I live in China...Wuhan, Hubei to be specific...a couple things.
Some of this is possibly (definitely?) over analyzed. It's only within a short generation that the idea of empowering women in any way is even considered. Female infanticide was practiced surreptitiously well into the 2000's. Any denial of this fact is fatuous. Few men are even notionally inclined toward women's empowerment, let alone equality, and that's describing it nicely. Men pretty much want a slave. Smart women that can get any level of independence, get it and will do anything to keep it. I know a lot of women divorcees that are very happy.
Child care? No problem here. If it gets that far, grandparents can't wait to take care of the kids. Can't. Wait. I have several friends who are in the position of being loudly and constantly nagged by their own parents to have kids so they can take care of them. While not plugging into the average Americans idea of outdoor space, there is no lack of "socialist gathering plazas" (think gigantic cul de sac) in every neighborhood in every town. In nice weather, they're packed with a thousand, or thousands of people. By any American standard, these spaces are 100% completely safe. No crime. Zero.
Final thought...Life here is hard. Like, way harder than any American can even begin to imagine. Even when one is entering/entered into the middle class and "making it", it's hard. For kids, school is a literal 10-12 hour day in the younger years, expanding to an 18 hour a day experience as they enter Middle School and High School, 7 days a week. Some (many?) young people don't want to subject a kid to what they themselves suffered through. How much that impacts birth rates, I don't know.
The Gaokao defines a kids life. If you get through above the line, you get to go to university and at least a remote chance of going middle class. Below the line, no one cares. You don't matter. About 15-18% of boy men...the numbers are argued.... have almost no chance for a mate...another big component of the "life is hard" part.
Not that long ago, I read a book about feminism in South Korea. The author basically asserted, South Korean men are pigs, and now that women have other choices, they don't want to marry them or have kids with them. It sounded a lot like what you said in the first long paragraph.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, a TFR of 0.72 in 2023. The rate to simply replace the population, no increase or decrease, would be 2.1.
When something is happening globally, it really doesn't make sense to investigate causation factors locally. All of these articles about particular places and particular shifts in policy are missing the forest for the trees.
When the category 5 typhoon blows through, some boats will be cast downwind earlier and faster, and some ships will lag a bit behind. But there is not much to be learned trying to tease out which differences between the boats and ships might have consistently contributed to being slightly ahead of or behind the pack. The point is, the whole pack is moving far away from the origin, and there in one common cause behind it all - the typhoon.
I could go with that if someone could credibly tell us what the typhoon is. Metaphors are fun and enhance scientific understanding, but they ain't science.
Agreed. But there are very different rates of being "cast downwind". South Korea is in the lead with a TFR of 0.72 and Niger is plodding way back at 6.64! The differences should help to figure out just what the typhoon is (or actually are).
It's scary scrolling through the World Bank's table of birth rates. At the end are various groupings. For example:
The only contenders that come to mind for global impacts are the internet and climate change. I can see many mechanisms of action for the internet, few for climate change.
The big one in really poor countries is a reduced need to have lots of kids to ensure some live to adulthood and can care for the parents when old. As education and income increase, expectations of needing ANY kids to take care of parents when old decrease. I don't remember to what extent that was attributed to more education vs higher income but those were two other factors for reasons independent of having someone to care for the parents when old. A fifth is increased access to birth control.
That first set (the precariousness of life means you need lots of kids to be sure a few will survive) is what I used to hear all the time when people talked about "the demographic transition". As the story went, even after antibiotics and vaccinations and public health, there was "cultural lag" where people kept having more than two children even though they weren't "needed". The implicit prediction was that the median number of children would stabilize at two. A few people would want lots of kids and some would be physically unable to have kids or would want only one, but the two extremes would pretty much cancel out.
We seem to be in a second transition where people don't really think about needing kids in their old age and care less and less about continuing the family line. So the median number of kids goes below two, sometimes way below two.
If the state penalized people for not having kids (rewarding people who do is functionally the same) to the point that it was harder to be childless then to have kids, would self interest not correct this situation.
Anytime you don't have kids you have more time for the rat race. But that doesn't really do society any good. Its a zero sum game.
Both. Ultrasounds were banned for a while; still are in some places, although off the record and no one will say it out loud. Various excuses were made for their use, but the game was determining gender, not health of mother or fetus.
Is there a problem with physical harassment and molestation of women on public transportation? What about the incidence of rape -- any evidence it is higher in China than its Western counterparts? I'm not aware that Chinese women fare worse than women in Western societies in these respects, but I'm curious.
The practice of female infanticide means that Chinese women embraced or at least accepted their inferior status. Kind of mind-boggling. It is like the mirror image of Western identity politics with regards to women.
I have never seen nor heard of any physical harassment on public transportation. Zero. It's not Japan. I'm sure if you polled the entire population, a story would pop up. Occasionally, if the topic is even broached, someone will say they know something, but if I pursue the topic, it always ends up in non-credible heresay. Street crime of any sort, if interpreted as Americans think of street crime, does not exist. I or my wife can take a walk in the middle of the night literally anywhere, and not even begin to be concerned with our safety. It is one of my great attractions to China.
Rape, I don't know. If there was a rape, it would most likely not hit the evening news. There are still underground internet "news" sources that might report it. I can't imagine that it never happens. I would be dumbfounded if it was anywhere near American numbers. Victim crime here is basically nonexistent. Of course it happens somewhere, but that sort of civil disruption just isn't common. I'll listen to anyone that's got a story, but i've never heard a story, ever, and I cut across a fairly wide swath of population, from urban to countryside.
Out in the countryside, it's still pretty medieval. Americans would be surprised at the caveman level of some remote areas. Stories occasionally pop up of some nutjob that keeps a mentally challenged person chained in a room and makes her have babies sort of thing. Not a lot, but I recall a couple times in the last 10 years of awful stuff. That happened fairly recently, it was widely covered in the news, public outrage was INTENSE, and the government acted on it in what seemed to be the appropriate manner.
Domestic abuse, definitely. Lots. "Acceptance", while the norm in the past, is (very) slowly changing. Stories of women that wouldn't put up with it are showing up more in the news. There's definitely more women standing up to the bullshit. The baseline male population, generally, are pigs. The government covers up or denies a lot of it. Creating the perception of social harmony is task #1.
Thanks for the detailed reply. To me the ability of unaccompanied women to go out in public without being physically molested is one of the dividing lines between civilized and uncivilized countries. Apart from predominantly Muslim countries, my understanding is that parts of India don't pass this test.
You're welcome. Agreed. My wife often goes out for a walk in urban areas that have no lighting, no real foot traffic, and if anything happened no one would hear it. She doesn't even have to think about safety; it's a given. As an American, who lived nearly 40 years in Chicago, it is a revelation.
This is an aspect of China that never gets any press in the West. It's not just about the "repressive regime controlling all life". It's not that at all. People here aren't looking for trouble. There's enough in daily life.
That said, there is still mob crime, and it's intense. There are still guys that control the waterfront kind of stuff. Gambling and prostitution in the usual venues, mob controlled. Some of it bleeds over into daily life, via relationships.
In our neighborhood, a development had the local "leader", there was the local Party guy, and the "contractor". One of them was mob affiliated, but they were all blood related. The mob guy essentially just claimed the entire parking garage even though people had paid and owned legal title to their spaces. When people protested, a van showed up, very big men got out, and a couple people got beat downs and went to the hospital, all right in front of the local police, who stood there acting nervous. When people continued to complain the next day, a concrete truck arrived and dumped about 10 cubic yards of concrete in the garage entrance. The concrete was there for a week, along with periodic visits to the neighborhood by very big guys that did extremely intimidating stuff. The concrete seemed to be the final straw. The local Party guy called a meeting attended by everyone but The People, and the garage issue was resolved. Now, we have some new incompetent management company, probably the same mob, different name. It's mostly OK, by China standards.
Down by the Thai-Myanmar-China borderlands, it's seriously awful mega crime with feudal lords controlling stuff with private armies. You've probably read about some of it.
“I say we need cul de sacs.“ You’re on the right track Arnold. Our entire neighborhood here in North Carolina — made up of more than one hundred homes — is like a giant cul de sac. There is one entrance into the neighborhood, through a gate. Inside, all streets dead end in cul de sacs. Kids roam more freely than in any neighborhood I’ve lived in. In fact kids drive golf carts around as if it’s legal to do so. Regular cars drive slowly. There are dirt walking and biking trails. Further, many children attend Thales Academy, a low-ish cost, private, secular school five minutes away. In fact, Thales employees will claim that half the school lives in our neighborhood. I say this is unprecedented in America. Show me a private school K-12 school in which half the school lives in one neighborhood. This is of course one reason why parents prefer public schools. They want their kids to be part of a school-neighborhood community. This doesn’t exist for other private schools and is one reason private schools are less popular. In private schools students live over a much larger area, so students cannot easily access their school friends by walking or biking. Parents much drive them after arranging play dates. Play dates are a drag.
In a cul de sal neighborhood in which many students attend the same low-cost private school, you eliminate the riff raff students, but don’t filter for rich kids. Rich progressives families often generate a culture of drugs, entitlement, and poor metal health. This neighborhood is in a red county; the families are libertarian and conservative.
With this said, the neighborhood has a lot of room for improvement.
It sounds wonderful. I know someone else that lives in a similar type neighborhood in North Carolina. She says the same things. (Who knows, maybe it's the same neighborhood.)
You’ve probably never been to a community like this. There’s no fence around the neighborhood. The gate is open 5 days a week, but the cameras are always watching. The dirt trails remind me of Yosemite. There are many horses, stables, creeks, ponds, and a river. The forest is the fence.
Without question, there is an explosion of very young children everywhere. In a view that encompasses about 15 years, it has gone from hardly seeing toddlers to seeing them everywhere. I am not projecting or making this up. There are now simply an amazing number of toddlers in the neighborhood, at the malls, in the socialist gathering plazas...all being tended to by the grandparents.
This is not in any way a scientific observation, no data collection, nor is it an opinion on demographic effects, etc., etc. There's just a lot of kids. Knowing what I know about China, it's entirely possible that the call from government for more children is having an impact.
"Shot"...I can't say it didn't happen, but that wasn't the approach. Forced abortion, sterilization, various other atrocities...sure. If you paid money, you could have more than one kid. There's a lot of storyline that is lost in translation, so to speak.
There certainly was wishful thinking, but I think the idea behind it was that people wanted to reproduce themselves, and since it takes two to make a baby, that meant eventually having two babies (who would, because this is the modern world, both survive to adulthood, and in fact still be alive when the parents died).
"While it may be good news that marriage rates are high among college-educated women, the bad news is that they get married so late. Getting married in your thirties makes it much harder to have children. Did you know that obstetricians refer to a woman giving birth (I’m sorry, “birthing person”) over the age of 35 as a “geriatric pregnancy” (I’m sorry, “advanced maternal age”)."
This is an interesting issue and lots of important things to consider but ...
I don't see the point of this geriatric comment unless it is not factually correct that risks rise exponentially starting at about that age.
I've commented before referencing statistics that women with masters degrees have more kids than bachelors only and PhDs have more kids than those with masters. I think the relationship between college, marriage, and kids is far more complicated than your posts have suggested.
"Data table 11 shows that the birth prevalence of babies with any congenital anomaly was significantly higher in babies born to mothers aged 35 to 39 years (252.6 per 10,000 total births, 95% CI 243.5-262.0) and to those 40 years and over (400.7 per 10,000 total births, 95% CI 377.8-424.6)"
So, 252 per 10,000 at age 35-39 damn near doubles (400/10,000) over age 40.
The rest of the first paragraph there shows the optimal age range (in terms of minimizing congenital anomalies) is 25 to 35.
Average age of first birth in the UK right now? About 33, from memory. It used to be about 26 around 1992, I think.
Now, there's certainly a whole of stuff going on, but one thing I've never seen mentioned in any debate; the campaigns against teenage pregnancy - "don't have kids at while you're still at school" stuff. They began sometime in the '70s. At exactly the same time as years in education began to increase - certainly in the UK as the school leaving age was raised from 14 to 16, more 16 year olds started attending college for A-levels, and university attendance rose as well (about 9% of each cohort in '72, about 25% mid-90s, about 50% a few years back).
The link above also shows higher risks of congenital anomalies at under age 20.
I've learned to take him with a grain or more of salt. He has his hobby horses like anyone else.
In this case, for somebody who senses disruption in lots of geopolitics he's unusually persistent in thinking marriage and child raising are going to continue on the same path they've been on the last half century.
Yeah. Salt. It's the China stuff that makes me want to just say STFU. Everything else, I don't care. Everyone gets to have an opinion, even when it's fatuous.
We don't need babies - we need fewer, better people.
I'm going to guess the writer does not think we need more babies of the born-in-Burger-King-and-flushed-down-the-toilet type. (I'm also going to bet he doesn't read the agony column; it's a feminine weakness of mine and has been all my life, and yet it has a way of "keeping things real".)
So to speak with greater clarity: if the stratum of society that the writer wishes to see procreate, has become so deluded as to not know that for the 99% of us who will do nothing else of particular note in our lives, the point of life is to create more life - and he thinks this requires subsidy in order to import people who do not share this culturally-imposed neurosis, who do not find children either alien or something to "plan" the care and maintenance of (the latter for good or for ill, see e.g. Gaza) - he is in my opinion, out to lunch. Such an arrangement can only degrade the status of children further; and the subsidizing class will be overwhelmed by the "solution" in any case - because the subsidizing class by definition will not volunteer its women for this childcare duty (if they were willing to spend their lives or even just their young, procreative years caring for others' children, they'd be willing to care for their own ... even school teaching, to judge from otherwise super-lefty reddit, once such a wonderful job for women, has become "problematic", and I predict a huge nationwide shortage of teachers in the near future).
I will not say it is better to (openly) open the border than to engage in this roundabout get-other-people .... to-pay-other-people ... to-do-your-work-for-you scheme; I contend it would be better to leave things utterly alone, and let society heal itself of its pathologies, or not.
This topic of fertility is starting to be something maddening, like race.
There may be something we don't perceive about it.
It may yield to something better quite naturally, on its own.
In any case, one should hardly trust the fine folks who brought it to us, to deliver the change.
I'm referring to this alteration in reproductive behavior. To the extent it was artificially imposed, I don't trust in more government engineered solutions. To the extent it is a response to modernity - I'd prefer some humility, a wait-and-see approach, especially versus replacement.
I seriously suspect that there was no direct government engineering toward a lower birth rate. I think it's a response to higher income, changes in relative prices (houses are more expensive; entertainment--video, music, etc.--is less expensive and available 24/7), technology change (everything from the decline of jobs that require brawn to the Internet to contraception), and related cultural change.
The Chinese One Child policy was totally govt—yet the TFR in S. Korea is lower. Plus govt policy is changeable by voting, which might change the culture trends.
Your noting cultural trends seems spot on.
Biggest govt lever is subsidizing house building, so more houses are built—especially for young married couples with kids.
I live in China...Wuhan, Hubei to be specific...a couple things.
Some of this is possibly (definitely?) over analyzed. It's only within a short generation that the idea of empowering women in any way is even considered. Female infanticide was practiced surreptitiously well into the 2000's. Any denial of this fact is fatuous. Few men are even notionally inclined toward women's empowerment, let alone equality, and that's describing it nicely. Men pretty much want a slave. Smart women that can get any level of independence, get it and will do anything to keep it. I know a lot of women divorcees that are very happy.
Child care? No problem here. If it gets that far, grandparents can't wait to take care of the kids. Can't. Wait. I have several friends who are in the position of being loudly and constantly nagged by their own parents to have kids so they can take care of them. While not plugging into the average Americans idea of outdoor space, there is no lack of "socialist gathering plazas" (think gigantic cul de sac) in every neighborhood in every town. In nice weather, they're packed with a thousand, or thousands of people. By any American standard, these spaces are 100% completely safe. No crime. Zero.
Final thought...Life here is hard. Like, way harder than any American can even begin to imagine. Even when one is entering/entered into the middle class and "making it", it's hard. For kids, school is a literal 10-12 hour day in the younger years, expanding to an 18 hour a day experience as they enter Middle School and High School, 7 days a week. Some (many?) young people don't want to subject a kid to what they themselves suffered through. How much that impacts birth rates, I don't know.
The Gaokao defines a kids life. If you get through above the line, you get to go to university and at least a remote chance of going middle class. Below the line, no one cares. You don't matter. About 15-18% of boy men...the numbers are argued.... have almost no chance for a mate...another big component of the "life is hard" part.
Not that long ago, I read a book about feminism in South Korea. The author basically asserted, South Korean men are pigs, and now that women have other choices, they don't want to marry them or have kids with them. It sounded a lot like what you said in the first long paragraph.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the world, a TFR of 0.72 in 2023. The rate to simply replace the population, no increase or decrease, would be 2.1.
I didn’t want to overreach and use the porcine reference, but….yeah. Pigs.
When something is happening globally, it really doesn't make sense to investigate causation factors locally. All of these articles about particular places and particular shifts in policy are missing the forest for the trees.
When the category 5 typhoon blows through, some boats will be cast downwind earlier and faster, and some ships will lag a bit behind. But there is not much to be learned trying to tease out which differences between the boats and ships might have consistently contributed to being slightly ahead of or behind the pack. The point is, the whole pack is moving far away from the origin, and there in one common cause behind it all - the typhoon.
I could go with that if someone could credibly tell us what the typhoon is. Metaphors are fun and enhance scientific understanding, but they ain't science.
People used to have names for the flowers in their midst.
I have names for the flowers. I know others that do too.
Agreed. But there are very different rates of being "cast downwind". South Korea is in the lead with a TFR of 0.72 and Niger is plodding way back at 6.64! The differences should help to figure out just what the typhoon is (or actually are).
It's scary scrolling through the World Bank's table of birth rates. At the end are various groupings. For example:
High Income 1.5
Low Income 4.6
European Union 1.5
East Asia 1.5
Sub-Saharan Africa 4.5
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN
The only contenders that come to mind for global impacts are the internet and climate change. I can see many mechanisms of action for the internet, few for climate change.
Those aren't even at the top of the list.
So what is (are?)?
The big one in really poor countries is a reduced need to have lots of kids to ensure some live to adulthood and can care for the parents when old. As education and income increase, expectations of needing ANY kids to take care of parents when old decrease. I don't remember to what extent that was attributed to more education vs higher income but those were two other factors for reasons independent of having someone to care for the parents when old. A fifth is increased access to birth control.
That first set (the precariousness of life means you need lots of kids to be sure a few will survive) is what I used to hear all the time when people talked about "the demographic transition". As the story went, even after antibiotics and vaccinations and public health, there was "cultural lag" where people kept having more than two children even though they weren't "needed". The implicit prediction was that the median number of children would stabilize at two. A few people would want lots of kids and some would be physically unable to have kids or would want only one, but the two extremes would pretty much cancel out.
We seem to be in a second transition where people don't really think about needing kids in their old age and care less and less about continuing the family line. So the median number of kids goes below two, sometimes way below two.
If the state penalized people for not having kids (rewarding people who do is functionally the same) to the point that it was harder to be childless then to have kids, would self interest not correct this situation.
Anytime you don't have kids you have more time for the rat race. But that doesn't really do society any good. Its a zero sum game.
Did female infanticide involve selective abortion, post-birth infanticide, or both?
Both. Ultrasounds were banned for a while; still are in some places, although off the record and no one will say it out loud. Various excuses were made for their use, but the game was determining gender, not health of mother or fetus.
Is there a problem with physical harassment and molestation of women on public transportation? What about the incidence of rape -- any evidence it is higher in China than its Western counterparts? I'm not aware that Chinese women fare worse than women in Western societies in these respects, but I'm curious.
The practice of female infanticide means that Chinese women embraced or at least accepted their inferior status. Kind of mind-boggling. It is like the mirror image of Western identity politics with regards to women.
I have never seen nor heard of any physical harassment on public transportation. Zero. It's not Japan. I'm sure if you polled the entire population, a story would pop up. Occasionally, if the topic is even broached, someone will say they know something, but if I pursue the topic, it always ends up in non-credible heresay. Street crime of any sort, if interpreted as Americans think of street crime, does not exist. I or my wife can take a walk in the middle of the night literally anywhere, and not even begin to be concerned with our safety. It is one of my great attractions to China.
Rape, I don't know. If there was a rape, it would most likely not hit the evening news. There are still underground internet "news" sources that might report it. I can't imagine that it never happens. I would be dumbfounded if it was anywhere near American numbers. Victim crime here is basically nonexistent. Of course it happens somewhere, but that sort of civil disruption just isn't common. I'll listen to anyone that's got a story, but i've never heard a story, ever, and I cut across a fairly wide swath of population, from urban to countryside.
Out in the countryside, it's still pretty medieval. Americans would be surprised at the caveman level of some remote areas. Stories occasionally pop up of some nutjob that keeps a mentally challenged person chained in a room and makes her have babies sort of thing. Not a lot, but I recall a couple times in the last 10 years of awful stuff. That happened fairly recently, it was widely covered in the news, public outrage was INTENSE, and the government acted on it in what seemed to be the appropriate manner.
Domestic abuse, definitely. Lots. "Acceptance", while the norm in the past, is (very) slowly changing. Stories of women that wouldn't put up with it are showing up more in the news. There's definitely more women standing up to the bullshit. The baseline male population, generally, are pigs. The government covers up or denies a lot of it. Creating the perception of social harmony is task #1.
Thanks for the detailed reply. To me the ability of unaccompanied women to go out in public without being physically molested is one of the dividing lines between civilized and uncivilized countries. Apart from predominantly Muslim countries, my understanding is that parts of India don't pass this test.
You're welcome. Agreed. My wife often goes out for a walk in urban areas that have no lighting, no real foot traffic, and if anything happened no one would hear it. She doesn't even have to think about safety; it's a given. As an American, who lived nearly 40 years in Chicago, it is a revelation.
This is an aspect of China that never gets any press in the West. It's not just about the "repressive regime controlling all life". It's not that at all. People here aren't looking for trouble. There's enough in daily life.
That said, there is still mob crime, and it's intense. There are still guys that control the waterfront kind of stuff. Gambling and prostitution in the usual venues, mob controlled. Some of it bleeds over into daily life, via relationships.
In our neighborhood, a development had the local "leader", there was the local Party guy, and the "contractor". One of them was mob affiliated, but they were all blood related. The mob guy essentially just claimed the entire parking garage even though people had paid and owned legal title to their spaces. When people protested, a van showed up, very big men got out, and a couple people got beat downs and went to the hospital, all right in front of the local police, who stood there acting nervous. When people continued to complain the next day, a concrete truck arrived and dumped about 10 cubic yards of concrete in the garage entrance. The concrete was there for a week, along with periodic visits to the neighborhood by very big guys that did extremely intimidating stuff. The concrete seemed to be the final straw. The local Party guy called a meeting attended by everyone but The People, and the garage issue was resolved. Now, we have some new incompetent management company, probably the same mob, different name. It's mostly OK, by China standards.
Down by the Thai-Myanmar-China borderlands, it's seriously awful mega crime with feudal lords controlling stuff with private armies. You've probably read about some of it.
“I say we need cul de sacs.“ You’re on the right track Arnold. Our entire neighborhood here in North Carolina — made up of more than one hundred homes — is like a giant cul de sac. There is one entrance into the neighborhood, through a gate. Inside, all streets dead end in cul de sacs. Kids roam more freely than in any neighborhood I’ve lived in. In fact kids drive golf carts around as if it’s legal to do so. Regular cars drive slowly. There are dirt walking and biking trails. Further, many children attend Thales Academy, a low-ish cost, private, secular school five minutes away. In fact, Thales employees will claim that half the school lives in our neighborhood. I say this is unprecedented in America. Show me a private school K-12 school in which half the school lives in one neighborhood. This is of course one reason why parents prefer public schools. They want their kids to be part of a school-neighborhood community. This doesn’t exist for other private schools and is one reason private schools are less popular. In private schools students live over a much larger area, so students cannot easily access their school friends by walking or biking. Parents much drive them after arranging play dates. Play dates are a drag.
In a cul de sal neighborhood in which many students attend the same low-cost private school, you eliminate the riff raff students, but don’t filter for rich kids. Rich progressives families often generate a culture of drugs, entitlement, and poor metal health. This neighborhood is in a red county; the families are libertarian and conservative.
With this said, the neighborhood has a lot of room for improvement.
It sounds wonderful. I know someone else that lives in a similar type neighborhood in North Carolina. She says the same things. (Who knows, maybe it's the same neighborhood.)
Lol. Yesterday I visited a friend who lives in a neighborhood in Cary, NC like that.
And of course lots of gated neighborhoods are like that. I'm not sure that is something to aspire to.
It’s not my cup o’ tea, certainly. But, if you have kids in the 21st century, it’s attractive.
You’ve probably never been to a community like this. There’s no fence around the neighborhood. The gate is open 5 days a week, but the cameras are always watching. The dirt trails remind me of Yosemite. There are many horses, stables, creeks, ponds, and a river. The forest is the fence.
Yeah, let’s talk offline and find out.
One more comment on the China children thing....
Without question, there is an explosion of very young children everywhere. In a view that encompasses about 15 years, it has gone from hardly seeing toddlers to seeing them everywhere. I am not projecting or making this up. There are now simply an amazing number of toddlers in the neighborhood, at the malls, in the socialist gathering plazas...all being tended to by the grandparents.
This is not in any way a scientific observation, no data collection, nor is it an opinion on demographic effects, etc., etc. There's just a lot of kids. Knowing what I know about China, it's entirely possible that the call from government for more children is having an impact.
In China, a factor might be that for decades they shot parents who had more than one child. Old habits die hard.
"Shot"...I can't say it didn't happen, but that wasn't the approach. Forced abortion, sterilization, various other atrocities...sure. If you paid money, you could have more than one kid. There's a lot of storyline that is lost in translation, so to speak.
There certainly was wishful thinking, but I think the idea behind it was that people wanted to reproduce themselves, and since it takes two to make a baby, that meant eventually having two babies (who would, because this is the modern world, both survive to adulthood, and in fact still be alive when the parents died).
"While it may be good news that marriage rates are high among college-educated women, the bad news is that they get married so late. Getting married in your thirties makes it much harder to have children. Did you know that obstetricians refer to a woman giving birth (I’m sorry, “birthing person”) over the age of 35 as a “geriatric pregnancy” (I’m sorry, “advanced maternal age”)."
This is an interesting issue and lots of important things to consider but ...
I don't see the point of this geriatric comment unless it is not factually correct that risks rise exponentially starting at about that age.
I've commented before referencing statistics that women with masters degrees have more kids than bachelors only and PhDs have more kids than those with masters. I think the relationship between college, marriage, and kids is far more complicated than your posts have suggested.
https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/ncardrs-congenital-anomaly-statistics-annual-data/ncardrs-congenital-anomaly-statistics-report-2020/maternal-age
"Data table 11 shows that the birth prevalence of babies with any congenital anomaly was significantly higher in babies born to mothers aged 35 to 39 years (252.6 per 10,000 total births, 95% CI 243.5-262.0) and to those 40 years and over (400.7 per 10,000 total births, 95% CI 377.8-424.6)"
So, 252 per 10,000 at age 35-39 damn near doubles (400/10,000) over age 40.
The rest of the first paragraph there shows the optimal age range (in terms of minimizing congenital anomalies) is 25 to 35.
Average age of first birth in the UK right now? About 33, from memory. It used to be about 26 around 1992, I think.
Now, there's certainly a whole of stuff going on, but one thing I've never seen mentioned in any debate; the campaigns against teenage pregnancy - "don't have kids at while you're still at school" stuff. They began sometime in the '70s. At exactly the same time as years in education began to increase - certainly in the UK as the school leaving age was raised from 14 to 16, more 16 year olds started attending college for A-levels, and university attendance rose as well (about 9% of each cohort in '72, about 25% mid-90s, about 50% a few years back).
The link above also shows higher risks of congenital anomalies at under age 20.
Interesting data. Thanks for sharing. Were you trying to make a point?
I'd be stunned if average age of first birth were 33. If so, for every 19 year old there'd need to be two 40 year olds.
Good point about avoiding teen pregnancies causing the average age to increase.
I wrangled with myself whether to comment on this, but why not....
If Peter Zeihan was never referenced ever again on anything, and particularly any commentary on China, the world would be smarter.
I've learned to take him with a grain or more of salt. He has his hobby horses like anyone else.
In this case, for somebody who senses disruption in lots of geopolitics he's unusually persistent in thinking marriage and child raising are going to continue on the same path they've been on the last half century.
Yeah. Salt. It's the China stuff that makes me want to just say STFU. Everything else, I don't care. Everyone gets to have an opinion, even when it's fatuous.
We don't need babies - we need fewer, better people.
I'm going to guess the writer does not think we need more babies of the born-in-Burger-King-and-flushed-down-the-toilet type. (I'm also going to bet he doesn't read the agony column; it's a feminine weakness of mine and has been all my life, and yet it has a way of "keeping things real".)
So to speak with greater clarity: if the stratum of society that the writer wishes to see procreate, has become so deluded as to not know that for the 99% of us who will do nothing else of particular note in our lives, the point of life is to create more life - and he thinks this requires subsidy in order to import people who do not share this culturally-imposed neurosis, who do not find children either alien or something to "plan" the care and maintenance of (the latter for good or for ill, see e.g. Gaza) - he is in my opinion, out to lunch. Such an arrangement can only degrade the status of children further; and the subsidizing class will be overwhelmed by the "solution" in any case - because the subsidizing class by definition will not volunteer its women for this childcare duty (if they were willing to spend their lives or even just their young, procreative years caring for others' children, they'd be willing to care for their own ... even school teaching, to judge from otherwise super-lefty reddit, once such a wonderful job for women, has become "problematic", and I predict a huge nationwide shortage of teachers in the near future).
I will not say it is better to (openly) open the border than to engage in this roundabout get-other-people .... to-pay-other-people ... to-do-your-work-for-you scheme; I contend it would be better to leave things utterly alone, and let society heal itself of its pathologies, or not.
This topic of fertility is starting to be something maddening, like race.
There may be something we don't perceive about it.
It may yield to something better quite naturally, on its own.
In any case, one should hardly trust the fine folks who brought it to us, to deliver the change.
I'm confused. What is the "it" in the last three sentences?
I'm referring to this alteration in reproductive behavior. To the extent it was artificially imposed, I don't trust in more government engineered solutions. To the extent it is a response to modernity - I'd prefer some humility, a wait-and-see approach, especially versus replacement.
I seriously suspect that there was no direct government engineering toward a lower birth rate. I think it's a response to higher income, changes in relative prices (houses are more expensive; entertainment--video, music, etc.--is less expensive and available 24/7), technology change (everything from the decline of jobs that require brawn to the Internet to contraception), and related cultural change.
The Chinese One Child policy was totally govt—yet the TFR in S. Korea is lower. Plus govt policy is changeable by voting, which might change the culture trends.
Your noting cultural trends seems spot on.
Biggest govt lever is subsidizing house building, so more houses are built—especially for young married couples with kids.
You made it that far?