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0 pointscoldcode2y ago0 comments

More countries are now sub-2.0 replacement, China is down to 1.09 so the peak is unlikely to get much more than that.

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11 comments · 3 top-level

popol122y ago· 6 in thread

A Google search for “china children per woman” gives me 1.705

Are you talking about something else ?

The Google hit China TFR 1.705 for 2023 is bogus (and 2023 isn't even over yet, which should have alerted you), it's single-sourced from macrotrends.net which is quoting an old (pre-pandemic) UN forecast; you can see from their graph their (forecasted) numbers for 2020-2 turned out totally wrong. Lots of other sites are quoting the Google and macrotrends as fact. So now the #1 Google hit on that is misinformation. (Always look for attributions and dates).

As to 2022, China did briefly drop to a TFR of 1.09, like GP said [1]; but the moving average over several years is more like 1.3. You have to put the 2022 drop in context that their very strict lockdown went into its third year, and there were two cases of pregnant women losing their babies e.g. because the hospital denied them entry for having negative Covid tests but a few hours too old [2].

[0]: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/fertility-ra...

[1]: "China's fertility rate drops to record low 1.09 in 2022- state media" https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-fertility-rate-dr...

[2]: https://fortune.com/2022/01/07/china-covid-cases-miscarriage...

anonylizard2y ago

Its now dropping even lower in 2023, long after the lockdowns have ended.

Turns out the East Asian style of hyper-competitive child rearing has its downsides, namely the high costs dissuade parents from having children altogether.

China faces every antinatal problem the west does, except far worse.

1. Extremely high housing prices making family formation expensive

2. Small apartments suppress large family formation (Seen in Europe)

3. General collapse of marriage rates due to changing incentives and thus moral norms

4. Higher education decreasing fertile years.

5. Economic depression, especially for young people, euro debt crisis level of youth unemployment.

You add to that, that China still officially has a 3-child policy (not that many people even have 2), because the birth control bureaucrats still need a job.

China is probably 2nd lowest in the world behind South Korea, and will stay there, if not

2 more replies

popol122y ago

I gotta admit I don't fact check google's promoted numbers, thanks for demonstrating that I should :)

happymellon2y ago

Normally it requires two people to make a baby. So 1.7 is less than the number of people requires to create it.

Rates are normally calculated by couples. 0.85 per person is a decline.

paulmd2y ago

Leave it to HN to be unaware of the physical or social mechanics of reproduction

istjohn2y ago

I suppose that would be replacement rate if there were 42% more women than men in China. But according to Wikipedia there actually 4.5% more men than women.

jl62y ago· 2 in thread

The trends are mostly encouraging but there are still 102 countries with a fertility rate above replacement rate, so we’re not out of the woods yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...

crote2y ago

2.1 is the replacement rate for well-developed countries. It does not apply universally to all countries.

For example, the US had a fertility rate of 7.0(!) in 1800 and saw no significant population growth due to births because most of those kids died well before reaching the age of reproduction.

Historically, fertility rates have always dropped once basic standards of living have managed to get rid of excess child mortality.

XorNot2y ago

Unless those countries have increasingly western lifestyles, stable political systems and growing economies, then it actually doesn't matter. The grim reality is that all those places have substantial modifiers on their death rates, and aren't exporting their increasing population to the world in any meaningful way.

We know from experience that if those places actually started to improve, then the birth rate would drop precipitously.

ido2y ago

You mean less than that? But more importantly, after that peak comes a long and steady decline (as far as we can tell).

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