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China has a birth-rate problem. It's also the 2nd-least affordable country in the world to raise a child, says a Beijing think tank.

https://www.businessinsider.com/raising-children-china-50-percent-more-expensive-than-us-2024-2

China is one of the most unaffordable places in the world to raise a child, ranking higher than the US and Japan, per Yuwa Population Research.

China has a birth-rate problem. It's also the 2nd-least affordable country in the world to raise a child, says a Beijing think tank.

China is one of the world's most unaffordable places to raise a child, a Beijing think tank says.
The cost of raising a child compared to GDP per capita is 6.3 times in China, but 4.11 in the US, it said.
The cost of raising a child is sinking China's already falling birth rate, the researchers said.

34 comments

arin

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Ah yes capitalism where the female partner needs to work and have no time to be a mom. Then politicians worry about dwindling young labor when it's too late. Also banning porn and censoring sexuality... Shaming sex. Fertility is known to be higher when younger but there's no support to allow the young fertile people to thrive so they work until retirement fate, brilliant capitalism

stockRot

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Are you saying that capitalism is the reason why women work in China? That sounds incredibly problematic of you.

FlyingSquid

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China has a falling birth rate.

Russia has a falling birth rate.

China has a surplus of men.

Russia has a surplus of women.

Too bad they hate each other.

PugJesus

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And both have deeply rooted racism problems that make Europe and the Americas look placid by comparison.

FlyingSquid

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Very much so. You make this suggestion to a lot of Russians or a lot of Chinese and they'll start talking to you about blood purity.

Mouselemming

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Blood purity leads to blood paucity! Hybrid vigor ftw!

Also, for those who want to know, South Korea is the most expensive place to raise a child.

FlyingSquid

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Apparently, according to what I just looked up, China is the second-highest.

Although I wonder if those are weighted against America's for-profit healthcare system?

Mouselemming

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Not sure, although routine medical care for children is one of the few areas that most health insurance plans do a decent job of covering, and/or there's public or charitable resources to help with it.

Pretzilla

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Good thing they hate each other

We don't need more of either for war fodder

FlyingSquid

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I meant too bad for them, but what you're saying could (unfortunately) apply to a lot more countries than those two.

Pretzilla

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Yea true but those two stand out as top tier authoritarian states with warmongering aspirations

FlyingSquid

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Give the U.S. a year.

DeepGradientAscent

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Something in my gut tells me Russian women aren't attracted to Chinese men, generally speaking.

Malte

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On the other side: if most alternatives are raging alcoholics it might give the chinese men an edge.

DeepGradientAscent

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My gut, admittedly influenced by national and ethnic stereotypes, also says that, generally speaking, Russian women prefer the alcoholic canon fodder over a (typically) short Chinese guy.

LemmyExpert

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"Why aren't the wage slaves breeding?? 🥺 We need more or our standard of living is really going to take a huge hit."

randompasta

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A falling birth rate is not bad for the planet. But it isn't falling globally.

wahming

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It IS falling globally. It's also been proven in studies that it will not matter to the current environmental crisis, our consumption habits are what matters.

SkyeStarfall

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How does there being less people not matter? If there's more people, there's more people that can consume. It's not the only variable, but it's absolutely relevant.

A billion people will consume more than a million people do.

wahming

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Because of the time frames. Birth rates take a long time to be reflected in population numbers, on the order of decades to centuries. Climate change however, is something we're facing right now, and we better find a solution to it in the next couple decades or we're fucked. It's not that population numbers don't affect consumption, it's that it doesn't affect our current climate crisis.

SkyeStarfall

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But kids consume resources too? It's reflected immediately, even if it might not be the immediate full effect.

wahming

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The assertion is not that population change does not affect consumption, but that the decline in population is not significant enough to make a difference in the near future, at least compared with other factors

WeeSheep

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I haven't seen any studies showing the birth rate is actually falling below previously recorded levels globally. I have seen the rate of births have slowed from an annual significant increase in population to an annual lesser increase in population. Still increasing population, but the rate at which we are increasing has slowed.

partial_accumen

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Still increasing population, but the rate at which we are increasing has slowed.

This statement suggests that we can't do math and can't accurately predict whats going to happen with population increases or decreases. We know how old a human being generally has to be to give birth, and we know how many humans we have of each cohort. Its pretty easy to see that what the population increases or decreases will occur when the younger cohorts come of age.

The number we care about is "replacement rate". A growing replacement rate is: 2.1. This means that each parent will replace themselves with a new child, and then 1 tenth of another. Practically this means 9 out of 10 of two parents have two children and the 10th of 10 parents will have 3 children.

So we just have to look up the replacement rate for each country, and for it to grow from domestic population growth alone.

Countries being discussed in trouble:

Russia = 1.42 source
China = 1.15 in 2021, is now approaching 1.0 source

Country being discussed doing okay:

USA = 1.67 source

So why is the USA okay while China and Russia are in a bad place if everyone is below 2.1? New births aren't the only way to increase a country's population. Immigration also works.

Russia = 0.626 per 1000 population source
China = negative 0.253 per 1000 population source
USA = 2.768 per 1000 population source

So with immigration the USA is doing fine and dandy, Russia is barely holding on while marching its child bearing age men into the meat grinder of war, and China is having people not have babies all the while thousands of them are leaving the country at the same time.

wahming

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Just to note, immigration only works as long as there are source countries with high birth rates. Even those countries (many African ones) are seeing declines in their birthrate.

partial_accumen

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Just to note, immigration only works as long as there are source countries with high birth rates.

How do you figure that? If a country is a horrible place to be, and even has a replacement rate below 2.1 there a can be emigration far greater from that country with the population going elsewhere. Present day Venezuela is a good example of this.

wahming

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I meant from a global perspective. A lot of people think falling birth rates in western countries are fine since they can sustain via immigration from countries with high birth rates. They generally don't realise that the birthrate is falling globally, and then it's just a matter of which country gets fucked first.

partial_accumen

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If you're talking from the perspective of the survival of humanity, sure. However that's far enough out that much larger factors (like climate change related war and famine) are going to threaten human growth long before the global replacement rate is an issue.

wahming

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Still increasing population, but the rate at which we are increasing has slowed.

Yes, that's the definition of a decreasing birth rate. If it continues to decrease (it's happening worldwide, and nobody's figured out how to reverse the trend yet), we hit peak population this century and start declining.

https://archive.ph/YjTq7

This is a very interesting read for anybody who wants to know more about the topic

Scubus

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I think I know how to reverse the trend. Make the world a not shit place, make it so the world isn't literally ending around us, and provide financial security so people feel safe raising children.

That being said, dunno why we would actually want more people until we head to space.

bo5on

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I really wish the article did more to support it's position that a declining population is bad for human progress towards the back half of this century. Seems like a pretty important pillar of the discussion but it has maybe two throw away sentences with references to papers that are actually unrelated to its claim.

partial_accumen

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I really wish the article did more to support it’s position that a declining population is bad for human progress towards the back half of this century.

Meh, that didn't bother me. That wasn't the purpose of the article to delve into every implication of the data, and doing so would call into question the motive for posting the factual information it was providing with some of its audience. They kept if fairly objective and left the more subjective questions to the readers.

nutsack

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One day you're saying there's too many kids in the next day you're saying there's not enough kids how about you just relax man

LightDelaBlue

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Oh like here . The number of newborn is collapsing .