China's demographic crisis is fascinating, and alarming, because it shows that even a brutal totalitarian hyper-nationalist government cannot reverse the demographic crash afflicting most industrialized populations. The core reason for the crash is becoming apparent...
... it's because having babies is HARD, especially on women.
That's the big secret lost during the latter half of the 20th Century that is slowly, painfully being rediscovered by the 21st, in both free and unfree societies. Everyone underestimated how hard child-rearing is.
That's the big secret lost during the latter half of the 20th Century that is slowly, painfully being rediscovered by the 21st, in both free and unfree societies. Everyone underestimated how hard child-rearing is.
That sounds simple and obvious, but let me assure you, it is anything BUT obvious to political elites, everywhere from Western democracies to Communist China. They all convinced themselves family formation and child-rearing are purely materialistic processes, almost industrial.
When birthrates begin to dip, the elites assume they can "fix" the problem with a few more government handouts: a bit more financial support for maternity, more generous family leave policies, lavishly funded child care programs, etc.
But the truth is that having children is such a difficult endeavor, especially for the women who give birth and are so deeply involved in nurturing the babies, that mere financial incentives are not enough. Couples don't delay marriage and family because of minor money problems.
China just explicitly confirmed the big secret of demographics: healthy societies require a large number of families to have THREE children or more. China allowing two kids had nearly zero effect on decline. Likewise Western couples having one "designer baby" late in life.
It's simple and obvious, a truth known instinctively by the deplorable masses: population slides unless the average couple produces 2.1 or 2.2 children or whatever. You have to reproduce above mere replacement level. This was well-understood for all of human history until now.
How do you convince a large number of couples to have more than two kids? How do you encourage a large number of women to go through childbirth three times or more, a large number of fathers to embrace the burden of providing for so many children?
That's the question at the heart of demographic decline in every society dominated by leftist, collectivist thought, from Western liberalism to Chinese communism. Materialist left-wing elites convinced themselves to forget what a thousand generations of mankind had learned...
... only love and faith will do it. Only deep love between men and women, pervasive cultural support for their special bond, insatiable love for children, and deep faith - transcendence, love and hope for the future - can overwhelm the many reasons NOT to have three kids.
Sensible reasons not to have children, especially more than two, multiply in prosperous advanced societies. The reasons upscale urban Chinese women give for not getting started young on raising large families sound remarkably similar to the answers from American or British women.
We don't want to sacrifice our comfortable lifestyle for incredibly expensive children. We don't want to ruin our careers. Kids are something we can do later, when school and career are well in hand. There's too much going on in our busy modern lives, we wouldn't be good parents.
And in the West, do not underestimate the pressure against marriage and family created by doomsday environmentalism and the Left's "humanity is a virus" moralizing. The minds of educated young couples are marinated in that garbage, in school and pop culture, their whole lives.
If you ask an upscale, college-educated young American woman if she plans to have three kids, her answer is very likely to include a comment about how bringing so many children into an overcrowded dying planet wracked by income inequality seems sinful to her.
The big problem is that even as modern prosperity increases the disincentives for marrying young and raising large families - the irreplaceable key to healthy, growing societies - modern political ideology deliberately targets and destroys the faith that might counter them.
Every single cultural force that might prevail against the numerous sensible reasons to delay marriage and family into middle age, every single social and religious imperative for making those incredible sacrifices to have three kids, has been hunted down and destroyed.
At the moment, our death-cult left-wing culture is working very hard on obliterating the idea that women have any special role or responsibility in child-rearing at all. Men can have babies too, don't you know! Saying otherwise is a thoughtcrime that will be harshly punished!
In China, the problem was ideological arrogance. They thought faith and love could be replaced by stern orders from Communist central planners to start pumping out babies when the State decided overpopulation was no longer a problem. Ambitious young professionals are not obeying.
Our dominant left-wing political ideology ALSO created the massive problem that demographic decline is pushing us into: lack of enough young workers to provide the revenue necessary to finance social programs designed with the assumption of perpetual growth.
The Left built the bomb AND lit the fuse. Moving away from religious faith and cultural support for marrying young and raising large families, at the same time they were building a gigantic Ponzi-scheme welfare state, made a demographic crisis inevitable - and perhaps insoluble.
The damage of generations cannot be easily repaired, and it might be almost impossible to repair it at all, since at this point even DISCUSSING the problem honestly is thoughtcrime. So many moms and dads out there know the truth, but they're discouraged from sharing their wisdom.
And our "science"-obsessed, media-driven political culture knows the truth, too. They have oceans of studies proving everything I've said in this thread, mountains of data about the danger of demographic decline, and the importance of kids being raised by their own moms AND dads.
But they are ideologically prevented from honestly addressing the simple question at the heart of all this: how do you convince ambitious young women to have three or more children? /end
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