[gumby]

The title is bogus for what's actually a good article.

People are having fewer kids where the economic future for their kids is poor. This factor applies to the US as well: e.g. fewer kids are born during recessions. The article even says so, and merely asserts the "problem" of the OCP.

Just look to countries that suffered devastating wars to see how this has been handled in the past: immigration or simply abandoning a segment of the population. Germany imported many Gastarbeiter from Turkey (neutral in WWII) in the 1950s. As for abandonment: look at the number of never-married women in Europe and the US among the cohort born between 1890-1910, or the fact that in the US poverty among the elderly became acutely visible, and addressed, in the 1960s due to the combo of the earlier never-married and those who'd lost children who could have supported them.

If china really comes to suffer from the demographic overhang of the elderly, as Japan does already, they can turn to automation and immigration. Automation looks like a boon compared to abandonment! Not to mention the huge unemployment problem in china which could be solved by the "shift to services" (i.e. elder care) which doesn't require as much specialized training.