Population decline has become a hot topic around the world in 2023, with countries like South Korea and China entering a demographic crisis and most developed countries struggling with declining birth rates.
Each crisis had its own cultural and historical factors, such as the lingering hangover from China's brutal one-child policy of forced abortions and sterilizations, but each crisis had its own cultural and historical factors, including a lingering hangover from China's brutal one-child policy of forced abortions and sterilizations, but the code for maintaining population growth in tandem with industrial development was not enough. No one seemed to be able to decipher it.
This was particularly troublesome for China. China's autocratic rulers thought they could order their people to have more children just as easily as they had previously told them to stop procreating.China started the year with admit This is the first time the country's population has declined since Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in the 1960s.
By the middle of this year, Chinese authorities began frantic efforts to: embarrass people If they refused, he called them “pedophiles” and forced them to bear children. In August, the city of Xi'an sent out text messages for China's version of Valentine's Day. prompt Ask residents to think about “sweet love, marriage, and childbirth.''
A woman rides her bicycle past a sign encouraging couples to have only one child on March 25, 2001, along a road leading to a village on the outskirts of Beijing. China has abolished this policy and since 2015 has been enthusiastically encouraging couples to have more children, but the birth rate has fallen. It's not increasing. (Goh Chaihin/AFP/Getty Images)
The one-child policy created a shortage of fertile young women and put China in a deep demographic hole, as parents were legally restricted to only one child and were generally intolerant of boys. . It also created some unique social distortions, such as the tendency to increase spending on only children, which created unrealistic expectations when the one-child policy was lifted.
However, the world's worst birth crisis is currently hitting South Korea. Pediatric clinics and kindergartens have been destroyed due to the rapid and severe population decline. shut down.
If current birth rates continue, South Korea could lose nearly half its population by the end of this century.Korean society is almost growing allergic To children, as if childless people were some strange alien species that they should never encounter.
“Children's exclusion zones are becoming increasingly popular in South Korea, but parents say they are holding back the next generation.”
Unable to reach yurt #Japan bientot (si c'est pas déjà ds quelques endroits d'ailleurs), je me coupe la droite (la jambe) pic.twitter.com/0kT54qkL0Q— Shoot Japan (@ShootOSAKA) December 3, 2023
Japan was one of the early examples of rapid population decline, but report In 2023, all but one prefecture are still in decline, with some expected to have lost 30 to 50 percent of their population. The national population is projected to decline by another 17 percent over the next quarter century.
The only prefecture in Japan expected to grow by 2050 is Tokyo, and its surrounding counties are declining more slowly than the rest of the country. Demographers suggested this is an understandable phenomenon, as older residents naturally flock to larger cities with better access to health care and social services, which is understandable in an era of declining populations and longer life expectancies. .
Of course, U.S. population growth is a more complicated story.Large countries with highly diverse populations and high immigration rates do not have to worry about population decline in the short term, but the Census Bureau project America's population may begin to level off by the end of this century, and some groups of Americans have higher birth rates than others.
Still, the Census Bureau assumes an “excess of deaths over births” in all future scenarios, likely beginning sometime in the next 30 years. Fewer births and longer lifespans mean America's population is aging, but it has not yet disappeared like South Korea.
The essential challenge facing developed countries is very simple. The high cost of raising children worries couples about sacrificing their lifestyles and career ambitions to raise the large families essential to a growing population.
The costs of raising children are not just the direct costs of medical care and material needs. This is why China's efforts to boost birthrates through childcare subsidies haven't worked as well as planners hoped.Total cost includes: opportunity cost This is much more difficult to redeem, especially for women.
As women in any society become more educated and ambitious, the opportunity costs of marriage and childbearing increase, especially for young women with high career ambitions. Government subsidies for diapers and kindergartens don't change this calculation much.Singapore offer There are incredibly generous subsidies for raising children, but they have little effect on birth rates.
This photo taken on May 8, 2015 shows a mother holding her child on the Tokyo subway. AFP PHOTO / FRED DUFOUR (Photo credit: FRED DUFOUR/AFP via Getty Images)
Various cultural and economic factors in a particular country overlap on top of this underlying dynamic. For example, Asian countries in decline tend to be culturally homogeneous and have very low immigration rates. Younger generations in China are worried about starting a family, worried about the economic downturn, a downturn in the real estate industry and diminishing job prospects.
Asian cultures tend to stigmatize unmarried motherhood, so women who don't want to get married don't have children either. Russia's population decline is influenced With high mortality rates, high numbers of abortions, and mass immigration.
Conversely, the world's highest birth rate is found in africaHere, the opportunity cost of motherhood is very low, cultural forces encouraging fertility are strong, children are needed simply as labor, and there is no need to develop the human capital to meet that need. Costs are minimal.
There are no easy lessons that countries with low birth rates can learn by studying countries with high birth rates. Except for the observation that large populations tend to respond to perceptions of costs and benefits and tend to overcome those perceptions even when demographic survival is at stake. is. All social welfare systems around the world rely on a growing population of working young people, generating tax revenue to pay for benefits for the elderly. The designers of these systems grossly underestimated how easily demographic predictions could break down.
