[eru]

> It's the sort of thing that makes me wish my country was like China.

PR China is still pretty poor (around 31k$ gdp per capita adjusted for purchasing power) and its growth has lost a bit of steam recently.

You should wish your country to be more like Taiwan or South Korea. Or Singapore.

[nixon_why69]

I think the PPP calculations may suffer from the same problem as the USA inflation rate being nominally low. Housing, food and medicine are all ludicrously cheap outside of tier 1 cities.

[matheusmoreira]

> 31k$ gdp per capita

My country is currently at about a third of that.

[greenavocado]

> You should wish your country to be more like Taiwan or South Korea. Or Singapore.

Total fertility rate for all of those countries is close to 1.0, including China's. They are dying societies.

[eru]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer... suggests Chad and Somalia and DR Congo are the most vibrant societies by that metric.

You might want to compare Singapore with a city like NYC or London, not with a territorial state. It's pretty normal around the world for cities to be replenished mainly by people moving in.

(Of course, to be fair you then also need to compare GDP per capita against other cities. And they usually do a lot better than territorial countries that include a lot of hinterland.)

[HKH2]

What if you omit states that depend on welfare?

[greenavocado]

I never said a high TFR means a vibrant society. A low TFR is indisputably the slow death of a society.

[myrmidon]

> A low TFR is indisputably the slow death of a society.

No this is a non-sequitur.

Low fertility only means that the affected society grows smaller. This is only equivalent to "slow death" when it persists for centuries until the society is actually dead.

[petersellers]

Not necessarily if you take immigration into account.

[greenavocado]

A society replaced by immigrants is no longer that same society. My original point still stands.

[eru]

In the case of Singapore it would be just the opposite:

Singapore was and is build on the back of immigrants. Replacing ourselves with kids instead of immigrants would be the big change.

[thunderfork]

Whereas a society replaced by children...

[eru]

Vatican is the deadest of societies, I guess?

[greenavocado]

Correct