China’s baby bust is happening faster than many expected, raising fears of a demographic collapse. And coping with the fallout may now be complicated by miscalculations made more than 40 years ago.
The rapid shift under way today wasn’t projected by the architects of China’s one-child policy—one of the biggest social experiments in history, instituted in 1980. At the time, governments around the world feared overpopulation would hold back economic growth. A Moscow-trained missile scientist led the push for China’s policy, based on tables of calculations that applied mathematical models used to calculate rocket trajectories to population growth.
Four decades later, China is aging much earlier in its development than other major economies did. The shift to fewer births and more elderly citizens threatens to hold back economic growth. In a generation that grew up without siblings, young women are increasingly reluctant to have children—and there are fewer of them every year. Beijing is at a loss to change the mindset brought about by the policy.
Births in China fell by more than 500,000 last year, according to recent government data, accelerating a population drop that started in 2022. Officials cited a quickly shrinking number of women of childbearing age—more than three million fewer than a year earlier—and acknowledged “changes in people’s thinking about births, postponement of marriage and childbirth.”
Some researchers argue the government underestimates the problem, and the population began to shrink even earlier.
At population level scales, “the rich” do not have the unlimited money pot that people think they do. The US spends 4.5 trillion dollars just on health care each year. If you completely liquidated all the wealth of the top 1% (ignoring that the fact that this is functionally impossible without massively decreasing its value; a stock is much less valuable if you know you can’t hold onto it to collect future returns because the government is going to seize it), then the top 1% could fund American health expenses for ten years at the absolute most. Admittedly, the US is extraordinarily inefficient with health care spending, but if you adjust per capita spending to the levels of France, you still completely run out of money in 15-20 years.
This is a bit of an exaggeration, since you’re obviously talking about a more limited problem then all medical expenses, but because the vast majority of medical expenses are incurred by the elderly, it’s not as inapplicable as it might seem. Ultimately, funding sources need to be sustainable and not self-depleting, and for population-level spending, you pretty much always need to expand your funding beyond the ultra-rich. There’s a reason why the excellent social services in Europe also come with a much higher tax burden for all people, not just the wealthy.
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Yes, I’m aware, which is why I specifically highlighted that and mentioned how if you do the analysis with a European level of spending, the outcome isn’t fundamentally different.