In China all four expectations are ramped up to the max though. Long hours means 9 AM to 9 PM 6 days a week ("996"), property prices are completely unaffordable, getting married is an ironclad social requirement and, thanks to the one-child policy, every young person has four grandparents and two parents breathing down their neck to produce offspring. And oh, your life is largely determined by your performance during the gaokao exam, so you've spent your entire childhood cramming for it.
Also, I doubt there's any other country aside from maybe North Korea where the sentiment "I want to be lazy!" is a censorable offence.
> Fertility rate in Spain and Italy is below 1.3 and we have no clue how to address it.
There are alredy too many people in this world... we don't live on farms anymore, so that we'd need many kids to help work on them... the only problem currently is, that our pension systems and some of the economic systems depend on more and more people producing and that we have yearly growth (instead of sustained business).
If your concern is sustainability then a fertility rate closer to 2.1 should be your goal. 1.3 is just collapse. Right now in the US we have 3 workers for every retired person. Imagine instead a world where every worker is supporting four retirees. It doesn't matter how you structure or fund your pensions, that just isn't going to work.
This is an interesting point, even if the retirees self-funded their retirement. There would need to be a nearly 4x increase in productivity per 30 years to avoid an inflation catastrophe as the workers products have increased demand relative to the maximum supply of workers/services/goods.
The U.S. (and Spain and Italy) are desirable places to be so immigration can make up for fertility rates being below what's needed to maintain the population. As a bonus, you don't need to wait ~18 years for an adult immigrant to be a productive, tax-paying member of society.
The US has a long tradition of immigration and it will certainly make the collapse less painful as compared to places like China and Russia but I'm skeptical that immigration can make up for a FR as low as 1.3.
I think
1. It's going to take a lot more immigration.
2. Significantly higher immigration is going to politically destabilizing for a variety of reasons.
Are we preparing for this? I really wish we had a functional government.
EDIT:
3. Pretty much everywhere except India, Afghanistan, and a few places in sub-sahara Africa have fertility rates below replacement. Immigration from anywhere but those places helps the destination country but makes the originating one worse. What effects is that going to have?
We're just another animal on planet earth that consumes resources and takes up space. There is some saturation point where no more people can fit and/or no more people have the resources they need to survive. Ideally, the alarm is sounded before that saturation point. It may sound bad to say there are too many people, but it would be a lot worse if we got to the saturation point and billions of people suffered.
This is such a moronic statement. If you really really want to limit population then limiting the number of children is a absolutely terrible and potentially catastrophic way of doing it.
Who is going to replace and look after that rapidly aging population? Or is complete collapse your goal?
9AM to 9PM 6 days a week matches what the US went through during the Industrial revolution. The one child policy has been replaced with three children.
Also the article doesn't speak about any of it being censored. The fact a commenter in state media said "this is shameful" is not censorship. The fact it's hard to find T-shirts with the meme also isn't censorship, unless we have evidence of someone trying to sell such T-shirts and being censored.
What you say is a great example of how you can take some half-truths and spin them into a propaganda narrative. You just want to make sure China looks bad, for some reason. No shades of gray in this country with over a billion people. All fits into a simple narrative, doesn't it?
In the western world, young people often need two jobs just to survive. No they don't have houses either. Laying down and memeing online is often not even an option, censorship or not. Why do we need to villify China about a problem that's literally world-wide? Does it simply feel better to know someone is worse out there?
loosening the one child policy to 3 doesn't change anything for couples today who are supporting 2 sets of parents - it's not making more brothers and sisters for them.
The hilarious part is how the Chinese Communist Party's official propagandists and elite Chinese academics are using their bully pulpits to explicitly shame anyone who contemplates giving up on the rat race.
Imagine you go to nytimes.com one morning and the US government and Harvard professors have written op-eds scolding you, demanding that you work hard to "ensure a happy life" or you will be "unjust", "shameful", and "disappoint your parents and the taxpayers." You might get the vibe that they protest too much, and your well-being is actually the least of their concerns.
To be fair, the Chinese would probably find NYT op-eds from the Great Awokening era equally hilarious and self-undermining.
It's my perception that those op-eds are very much in the contrarian minority, a far cry from being the central position of the media institution. They're roundly and immediately mocked, and the majority of coverage in mainstream newspapers is much more sympathetic to the antiwork extreme than the bootstraps one.
Yeah, if anything, US is the mirror image, where all prestige media is filled with complaints about how bad The System sucks and how it is the cause of every hapless individual's inevitable burnout and despair.
In Canada, the op-ed pages at the start of the pandemic were full of articles about how CERB (benefits for those laid off due to COVID) was being exploited by work-shy layabouts.
Very astute, the form of the struggle is the same therefore the degree of the struggle must be the same too. In the same way that a famine isn't a big deal because we've all got to figure out where our next meal is coming from.
Also, I doubt there's any other country aside from maybe North Korea where the sentiment "I want to be lazy!" is a censorable offence.