China allows couples to have three children • Hacker News Board

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#121

Post by jp555 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

Kaze404 wrote: post #113

jp555 wrote: post #65

Good luck. With a shrunken generation of family to help due to 30+ years of one-child policy, and almost no social support (China does not really have socialized healthcare in practice) there's no one to help take care of larger families. But there is a HUGE number of rapidly aging parents and grandparents to take care of. Add a culture that puts accumulating wealth as the #1 virtue, and it becomes nearly impossible…

If you omit the part about the one-child policy I would think you were talking about the USA.

US has one of the best demographics in the Western world. Millennials are larger than Boomers. Plus the US can use immigration to decide what population they want. Countries not built on immigration cannot really do this in practice. see Japan.

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#122

Post by eloisius » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:18 PM UTC

faitswulff wrote: post #104

HDMI_Cable wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any other explanations for the massive male surplus?

Is adoption murder? Abortion? Why is it easier to imagine that Chinese people murder infants than it is to imagine literally any other scenario? Why is it easier to assume that a massive sex imbalance is the result members of a particular group of people being psychopaths rather than the result of some systemic cause? Hmm.

I think the systemic cause was clearly pointed out: the one child policy.

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#123

Post by dirtyid » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:22 PM UTC

throw0101a wrote: post #112

dirtyid wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One Child Policy prevented ~300M births. Currently PRC with 1.4B has 150-200M surplus / idle workers, 600M trapped in low(er)-middle income. PRC has too many people to elevate to upper-middle or high income status within reasonable time and simply not enough resources. Any policy to reduce population was "beneficial". 1.4B is already too much. PRC with population of 1.7B people would fall apart. Crassly, a more sever…

> One Child Policy prevented ~300M births. This is a questionable ascertain. The birth rate had already dropped, and had been dropping for over a decade, before the policy kicked in.

>The birth rate had already dropped, and had been dropping for over a decade, before the policy kicked in.

That was due to the original 2-child policy from the 70s. To rephrase accurately: "family planning" prevented ~300M births, adjusted downward from 400M since 100M+ previously unregistered birth was logged since reversion to two child policy again. There's no credible analysis that suggest PRC family planning policies did not directly and dramatically reduce population. 300M IUDs and 100M sterilizations aren't placebos.

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#124

Post by faitswulff » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

eloisius wrote: post #122

faitswulff wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is adoption murder? Abortion? Why is it easier to imagine that Chinese people murder infants than it is to imagine literally any other scenario? Why is it easier to assume that a massive sex imbalance is the result members of a particular group of people being psychopaths rather than the result of some systemic cause? Hmm.

I think the systemic cause was clearly pointed out: the one child policy.

And the killing of children follows, naturally

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#125

Post by qwytw » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:26 PM UTC

bluescrn wrote: post #103

unnamed76ri wrote: post #76

Gotta love HN comment section on a story such as this. People here solving math problems more than questioning the power of a government to tell people how many children they are ALLOWED to have.

But perhaps it would have been the right thing to do for governments to limit population growth and not let us breed our way to destruction so fast, unsustainably stripping the earth of its resources and accelerating climate change. Personally, a one-child limit a few decades ago would have been much more tolerable than face being told in the near future that we can no longer eat meat, drive a car, or travel internat…

Or maybe, perhaps there are other ways to decrease birth rates to a more sustainable level besides forced abortions and infanticide? There is not a single in country in the EU with a fertility rate above 2 (the average in 2019 was 1.54) it's higher in the US but this is mostly a result of external immigration (either directly or immigrants having more children). At least in Europe this is going to cause huge issues in the upcoming decades due to huge increases in social and healthcare expenditures coupled with a shrinking workforce.

*https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00199/defa...

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#126

Post by MrsPeaches » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:27 PM UTC

As far as I am aware [1] one of the big issues here is housing.

With the one child policy all of the housing was built for 1 child families (i.e. 2 bedroom apartments). Even with the two child policy it was really difficult to find apartments built for larger families.

[1] I know someone who lived in China, who said this was an issue, but I don't have any actual sources so this may be wrong.

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#127

Post by lammalamma25 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

Every story about China should include a note that the government decides how many children its citizens are allowed to have. We've grown numb to how terrible this is.

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#128

Post by mcculley » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:29 PM UTC

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #116

mcculley wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am amused at the phrase "communist buerocrats [sic]". I live in the United States, where a particular bastard hybrid of socialism and crony capitalism requires that every birth be well documented by bureaucrats.

Are you railing against registering births? Which country doesn't do that? Somalia?

I am not against it at all. I am amused that anyone would think that only “communists” have bureaucracy.

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#129

Post by WillDaSilva » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

hutzlibu wrote: post #86

dragonelite wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a hard problem to solve don't even know a developed country that actually managed this problem well.

I am not sure, that this is a problem that needs centralized "solving". I don't want anyone tell me, how much children I can or should have. We got to make sure the work life balance is in order for people to have the time and money to afford a family and give adequate support like daycare etc. But apart from that, I really don't like some buerocrats in some buerau somewhere calculating the "correct" number of births…

> We got to make sure the work life balance is in order for people to have the time and money to afford a family and give adequate support like daycare etc.

Stuff like this can and does result from bureaucrats / policy-makers deciding what an ideal number of children (for the well-being of the society) is. You say "that regulates itself", but clearly the things you listed (work-life balance, economic prosperity, daycare, etc.) are not self-regulating. You also mention specifically that this matter doesn't need centralized solving, but that's different from what you went on to say, that the factors that go into determining how many children are had are self-regulating. A decentralized approach does nothing to guarantee that.

Whether you like it or not, the government has a large influence over all of these matters. Choosing to not regulate them is a choice that will affect how they turn out. Likewise, the very structure of the economy and social systems will affect these things. A government can not avoid determining what those are like, whether by the government's active influence over them, or its more laissez-faire approach. When you have a monopoly on violence, you cannot truely recuse yourself from what happens in the society around you, and if you lack a monopoly on violence then you aren't really a government.

Re: China allows couples to have three children

#130

Post by xyzzy123 » Mon, May 31, 2021, 1:36 PM UTC

lammalamma25 wrote: post #127

Every story about China should include a note that the government decides how many children its citizens are allowed to have. We've grown numb to how terrible this is.

This doesn't seem intrinsically terrible to me, particularly if it's done through incentives and doesn't involve say, murder or sterilisation.

If we accept that any biome will eventually have a finite carrying capacity while the possibility of human reproduction is exponential it seems inevitable that there must be some limits to reproduction. Regulation is crude but might be less bad than "direct environmental feedback" such as die-offs or drastically decreasing quality of life.

Of course it's a co-ordination problem, which is very difficult.

I can imagine many cultural and technological approaches to population control, some of which already exist, and might not be terrible.

It seems to me that in particular any engineered habitats with well-defined carrying capacities, e.g. mars, would have to deal with this quite early on.