.”
And if you look at the data from the Shanghai Academy of Science, it’s even worse than the official state numbers.
“China aged past the point of demographic no return over 20 years, ago and it wasn’t just this year that India became the world’s most populous country, that probably happened roughly a decade ago. And it wasn’t in 2018 that the average Chinese aged past the average American, that was probably roughly in 2007 or 2008.”
“This is not a country that is in demographic decay, this is a country that is in the advanced stages of demographic collapse. And this is going to be the final decade that China can exist as a modern industrialized nation state, because it simply isn’t going to have the people to even try.”
“Labor costs you’re having now or as low as they’re ever going to be. Consumption is as high as it’s ever going to be.”
“So even before you consider the political complications or issues with operating environment or energy access or geopolitical risk or regulational risk, the numbers just aren’t there anymore so you have to ask yourself why you’re still there.”
Add to that the fact that China economy is probably overstated by 60%, and it looks like China’s brief days in the sun are already over.
I’ve seen Z man before and he caters to his audience. When he talks before the cross-dressers at the US military academy he says they are the best fighting force in the history of the world. When he gives a keynote at Indian investment conferences he says India is the best positioned as well as having the best looking people.When he’s in Mexico they’re the hardest working. It’s his schtick.
Of course the man caters to his audience: he’s one of the few generalists out there and he likes success.
He also hides his (old fashioned globalist) politics and presents as an objective viewer, which is always good: everyone who begins with an ideology leans into it and continues to make mistakes using it. Is objectivity when deciding reality possible? Of course not, but the attempt always improves the approach and forces a more perfect understanding. Even the attempt at objectivity improves analysis and helps prevent unforced political errors.
The best part about Zeihan is that he makes a larger way of thinking about geopolitics possible: it keeps people from being too small and directly ideologically political.
I certainly do NOT go to him about any topic specialties: I know a lot of subject matter specialists (in areas like Chinese history/politics or election prediction) that are annoyed by his presentations, but that’s to be expected in ANY generalist: their analysis about any specific matter is only as good as the last subject matter specialist Zeihan had read. Not all of them are going to be stars.
As long as you approach Zeihan as a way of thinking about the world and not the last word in any matter, he’s worth his weight in gold.
But would I take his bet about the next presidential election? Like hell I would. I’ve heard him speak: he knows no more than any other (mediocre) commenter.
But would I take his bet about the next presidential election? Like hell I would.
Argumentum as vericundium :“An example of the fallacy of appealing to an authority in an unrelated field would be citing Albert Einstein as an authority for a determination on religion when his primary expertise was in physics.” H/T Wikipedia
Peter Zeihan would likely be the last person I would consider as having an authoritative opinion on politics.
I suppose it could be really bad. Maybe even awful.
But aren’t there some advantages too? Maybe we’re better off without as much competition for resources. People will be able to have bigger apartments and enjoy more space in the cities.
[…] Don’t get me wrong, China is not a push over, they have a capable army and need to be watched. I also think we need to start limiting our trade with them and finding different overseas supply sources. However, those who keep up with China have known things have been very ungood over there for years. Their economy is contracting rapidly, some say on the verge of collapse, there is growing social unrest, and now their population seems to be in free fall: China’s Demographics: Even Worse Than You Think. […]
I have come to appreciate his marshalling of demographic and geographic statistics. The main areas where he really loses me is his view of climate change and “renewable” energy sources. He ignores the many critics of the climate change religion and while he highlights the raw material supply problems of renewables, he concludes that it will all work great if only they would place them in the right locations.
“Peter Zeihan would likely be the last person I would consider as having an authoritative opinion on politics.”
No idea what you’re on about. Generalist is a broad category synthesist, but “politics” can mean anything. It’s like saying you wouldn’t consider him about “uh….stuff”. Okay.
“Their economy is contracting rapidly, some say on the verge of collapse, there is growing social unrest, and now their population seems to be in free fall”
The unspoken civic pact/bargain in the PRC has always been:
We the communist party dynasty (yes…it’s dynastic) have inherited the Mandate of Heaven and we will take care of you, the Chinese citizen, as per our historical obligation to our people. We demand your unquestioning loyalty and obedience, and in exchange, we transitioned from your grandparents era – essentially a slave economy – to a market economy ‘with Chinese characteristics’ to improve your quality of life, which we have improved since the 80s. As your wealth improves, so too must your party loyalty and your dedication to appropriate social conditioning (social credit score). This, Mr. and Mrs. Wang, is your contract with the motherland.
If you can’t tell, the situation must always improve for the contract to be valid. Historically, in China this has always been the case and good dynasties usually last about 200-250 years. Some don’t make it that far before you get a Taiping or AnLuShan rebellion and things go tits up in a hurry.
The growing social unrest you mention is a symptom of this perception that the Central Party leadership aren’t keeping their end of the bargain. it is clear that the 70% consumer/service based economy China wanted to transition to (like the USA’s) isn’t going to happen, meaning new sources of geometric growth aren’t forthcoming.
China is a geopolitical bellwether for the entire globe. Things going badly there affect everything. The Han dynasty wall sent barbarians on the move that pushed steppe tribes further West and theoretically ended the Roman empire. A stable China is a good thing for the whole world. An unstable China means pain everywhere and for everyone.
They fell for the Ehrlich “Population Bomb” schtick, and now they’re paying for it. When the wolves come in off the steppe, howling, they’ll find the empty vacant cities to be a bit of a lark. Supposing they can survive the contaminated environment…
The thing that just cracks me up is the hubris, the arrogance. We know better. We just do, goes the plaintive cry of the oligarch and the centrist control freak. Meanwhile, their proposals are disposed of by God with utter disregard.
Want to know who is getting the last laugh? All those aborted babies, all those mothers who had their babies literally kicked out of their bellies by party apparatchiks, who now have no one to boss around… Ain’t that a hoot?
Shame the US won’t be able to take full advantage of China’s demographic collapse. I fear we are about to enter one of our own.
My brothers and I had eight kids among the the three of us. Our kids, ranging from the late 20s to early 40s now have eight kids between the eight of them and are unlikely to have more than three more. That’s well below replacement rate. And our kids were raised to believe having children was a good thing. A lot of others were not.
Give it a generation or two of that and we do our own disappearing act.
“Give it a generation or two of that and we do our own disappearing act.”
Unfortunately given Adaptive Marxism (i.e. woke) that is likely true: any class touched by the communists will have a nearly South Korean total fertility rate (which is .78 per woman” a catastrophe).
Even if conservative peoples have a much higher rate (right now it’s around 1.822 for conservative white women), the combination will end up with a TOTAL fertility rate for them of around 1.2 to 1.4 over the long run. That’s Japanese levels of stagnation.
Fortunately it’s a game of last man standing: the last nation with good demographics will have a vast advantage. And considering America’s total fertility rate (TFR) collapsed only last year during Covid, we will have a good time for the next 30 years while it winds its way through our economy. Even as recently as 2007 we had a TFR that was OVER 2.1.
Unfortunately last year we had a TFR of 1.64, with whites having a 1.598 TFR. Unless it recovers to pre-Covid (it won’t: see woke), we’re fucked.
Blacks
It’s odd, though: One of the strange modern trends is how adaptive marxism is hitting other minorities: blacks are on the way to being almost entirely woke as a people, and their TFR has collapsed even faster than the white birth rate, but from a much greater height:
1. Black women used to have almost an *entire child* more than white women. Not any more: last year black TFR was only 1.675, BARELY above the white total fertility rate. Literally only .077 children more than white women, who outnumber them 7 to 1.
2. With greater concentration of woke infiltration in the black community, I expect the black total fertility rate to be under 1.0 in less than ten years: even below the white fertility rate of 1.2 to 1.4. African-Americans had around 517,000 births last year.
In ten years, that could be down to under 250,000 a year, which is as bad as South Koreas catastrophic rate. Basically blacks will have South Korean birth rates with South Korean sized population. The’re a few years behind the South Koreans, but it’s heading that direction fast. In fact, the vital statistics of black births look almost almost perfectly like South Korean births from 15 years ago.
Hispanics:
Hispanics are having a similar response to woke as whites: they have a partially embedded woke community where part is deeply woke and a large part isn’t. It’s killing their TFR too: right now it’s only 1.885, which is a DEEP decline from earlier. They seem to be more on the trajectory whites are on, which means they will eventually be hitting a lower rate only kept up by immigration. Conservative hispanics will have a MUCH higher rate than their gringo-ized woke compatriots.
Asians:
Asians are utterly destroyed with no chance to recover in America: with woke only now hitting them, they are already the lowest TFR at 1.325: large immigration from Asia is the only thing keeping numbers from falling off a cliff. If Asian-American fertility goes any lower (which it almost certainly will), they will be fading away even with massive immigration.
All Asian immigrants of all nationalities seem to be following the fertility patterns of Eastern Asia, not Southern Asia. With woke, I suspect they will be at an unheard-of super-SUPER-low (.4-.6) fertility in under 20 years. Like blacks, I suspect the Asian-American population to be in terminal death decline very soon.
Overall, the total fertility rate is constantly dropping, but I suspect whites will (ironically) have the highest birth rates in 20 years, the exact opposite of the old wives tales and complaints of “blacks having 20 kids”. It will NOT be enough to save America in the long run unless there is a true turnaround from adaptive marxism and a replacement with a natalist ideology that values children.
We are the Children of Men. With woke, that means literally.
There’s a differential aspect to this. Some segments of any given population have zero children. Some have 3. Many incentives to have more than zero that existed a couple centuries ago have vanished. Whatever incentives and motivations that remain and successfully get people to have kids will be dispositive.
I know a family where one person is from one continent and the other from another. On one side of the family, ALL the siblings have at least 2 children, and the children are on track to replicate that. On the other, it’s one or none.
The future belongs to those who show up. I expect the drop in TFRs to reverse within a couple generations as the people susceptible to “child-free” motivations self-select out of existence. Also, I expect this reversal first in the highly industrialized West, and for the TFR decrease to continue for quite a while in the Third World as industrial modernity changes their incentives the same way it has elsewhere.
(Korea is a special case, as most of the population lives in Seoul and it’s basically all the megacity trends at once. Things will reverse there when Seoul can no longer physically continue as it is. Note the north is also under replacement, though not as badly so.)
There’s a chance the US can pull out of it. Maybe. The Chinese could, as well, but they’re not taking steps to cease the real cause of the problem, which is the essential and intractable immiseration of the populace.
I think one of the abiding lessons of the late 20th Century that a lot of the despotic total control types have utterly failed to either notice or internalize the implications of is this: You cannot force people to breed. The conditions obtaining when there was no efficient and effective birth control cease to operate on the population once such a thing exists. It’s now up to the people themselves to make the decisions to have and, more importantly, raise kids. You make them not want to? They won’t, and your population is going to fall like a stone.
Women didn’t used to have kids because they wanted them. They did, but they also had no damn choice–Kids were a natural outgrowth of sex. Now that sex is obtainable without kids as a side-effect, if you want kids, you have to make conditions such that people will want to have them, love them, and raise them. Otherwise? LOL… Ain’t happening.
The reason the birth rate here in the US has dropped goes straight to the costs and the miseries inflicted on people raising kids. They want every kid in a child seat, and cars to be small and fuel-efficient? Guess what, people? The Gods of Unintended Consequences raise their heads, and you’re only ever gonna get two kids per, no matter what you do. Same with all the other constraints. Make it too expensive to have kids? Then, people will quit having them…
I don’t think China can pull out. Not enough slack in their system, and what there was, they wasted pouring concrete for empty cities and apartment buildings that will never be filled. The US? If our governing idiots ever pull their heads out of their asses, we might address some of the actual root causes for our fertility rates dropping, which ain’t got a lot to do with the things they say.
This whole thing goes back to the problem I’ve pointed out again and again and again, over the years: The people running things actually have NO idea how things really work. Because, they never go out and look, trying to understand why people do what they do.
You can’t run something you don’t understand; our system does not train the “managerial elite” to go out and LOOK. They see things, but they don’t understand them; this is all over. They think “Well, the fertility rate is dropping… We’ll just enact laws lowering taxes for people with more children… That’ll fix it…”
Meanwhile, the actual root causes out there are half-a-dozen “minor” interlocking issues that they’ve created “fixing” other things. The small cars, the requirements for more safety measures around having kids (all in the name of “good ideas” to protect them…) which interact to create the lower fertility rates.
The problem is, none of these people ever get taught to think in terms of second- or third-order effects. And, they’re so narrowly mandated that the guy who saying “No, no more big cars…” isn’t the guy who has to worry about the long-term effects of a 1.71 fertility rate amongst the responsible productive portion of the population. All he worries about is his narrow slice, which ain’t enough.
It’s just like how the idiots created the SUV market that we’re all up in arms about. That happened precisely because they banned “big sedan/stationwagon”. Had they not done that, the SUV market would never have taken off, because the American market ain’t Europe with big cities all in relative proximity. They got the SUV and “big truck” market precisely because they tried to do away with that which the public actually wanted to buy, a big car with big range and carrying capacity.
God alone knows what the hell they’re going to get now that they’re trying to squeeze the SUV and truck to death. If they were smart, they’d look at things holistically, and get a damn clue. It’s like with the damn appliances… How much energy am I really saving by having to run my clothes and dishes through the cycles twice, to get them clean…?
Idiots. All of them. Top-to-bottom, side-to-side, all the way ’round…
BTW, Twitter in Elon’s infinite wisdom has decided to block anyone from viewing any content if not logged in. Since 90% of the audience does not log in (and being forced to log in just to read something necessarily means the owners can track what it is you’re reading, which is police-state totalitarianism just waiting to be used for something), and the value of Twitter is in the audience reach, this totally destroys the network effect and value of Twitter. As far as Zeihan is concerned, his newsletters are here:
“For American blacks, perhaps 25% of young black men in prison (don’t get me wrong–most of them completely justified) has something to do with it.”
No, not in the least. In fact, the opposite is true.
Male prison time seems to have very little impact on reproduction. If the women were in prison, I could see that being a problem, but it’s the men, and men are needed for VERY little of the birthing process.
Not only are women NOT put off by men with prison records, they’re actively attracted to them. I don’t remember the exact statistic or where I found it (it was long ago) but men with prison in their background have close to one more kid on average than (black) men who have never been to prison. I forget the exact number, but it was disheartening.
That in itself is a genetic wildfire creeping through the black population. With the Flynn Effect now in the historical rear view mirror, the only way for BIPOC to attain equity will be to destroy all standards.
Which has already happened. Adaptive Marxism has finally adapted America out of all competence.
I don’t think men who have been to prison are more attractive to women, I just think that the type of man who goes to prison has much lower standards about the kind of woman he’s willing to have sex with, a significant fraction of which are perfectly willing to have children out of wedlock as long as taxpayers are paying for them.
No. Sex is primal, and women love violence and danger. It’s in the DNA and any stupid society that won’t get rid of its worst people will have an endless dysgenic crush pushing generations into the dirt.
Anyway, it’s the low standards of women that’s the problem: they want them. Period.
Ted Bundy had 88 marriage proposals. One was from a beautiful Countess. Any society that doesn’t control sexuality (of both sexes) is bound to die.
[…] DEMOGRAPHICS: Even Worse Than You Think. “What happened back in 2017, well before Covid, is that we had a sudden collapse in the birth […]
I’ve seen Z man before and he caters to his audience. When he talks before the cross-dressers at the US military academy he says they are the best fighting force in the history of the world. When he gives a keynote at Indian investment conferences he says India is the best positioned as well as having the best looking people.When he’s in Mexico they’re the hardest working. It’s his schtick.
Paul Erhlich deserves the credit for all of that. Most destructive intellectual of the 20th Century.
Of course the man caters to his audience: he’s one of the few generalists out there and he likes success.
He also hides his (old fashioned globalist) politics and presents as an objective viewer, which is always good: everyone who begins with an ideology leans into it and continues to make mistakes using it. Is objectivity when deciding reality possible? Of course not, but the attempt always improves the approach and forces a more perfect understanding. Even the attempt at objectivity improves analysis and helps prevent unforced political errors.
The best part about Zeihan is that he makes a larger way of thinking about geopolitics possible: it keeps people from being too small and directly ideologically political.
I certainly do NOT go to him about any topic specialties: I know a lot of subject matter specialists (in areas like Chinese history/politics or election prediction) that are annoyed by his presentations, but that’s to be expected in ANY generalist: their analysis about any specific matter is only as good as the last subject matter specialist Zeihan had read. Not all of them are going to be stars.
As long as you approach Zeihan as a way of thinking about the world and not the last word in any matter, he’s worth his weight in gold.
But would I take his bet about the next presidential election? Like hell I would. I’ve heard him speak: he knows no more than any other (mediocre) commenter.
But would I take his bet about the next presidential election? Like hell I would.
Argumentum as vericundium :“An example of the fallacy of appealing to an authority in an unrelated field would be citing Albert Einstein as an authority for a determination on religion when his primary expertise was in physics.” H/T Wikipedia
Peter Zeihan would likely be the last person I would consider as having an authoritative opinion on politics.
I suppose it could be really bad. Maybe even awful.
But aren’t there some advantages too? Maybe we’re better off without as much competition for resources. People will be able to have bigger apartments and enjoy more space in the cities.
[…] Don’t get me wrong, China is not a push over, they have a capable army and need to be watched. I also think we need to start limiting our trade with them and finding different overseas supply sources. However, those who keep up with China have known things have been very ungood over there for years. Their economy is contracting rapidly, some say on the verge of collapse, there is growing social unrest, and now their population seems to be in free fall: China’s Demographics: Even Worse Than You Think. […]
I have come to appreciate his marshalling of demographic and geographic statistics. The main areas where he really loses me is his view of climate change and “renewable” energy sources. He ignores the many critics of the climate change religion and while he highlights the raw material supply problems of renewables, he concludes that it will all work great if only they would place them in the right locations.
“Peter Zeihan would likely be the last person I would consider as having an authoritative opinion on politics.”
No idea what you’re on about. Generalist is a broad category synthesist, but “politics” can mean anything. It’s like saying you wouldn’t consider him about “uh….stuff”. Okay.
[…] China’s Demographics: Even Worse Than You Think […]
“Their economy is contracting rapidly, some say on the verge of collapse, there is growing social unrest, and now their population seems to be in free fall”
The unspoken civic pact/bargain in the PRC has always been:
We the communist party dynasty (yes…it’s dynastic) have inherited the Mandate of Heaven and we will take care of you, the Chinese citizen, as per our historical obligation to our people. We demand your unquestioning loyalty and obedience, and in exchange, we transitioned from your grandparents era – essentially a slave economy – to a market economy ‘with Chinese characteristics’ to improve your quality of life, which we have improved since the 80s. As your wealth improves, so too must your party loyalty and your dedication to appropriate social conditioning (social credit score). This, Mr. and Mrs. Wang, is your contract with the motherland.
If you can’t tell, the situation must always improve for the contract to be valid. Historically, in China this has always been the case and good dynasties usually last about 200-250 years. Some don’t make it that far before you get a Taiping or AnLuShan rebellion and things go tits up in a hurry.
The growing social unrest you mention is a symptom of this perception that the Central Party leadership aren’t keeping their end of the bargain. it is clear that the 70% consumer/service based economy China wanted to transition to (like the USA’s) isn’t going to happen, meaning new sources of geometric growth aren’t forthcoming.
China is a geopolitical bellwether for the entire globe. Things going badly there affect everything. The Han dynasty wall sent barbarians on the move that pushed steppe tribes further West and theoretically ended the Roman empire. A stable China is a good thing for the whole world. An unstable China means pain everywhere and for everyone.
Or, not.
China has rendered itself an irrelevance.
They fell for the Ehrlich “Population Bomb” schtick, and now they’re paying for it. When the wolves come in off the steppe, howling, they’ll find the empty vacant cities to be a bit of a lark. Supposing they can survive the contaminated environment…
The thing that just cracks me up is the hubris, the arrogance. We know better. We just do, goes the plaintive cry of the oligarch and the centrist control freak. Meanwhile, their proposals are disposed of by God with utter disregard.
Want to know who is getting the last laugh? All those aborted babies, all those mothers who had their babies literally kicked out of their bellies by party apparatchiks, who now have no one to boss around… Ain’t that a hoot?
Shame the US won’t be able to take full advantage of China’s demographic collapse. I fear we are about to enter one of our own.
My brothers and I had eight kids among the the three of us. Our kids, ranging from the late 20s to early 40s now have eight kids between the eight of them and are unlikely to have more than three more. That’s well below replacement rate. And our kids were raised to believe having children was a good thing. A lot of others were not.
Give it a generation or two of that and we do our own disappearing act.
“Give it a generation or two of that and we do our own disappearing act.”
Unfortunately given Adaptive Marxism (i.e. woke) that is likely true: any class touched by the communists will have a nearly South Korean total fertility rate (which is .78 per woman” a catastrophe).
Even if conservative peoples have a much higher rate (right now it’s around 1.822 for conservative white women), the combination will end up with a TOTAL fertility rate for them of around 1.2 to 1.4 over the long run. That’s Japanese levels of stagnation.
Fortunately it’s a game of last man standing: the last nation with good demographics will have a vast advantage. And considering America’s total fertility rate (TFR) collapsed only last year during Covid, we will have a good time for the next 30 years while it winds its way through our economy. Even as recently as 2007 we had a TFR that was OVER 2.1.
Unfortunately last year we had a TFR of 1.64, with whites having a 1.598 TFR. Unless it recovers to pre-Covid (it won’t: see woke), we’re fucked.
Blacks
It’s odd, though: One of the strange modern trends is how adaptive marxism is hitting other minorities: blacks are on the way to being almost entirely woke as a people, and their TFR has collapsed even faster than the white birth rate, but from a much greater height:
1. Black women used to have almost an *entire child* more than white women. Not any more: last year black TFR was only 1.675, BARELY above the white total fertility rate. Literally only .077 children more than white women, who outnumber them 7 to 1.
2. With greater concentration of woke infiltration in the black community, I expect the black total fertility rate to be under 1.0 in less than ten years: even below the white fertility rate of 1.2 to 1.4. African-Americans had around 517,000 births last year.
In ten years, that could be down to under 250,000 a year, which is as bad as South Koreas catastrophic rate. Basically blacks will have South Korean birth rates with South Korean sized population. The’re a few years behind the South Koreans, but it’s heading that direction fast. In fact, the vital statistics of black births look almost almost perfectly like South Korean births from 15 years ago.
Hispanics:
Hispanics are having a similar response to woke as whites: they have a partially embedded woke community where part is deeply woke and a large part isn’t. It’s killing their TFR too: right now it’s only 1.885, which is a DEEP decline from earlier. They seem to be more on the trajectory whites are on, which means they will eventually be hitting a lower rate only kept up by immigration. Conservative hispanics will have a MUCH higher rate than their gringo-ized woke compatriots.
Asians:
Asians are utterly destroyed with no chance to recover in America: with woke only now hitting them, they are already the lowest TFR at 1.325: large immigration from Asia is the only thing keeping numbers from falling off a cliff. If Asian-American fertility goes any lower (which it almost certainly will), they will be fading away even with massive immigration.
All Asian immigrants of all nationalities seem to be following the fertility patterns of Eastern Asia, not Southern Asia. With woke, I suspect they will be at an unheard-of super-SUPER-low (.4-.6) fertility in under 20 years. Like blacks, I suspect the Asian-American population to be in terminal death decline very soon.
Overall, the total fertility rate is constantly dropping, but I suspect whites will (ironically) have the highest birth rates in 20 years, the exact opposite of the old wives tales and complaints of “blacks having 20 kids”. It will NOT be enough to save America in the long run unless there is a true turnaround from adaptive marxism and a replacement with a natalist ideology that values children.
We are the Children of Men. With woke, that means literally.
In China, perhaps killing off 40 million baby girls 20-30 years ago has something to do with it.
For American blacks, perhaps 25% of young black men in prison (don’t get me wrong–most of them completely justified) has something to do with it.
[…] worse than you think with China! We’re seeing a demographic collapse, and it probably is that China is past the point of no return. […]
There’s a differential aspect to this. Some segments of any given population have zero children. Some have 3. Many incentives to have more than zero that existed a couple centuries ago have vanished. Whatever incentives and motivations that remain and successfully get people to have kids will be dispositive.
I know a family where one person is from one continent and the other from another. On one side of the family, ALL the siblings have at least 2 children, and the children are on track to replicate that. On the other, it’s one or none.
The future belongs to those who show up. I expect the drop in TFRs to reverse within a couple generations as the people susceptible to “child-free” motivations self-select out of existence. Also, I expect this reversal first in the highly industrialized West, and for the TFR decrease to continue for quite a while in the Third World as industrial modernity changes their incentives the same way it has elsewhere.
(Korea is a special case, as most of the population lives in Seoul and it’s basically all the megacity trends at once. Things will reverse there when Seoul can no longer physically continue as it is. Note the north is also under replacement, though not as badly so.)
There’s a chance the US can pull out of it. Maybe. The Chinese could, as well, but they’re not taking steps to cease the real cause of the problem, which is the essential and intractable immiseration of the populace.
I think one of the abiding lessons of the late 20th Century that a lot of the despotic total control types have utterly failed to either notice or internalize the implications of is this: You cannot force people to breed. The conditions obtaining when there was no efficient and effective birth control cease to operate on the population once such a thing exists. It’s now up to the people themselves to make the decisions to have and, more importantly, raise kids. You make them not want to? They won’t, and your population is going to fall like a stone.
Women didn’t used to have kids because they wanted them. They did, but they also had no damn choice–Kids were a natural outgrowth of sex. Now that sex is obtainable without kids as a side-effect, if you want kids, you have to make conditions such that people will want to have them, love them, and raise them. Otherwise? LOL… Ain’t happening.
The reason the birth rate here in the US has dropped goes straight to the costs and the miseries inflicted on people raising kids. They want every kid in a child seat, and cars to be small and fuel-efficient? Guess what, people? The Gods of Unintended Consequences raise their heads, and you’re only ever gonna get two kids per, no matter what you do. Same with all the other constraints. Make it too expensive to have kids? Then, people will quit having them…
I don’t think China can pull out. Not enough slack in their system, and what there was, they wasted pouring concrete for empty cities and apartment buildings that will never be filled. The US? If our governing idiots ever pull their heads out of their asses, we might address some of the actual root causes for our fertility rates dropping, which ain’t got a lot to do with the things they say.
This whole thing goes back to the problem I’ve pointed out again and again and again, over the years: The people running things actually have NO idea how things really work. Because, they never go out and look, trying to understand why people do what they do.
You can’t run something you don’t understand; our system does not train the “managerial elite” to go out and LOOK. They see things, but they don’t understand them; this is all over. They think “Well, the fertility rate is dropping… We’ll just enact laws lowering taxes for people with more children… That’ll fix it…”
Meanwhile, the actual root causes out there are half-a-dozen “minor” interlocking issues that they’ve created “fixing” other things. The small cars, the requirements for more safety measures around having kids (all in the name of “good ideas” to protect them…) which interact to create the lower fertility rates.
The problem is, none of these people ever get taught to think in terms of second- or third-order effects. And, they’re so narrowly mandated that the guy who saying “No, no more big cars…” isn’t the guy who has to worry about the long-term effects of a 1.71 fertility rate amongst the responsible productive portion of the population. All he worries about is his narrow slice, which ain’t enough.
It’s just like how the idiots created the SUV market that we’re all up in arms about. That happened precisely because they banned “big sedan/stationwagon”. Had they not done that, the SUV market would never have taken off, because the American market ain’t Europe with big cities all in relative proximity. They got the SUV and “big truck” market precisely because they tried to do away with that which the public actually wanted to buy, a big car with big range and carrying capacity.
God alone knows what the hell they’re going to get now that they’re trying to squeeze the SUV and truck to death. If they were smart, they’d look at things holistically, and get a damn clue. It’s like with the damn appliances… How much energy am I really saving by having to run my clothes and dishes through the cycles twice, to get them clean…?
Idiots. All of them. Top-to-bottom, side-to-side, all the way ’round…
Mark Steyn was beating this drum in 2006. Funny how no one is giving him credit.
I agree with all of that.
BTW, Twitter in Elon’s infinite wisdom has decided to block anyone from viewing any content if not logged in. Since 90% of the audience does not log in (and being forced to log in just to read something necessarily means the owners can track what it is you’re reading, which is police-state totalitarianism just waiting to be used for something), and the value of Twitter is in the audience reach, this totally destroys the network effect and value of Twitter. As far as Zeihan is concerned, his newsletters are here:
https://us11.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=de2bc41f8324e6955ef65e0c9&id=5654564be1
but there’s dozens of other useful sources I’d found over the course of the past year that I’m really going to miss.
I hope Twitter backtracks on this quickly.
[…] Battleswarm- China’s Demographic crash? […]
“For American blacks, perhaps 25% of young black men in prison (don’t get me wrong–most of them completely justified) has something to do with it.”
No, not in the least. In fact, the opposite is true.
Male prison time seems to have very little impact on reproduction. If the women were in prison, I could see that being a problem, but it’s the men, and men are needed for VERY little of the birthing process.
Not only are women NOT put off by men with prison records, they’re actively attracted to them. I don’t remember the exact statistic or where I found it (it was long ago) but men with prison in their background have close to one more kid on average than (black) men who have never been to prison. I forget the exact number, but it was disheartening.
That in itself is a genetic wildfire creeping through the black population. With the Flynn Effect now in the historical rear view mirror, the only way for BIPOC to attain equity will be to destroy all standards.
Which has already happened. Adaptive Marxism has finally adapted America out of all competence.
I don’t think men who have been to prison are more attractive to women, I just think that the type of man who goes to prison has much lower standards about the kind of woman he’s willing to have sex with, a significant fraction of which are perfectly willing to have children out of wedlock as long as taxpayers are paying for them.
No. Sex is primal, and women love violence and danger. It’s in the DNA and any stupid society that won’t get rid of its worst people will have an endless dysgenic crush pushing generations into the dirt.
Anyway, it’s the low standards of women that’s the problem: they want them. Period.
Ted Bundy had 88 marriage proposals. One was from a beautiful Countess. Any society that doesn’t control sexuality (of both sexes) is bound to die.