The Silver Lining of the Baby Bust
Follow into
Save into
Follow into
In my previous blog, Well-being and Immiseration in Contemporary China, I reviewed a spectrum of quantitative proxies for well-being (and it’s opposite, immiseration), including economic, biological, and psychological variables. It is impressive how much agreement there is between these indicators. And that they all show dramatic improvements in the quality of life in China since 1978 (when Deng Xiaoping assumed supreme power). My conclusion: it all is bad news for the “China doomers” — China is not going to collapse any time soon.
One comment asked, but what about falling birth rates? China’s total fertility rate of around 1.0 is one of the lowest in the world. I was planning to address this issue in the context of a next post, on elite overproduction, but we might as well engage with this issue now.
My main point is that what destabilizes societies is not low birth rates, but quite the opposite. When birth rates peak, 20 years later a country experiences a “youth bulge” — an unusually large cohort of 20-somethings. A youth bulge is an important driver of instability in structural-demographic theory (and is well-accepted as such generally by the scholars of revolutions and civil wars).
One striking example that I discuss in End Times (Chapter 5) is the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, which was driven, to a large degree, by a 60% increase of people in their 20s between 1995 and 2010. Similar demographic dynamics contributed, more generally, to other countries affected by the “Arab Spring.” A structural-demographic analysis of these cases is in an article by our Russian cliodynamic colleagues, A Trap at the Escape from the Trap?
What China is currently experiencing is the opposite development, a baby bust leading to a “negative youth bulge.” As can be seen in the graphic below, for the next 20 years (and probably more, as the trend to low birth rates is not going to be reversed soon), the cohort of 20-somethings will be shrinking:
Population pyramid China in 2026
There will simply not be enough angry young Chinese to fill up Tiananmen Square.
More importantly, a shrinking youth cohort means that young people experience less competition from their peers — getting into a top university, securing a good first job, and so on. As a result, they are much more likely to be busy with that, rather than wanting to rebel.
Last, but not least, low TFRs eventually translate into increased wealth of the small cohorts. For TFR = 1, most families will have one child. When two young people form a new household, they will have two sets of loving parents helping them to get set up in life and, eventually, bequeathing their wealth to them. Simply — mechanically — as a result of shrinking population average wealth per individual will double with every generation.
From the point of view of individuals, then, falling birth rates have a substantial silver lining. Now, it is understood that this dynamic also creates losers. One is the state, which wishes to have a growing population that would pay more taxes, contribute to pension systems, and provide recruits for the military. Another is the economic elites who prefer oversupply of labor, so that they can keep wages down. These are all interesting topics, which I am happy to discuss in comments and future posts, but for now I’ll hit the “send” button.