China and the Coming Population Bust

Mario Dumont’s ADQ wants to give $5,000 to every Quebec woman who bears three children.

This is not a bad idea—depopulation is a pending crisis throughout the developed world, and something must be done.

But surely the money should go to the Dad? He’s the one who pays the bills, after all, in most families. And doing it this way might keep families together. Dad might hang around for the sake of the money, and so might Mom.

And should single women who bear three children without a father earn the money? After all, this could then encourage poor women to have children without Dads for the money—to the detriment of the children.


In somewhat related news: Ignatieff has criticized Stephen Harper for presuming to lecture China on Human rights, calling China a “superpower of the 21st century.” I think that, like most experts, he’s wrong here. China may be growing like blazes now, but there are obvious limits to its growth.

China has stopped making people. Thanks largely to vigorous government action, its birth rate ha dropped well below replacement level long before this tends to happen in developed countries.

This means China is likely to follow the same cycle as Japan: growing rapidly to a point, then going into dead stall as it runs out of productive workers. Worse, it will hit this point at a lower level of development than Japan. Worse still, unlike America and, to a lesser extent, Europe, Chinese culture is not built to manage immigration. It cannot make up this declining birthrate by letting in people from elsewhere. And worse still, China has some structural problems, such as lack of transparency and lack of rule of law, that still need to be fixed. The lack of these may mean that China’s development is largely done with mirrors, and might come crashing down. The need for these, and long delay in implementing them, may mean a big bump on the road ahead, with economic setbacks.

More broadly, the impending shortage of people should be factored more carefully into everyone’s calculations. UN figures currently suggest the population of the world will top out around 2050, and then begin to decline. As this happens, the shortage of workers will become a critical development factor.

For example, Spain’s record growth recently has a lot to do with the ready availability of immigrants from Latin America. Because the language is the same and the culture very similar, they can integrate quickly. The same large pool of immigrants also helps the US.

Make no mistake: people have always been our most precious resource.