2018-08-28

China and the West Locked Into Demographic and Dysgenic Decline

China's fertility rates will decline unless it implements a three-child policy or fertility targeting because all of its economic and social policies are fertility killers.

Back in 2016 I laid out some of the important factors in China's 2-Child Policy Can't Stop Fertility Collapse

First, China's replacement fertility rate is 2.2 children per woman, not 2.1, because of the sex-ratio imbalance (a result of the one-child policy and sex selective abortions).

Second, fertility rates in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore indicate Chinese fertility is likely to fall or remain low even with zero restrictions.

Third, the small bump in fertility seen in recent years was likely coming from the more fecund families. The table below shows fertility rate broken down by child. The first row is first child; then second child; third and up; total fertility at the bottom.
More second and third children were being born over time, but more women were choosing to go childless.

Fourth, as demographer showed in the linked post up top, a population requires many families with 3 or more children to offset those with one or none.
Assume the desired number of children has following distribution: 6,3,2,2,1,1,0, and all the family can fulfill their desire, then the seven families will bear 15 children, the fertility rate of 2.14, barely approaching replacement level. Of these 15 children, two families have nine children, two-thirds of the total; two children families only four; and only child only two less than the total number of 1 / 7. This also means that only when three or more children families are very common, will society be just at replacement level fertility.

This also shows that a comprehensive two-child policy is not enough. Under this policy, the number of births, respectively, in the same families will become 2,2,2,2,1,1,0, namely a total of seven families bear 10 children, the fertility rate was only 1.43. That is when people feel two children is very common for families with children, the fertility rate has been far below the replacement level.

Fifth, urbanization lowers fertility. Expensive family formation (high real estate prices) suppresses fertility. China's development model is a fertility crusher.

Sixth, social pressure and social structure lower fertility because the "three-person family" becomes a unit. A trivial, but important example: a KFC meal deal is designed for two parents and one child. Far more important: an apartment large enough for a three-child family that wants to maintain its living standards, will fall into the luxury category in many cities.

Seventh, modernity. Feminism, extended education, materialism, secularism and other social, cultural, religious (or lack thereof) forces influence fertility in a negative direction.

ZH: China May Scrap Two-Child Policy, Ending 40 Years Of Limits
Speculation about a change grew this month after a government-issued postage stamp for the Year of the Pig in 2019 showed a porcine family complete with three piglets.
The slide in population growth means China's consumer population has hit a brick wall and is already starting to decline.
Back in 2010 the entry-level workforce was already heading into decline. Now seven years later, the last vestiges of a Millennial baby-bump are hitting and the entry-level workforce will again decline. The age 25 to 35 cohort would naturally boost births in the coming decade if fertility remains steady. A policy to boost fertility should create an even larger than expected jump in births, but there's no signs of one yet.
And if you really want to dig into the demographic decline in China (and across the West and Japan for that matter), the outlook is far worse than the numbers reflect.

Unz: Dysgenics and Low Creativity: Why China Can’t Save Civilization
It’s possible to derive some comfort from contemplating the Chinese. Sure, unless something radical is done, Western civilization is going to collapse due to the most intelligent women having the fewest children and massive IQ (and highly fertile) immigration from the Third World [See At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future, By Edward Dutton and Michael Woodley of Menie] but surely civilization will be preserved by the Chinese. Unfortunately, research is showing that this is just wishful thinking.

Thus the leading IQ researcher Professor Richard Lynn actually proclaimed in his book Dysgenics that China’s one child policy—introduced in 1979 and abolished in 2015—was the saviour of civilization. The strongly cultural desire in China for a boy and the abortion of female fetuses, meant that by the late-1990s, young males massively out-numbered females in China, showed Lynn. The females would naturally be attracted to the wealthiest and most educated males, as these males would be able to provide the optimum lifestyle for them and, anyway, females tend to sexually select for status because doing so, under evolutionary conditions, ensured the survival of their offspring [Women marry up, By Edward Dutton, In T. Shackleford, & V. Shackleford-Weeks,Encyclopaedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, Springer, 2018]. The inevitable result, argued Lynn: less intelligent Chinese men would fail to breed, as intelligence robustly predicts wealth and status and is about 80% genetic. In addition, the ability to pay the fines for breaking the One-Child law would allow the wealthy, and thus more intelligent, to have more than one child. As such, concluded Lynn China must have “eugenic fertility” and it is to China that the “torch of civilization” will pass.

Unfortunately, this is not what research by a young Chinese psychologist has found. In a study published in 2016 in the leading journal Intelligence, Mingrui Wang presented some shocking—and counter-intuitive—findings. Even despite the one child policy, there is dysgenic fertility in China. [Evidence of Dysgenic Fertility in China, by Mingrui Wang et al, Intelligence, July-August 2016]

The Chinese researcher and his team explored the relationship between intelligence, education-level and fertility, using a large sample from the China Family Panel dataset, which is highly representative of the Chinese population. They found that among the cohort born between 1951 and 1970, the correlation between general intelligence and fertility was -0.1, very similar to that found in Western countries.

Between 1986 and the year 2000, the Chinese lost 0.31 IQ points per decade and between 1971 and the year 2000, the Chinese lost 0.75 IQ points.

The researchers also discovered that education level is negatively associated with fertility in China. And the negative correlation between fertility and both IQ and education level is stronger among females than males.

In other words, though the Chinese have an average IQ of 105 according to Richard Lynn, and despite their introduction of the One-Child policy, they are suffering precisely the same process as the West. The most intelligent females are not selecting for the most intelligent Chinese males or, indeed, any males. As in the West, they are dedicating themselves to their education and then their careers, meaning they are simply failing to pass on their genes at all.
This is the IQ shredder effect. Women and men are boosting GDP here and now, but future GDP could decline if automation doesn't pick up rapidly. Whether it picks up or not, the future will look much more like a hereditary aristocracy, a very religious one in the West be it Islamic or Christian.

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