Chinese Military,Political and Social Superthread

[Edward Campbell]

Bingo.....is China the only one?

Nope, Canada's birthrate is well below "replacement" level and our best sources of "supply" (India and the Philippines) also have declining birthrates.

 

[OldSolduer]

Until the GoC takes security threats seriously, don't expect the rest of the country to do so.

Good point but I will go further and infer that some members in government and the bureaucracy are complicit with the establishment of Chinese agents of influence.

 

[Spencer100]

Nope, Canada's birthrate is well below "replacement" level and our best sources of "supply" (India and the Philippines) also have declining birthrates.

Lol thanks....I was referring to government lying, misdirection, etc.

 

[Spencer100]

Good point but I will go further and infer that some members in government and the bureaucracy are complicit with the establishment of Chinese agents of influence.

Some? Lol

 

[Halifax Tar]

Nope, Canada's birthrate is well below "replacement" level and our best sources of "supply" (India and the Philippines) also have declining birthrates.

What's wrong with a lower birth rate ? Lower tax base, sure. And Gov spending should be shrinking as the need for that taxation eases to an equal ratio.

Why do we need a population to continually grow ?

 

[Edward Campbell]

What's wrong with a lower birth rate ? Lower tax base, sure. And Gov spending should be shrinking as the need for that taxation eases to an equal ratio.

Why do we need a population to continually grow ?

Because when the population falls and the economy shrinks with it, most Canadians, a solid majority I'm about 99% certain, will demand that services (costs) do not decline. They will demand the same or even higher levels of 'entitlements' as we enjoy today ... but there will be no one to pay for them.

 

[JLB50]

What's wrong with a lower birth rate ? Lower tax base, sure. And Gov spending should be shrinking as the need for that taxation eases to an equal ratio.

Why do we need a population to continually grow ?

It’s known in other circles as a pyramid scheme.

 

[dimsum]

And Gov spending should be shrinking

 

[OldSolduer]

And Gov spending should be shrinking as the need for that taxation eases to an equal ratio.

Why do we need a population to continually grow ?

And income tax was a temporary measure to pay for WW 1. That hasn't stopped successive governments from hiking taxes or making up new ones.
And a shrinking population won't either.

We are entitled to our entitlements - right?

 

[Halifax Tar]

Because when the population falls and the economy shrinks with it, most Canadians, a solid majority I'm about 99% certain, will demand that services (costs) do not decline. They will demand the same or even higher levels of 'entitlements' as we enjoy today ... but there will be no one to pay for them.

Are you positioning that if we don't continue to have a growing population at some point 100% of the populace will be unemployed/pensioners ?

You know how I feel, I have no sympathy for elder generations who piss into the wind for 50 years then expect the younger generations to support them.

 

[Halifax Tar]

I'm asking for more than they can give aren't I ?

 

[GR66]

What's wrong with a lower birth rate ? Lower tax base, sure. And Gov spending should be shrinking as the need for that taxation eases to an equal ratio.

Why do we need a population to continually grow ?

There are a number of factors involved.

Firstly, there is the inbalance between a large group of older, retired/retiring people compared to a smaller cohort of younger people. As people age they become a larger drain on the economy (pensions, health care, etc.) and cease paying into the government coffers that fund those things through their employment and income taxes. The smaller cohort of younger people simply don't generate enough tax revenue to cover those costs.

Also, as the older group of workers retire there aren't enough young workers to replace all of the positions that are being vacated. This drives up labour demand which increases wages. The combination of increased labour costs to companies combined with a significant reduction in the (younger) population in their prime consuming years leaves companies with higher overheads and less sales.

There are potential solutions like increased automation to allow for increased production and lower overheads, but unfortunately that doesn't solve the demand problem. Increased automation will reduce the number of workers required and that reduced domestic employment and reduction in overall wages due to lower labour demand will mean less domestic consumption. Increased exports could help this but unfortunately all of our major trading partners are facing the exact same demographic problems at the same time.

I agree that there are serious long term issues with economic growth depending on constant population growth, but the immediate issue is the size of the disparity due to the Baby Boomers. Increasing immigration (of younger people) to ease the curve will hopefully allow us to face less of a drastic shock and work on a more gradual transition to an economy that is less dependent on constantly increasing material consumption.

 

[Halifax Tar]

There are a number of factors involved.

Firstly, there is the inbalance between a large group of older, retired/retiring people compared to a smaller cohort of younger people. As people age they become a larger drain on the economy (pensions, health care, etc.) and cease paying into the government coffers that fund those things through their employment and income taxes. The smaller cohort of younger people simply don't generate enough tax revenue to cover those costs.

Also, as the older group of workers retire there aren't enough young workers to replace all of the positions that are being vacated. This drives up labour demand which increases wages. The combination of increased labour costs to companies combined with a significant reduction in the (younger) population in their prime consuming years leaves companies with higher overheads and less sales.

There are potential solutions like increased automation to allow for increased production and lower overheads, but unfortunately that doesn't solve the demand problem. Increased automation will reduce the number of workers required and that reduced domestic employment and reduction in overall wages due to lower labour demand will mean less domestic consumption. Increased exports could help this but unfortunately all of our major trading partners are facing the exact same demographic problems at the same time.

I agree that there are serious long term issues with economic growth depending on constant population growth, but the immediate issue is the size of the disparity due to the Baby Boomers. Increasing immigration (of younger people) to ease the curve will hopefully allow us to face less of a drastic shock and work on a more gradual transition to an economy that is less dependent on constantly increasing material consumption.

The Boomers should have planned for their future, and a good portion of them didnt. The impact of that shouldn't be left to generations they haven't even met, and probably wont.

The scary part for me is that the boomers are a powerful block of the population, politically. And they are pushing to overextend our future for comfort in the autumn of their lives now, and pushing the consequences onto future generations. This needs to be controlled. As their relevance subsides (they die) I predict things will slowly return to a balance.

 

[RangerRay]

Starting to get wildly off topic, but Jen Gerson has an article at The Line about why the coming demographic collapse will become a slow apocalypse.

Jen Gerson: We are probably doomed, though

But not for the reasons you think.

theline.substack.com

Jen Gerson: We are probably doomed, though​

But not for the reasons you think.​

Jen Gerson
22 hr ago

I'm going to start this column with one of those big, bold claims that is likely to get me into some trouble: Elon Musk is right. The biggest existential risk facing humanity today isn't climate change.

It's demographic collapse.

Hold on. Hold on. Take a deep breath. Stay with me.

I'm not saying that climate change is not a serious problem. It absolutely is, and we should do everything we can to solve it while we can. But the things that you think are going to get you are rarely the things that actually get you. We learned that lesson during the pandemic. We spend a lot of time worrying about pandemics, natural disasters, nuclear war, the dying of the sun — the big, dramatic, apocalyptic events depicted by Hollywood. We picture ourselves surviving the End Times accompanied by James Cameron-scripted action sequences and sweeping symphonic scores.

That's not how it plays out in reality. What no one expects is the slow decline, the steadily draining drip-drip of change for the worse. It's going crazy stuck in the house watching Netflix. It's wondering why labour shortages have grown so chronic over time. It's going for a walk and realizing the schools seem half empty and the playgrounds never have kids in them.

That's demographic collapse. And I suspect you're going to be hearing about it a lot more in the next 20 or so years. Because the world is running low on babies, and there's probably nothing we can do to fix it.

Of course, we've all heard about Canada's low replacement rate. Our fertility rate dropped below 1.4 babies per woman. A record low matched only by the record low of the year before. And before that. It takes a 2.1-per-woman birth rate to simply keep the current population stable. That means that all women, on average, have to produce 2.1 children to maintain current numbers.

Canada, as a peaceful and prosperous Western nation, has smoothed over the gap through immigration. Attracting newcomers is absolutely crucial toward maintaining a growing population and a healthy economy. Consider me rabidly pro-immigration. Get everyone who wants to come here through the vetting process and settled in as quickly as possible. We'd be sunk without the inward flow. Which no doubt accounts for recent government plans to dramatically increase our quotas of newcomers as a terrifying mass of Baby Boomers age into retirement and health-care needs that we need more people to pay for and service.

So no problem, right?

Not so much.

Wealthy, high-demand Western countries can fill out their ranks from poorer nations with healthier birth rates. For now. Pretty soon that's going to stop.

Because the demographic collapse isn't just hitting the rich world. Go look at the birth rates in Southeast Asia, India, the Middle East, even parts of Africa and you're going to see a terrifying similarity. They're all falling. Countries like South Korea, Thailand, Russia, China and Brazil are already well below replacement.

Meanwhile India and much of the Middle East are sitting at just above two births per mother — right where we were back in the 1970s. The only exceptions to the global demographic collapse are countries in Central Africa, but even there, the trend lines are starkly downward.

Pretty soon the developing world will join the rest of us staring imminent population decline right in the face.

What happens to Canada's immigration policy when our traditional sources of immigrants can't sustain their own populations? How do other baby-starved wealthy nations react to this? This point is crucial, especially for policymakers: We can set whatever immigration quotas we want. Sometime in the future — the near future, at that — global population growth will stall. And then reverse itself. After that, all of us wealthy countries are going to be competing more fiercely for a declining pool of new citizens.

Worse, there's no obvious way to reverse the trend. Over the past 70-odd years, we have seen profound and remarkable improvements on just about every metric of wealth, health and happiness. As quality of life improves, that life becomes more expensive, and the economic utility of additional children declines. Add in a touch of female empowerment and education, the birth control pill, improvements in child mortality, and voila. All of the sudden pumping out a dozen babies while scraping together a meal of potatoes and oats on a farm doesn't look so hot.

The very things that help humans flourish in the short term ensures fewer actual humans in the long term. Irony!

We’ve seen this trend repeat itself over and over again across the globe. If anything, the demographic collapse in much of the developing world appears to be happening even faster than the developed one. China's population was last at replacement in the 1990s. Its overall fertility now sits at an astonishing 1.18 births per woman.

That's right: Canada has a higher fertility rate than China.

To give you a sense of what that looks like in real terms: The population of China now sits at approximately 1.4 billion people. The most pessimistic projection in this Pew Research report puts China's population at 488 million by 2100. That means China's population could be a third of its current size within 80 years. It could be half in only 60.

What does Shanghai look like in that scenario? Or Beijing? How does China maintain its current quality of life and economic growth? Our entire way of life is now predicated on cheap labour in Asia. How is that sustained when the population collapses and wage pressures increase? Who works in the factories that build basically everything we now buy? How do we maintain our current globalized economic environment with a third the current workforce?

To put it bluntly: who makes our stuff? How do we recruit enough police and firemen to keep our houses safe and, uh, unburned? Who pays the taxes that support our welfare systems?

As the Effective Altruists have succinctly put it: "The economic systems of virtually all developed countries are predicated on an assumption of constant growth, which means that a decline in the working population has a high probability of leading to system-level collapse."

It doesn’t necessarily take a bomb to make all of the comforts of modern life disappear. Sometimes, all that stuff just fades away.

What would any country look like if, within the span of one human lifetime, half the population disappeared? Not by pandemic or war nor any freak of nature. But rather by the slow drip-drip loss of ordinary old age and disease. What if it disappeared because it was never born?

That's what we're facing.

Yet very few people seem to be conscious of this problem. A birthrate can collapse even as the population continues to grow, which will hide the bug — for a time. Further, many of us have been weaned on Malthusian fears of overpopulation. We, humans, are a stain on unblemished nature. Our decadent, Western lifestyles, if allowed to grow apace, threaten the climate and ecosystem, according to this neo-Puritan ideology. Fewer children is, thus, an unmitigated moral good. Demographic collapse may actually be one of the accidental solutions to our climate crisis.

And perhaps if we could manage this decline in a measured and gradual way, this argument may have some merit.

The problem is that we cannot.

If we do notice the birth rate, we usually make the error of assuming that the problem is logarithmic. We think of gradual peaks and declines over long stretches of time.

Demographic collapse is an exponential problem. If all the women in a population have one child instead of two, within 20 years, there will be half as many women available to have babies and so on and so on and so on. The human population has grown exponentially since the 17th century, with the fastest rates of growth occurring at the peak. Depopulation will hit us just as hard on the back end.

South Korea boasts the lowest fertility rate in the world at 0.8 babies per woman. That does get us into proper Walking Dead territory — complete with abandoned cities — within my lifetime.

And the really bad news is that the math is now baked in. Just from a sheer numbers perspective, we probably passed the threshold of demographic no return 10 years ago. Set up all the daycare programs and baby bonuses you want —Michelle Rempel-Garner recently got into the weeds on that here — there's virtually nothing we're going to do to get modern families from fewer than two children to three or four any time soon. I mean, I’m sure as hell not going be part of the solution. I’m almost 40. I’ve had two children and I’m tired. (So tired.) Even if all of our child-bearing-age women went on a proper apocalyptic bangin’ spree tomorrow, it probably wouldn't be enough.

We simply have to ride this particular monster to the ground and hope for the best. Robots and artificial intelligence may be able to replace workers, ameliorating labour shortages. Maybe we re-adjust our expectations of constant growth. Or maybe economic growth can shift from the physical to the virtual.

I don't know. I also don't know what the long-term societal impacts are of no or negative real growth. Everything we've enjoyed about this, the dying days of our golden age, has come about in an era of dramatic population growth. This has brought unprecedented social mobility, democracy, innovation and productivity. The more people we have, the more wealth we can marshal to support social safety nets. The more likely we are to invent things and solve problems — like, say, how to reduce carbon emissions.

We can always print more money, but we can't replace people. We are the most valuable resource that we have. We're going to learn that the hard way.

The Line is Canada’s last, best hope for irreverent commentary. We reject bullshit. We love lively writing. Please consider supporting us by subscribing. Follow us on Twitter @the_lineca. Pitch us something: lineeditor@protonmail.com

 

[Halifax Tar]

We simply have to ride this particular monster to the ground and hope for the best. Robots and artificial intelligence may be able to replace workers, ameliorating labour shortages. Maybe we re-adjust our expectations of constant growth. Or maybe economic growth can shift from the physical to the virtual.

I don't know. I also don't know what the long-term societal impacts are of no or negative real growth. Everything we've enjoyed about this, the dying days of our golden age, has come about in an era of dramatic population growth. This has brought unprecedented social mobility, democracy, innovation and productivity. The more people we have, the more wealth we can marshal to support social safety nets. The more likely we are to invent things and solve problems — like, say, how to reduce carbon emissions.

Hard times create strong men
Strong men create good times
Good times create weak men
And, weak men create hard times

So were right about there then. Ride it out I say, may be our only choice anyways.

 

[GR66]

The Boomers should have planned for their future, and a good portion of them didnt. The impact of that shouldn't be left to generations they haven't even met, and probably wont.

The scary part for me is that the boomers are a powerful block of the population, politically. And they are pushing to overextend our future for comfort in the autumn of their lives now, and pushing the consequences onto future generations. This needs to be controlled. As their relevance subsides (they die) I predict things will slowly return to a balance.

From the article below:

Over the past 70-odd years, we have seen profound and remarkable improvements on just about every metric of wealth, health and happiness. As quality of life improves, that life becomes more expensive, and the economic utility of additional children declines. Add in a touch of female empowerment and education, the birth control pill, improvements in child mortality, and voila. All of the sudden pumping out a dozen babies while scraping together a meal of potatoes and oats on a farm doesn't look so hot.

The very things that help humans flourish in the short term ensures fewer actual humans in the long term. Irony!

Feel free to blame the Boomers for not properly planning for their future, but then also feel free to blame them for the "remarkable improvements on just about every metric of wealth, health and happiness.". The modern, high-tech, interconnected World we currently live in wouldn't exist today without the exponential demographic and economic growth that accompanied the Baby Boom.

 

[YZT580]

What's wrong with a lower birth rate ? Lower tax base, sure. And Gov spending should be shrinking as the need for that taxation eases to an equal ratio.

Why do we need a population to continually grow ?

because you need fresh cash to cover your pension

 

[Halifax Tar]

From the article below:

Feel free to blame the Boomers for not properly planning for their future, but then also feel free to blame them for the "remarkable improvements on just about every metric of wealth, health and happiness.". The modern, high-tech, interconnected World we currently live in wouldn't exist today without the exponential demographic and economic growth that accompanied the Baby Boom.

Are they improvements ? Or did they improve boomer life to the detriment of follow on generations ? Knowingly or not.

Is our modern world better ? By the sounds of the article you're quoting its a house made of loose leaf paper and now its raining.

because you need fresh cash to cover your pension

No, you need cash. Not fresh cash. Less people = less consumers of tax funded services.

 

[GR66]

Are they improvements ? Or did they improve boomer life to the detriment of follow on generations ? Knowingly or not.

Is our modern world better ? By the sounds of the article you're quoting its a house made of loose leaf paper and now its raining.

I guess that's the question. The fact that literally every country on the planet is striving to live the kind of life that we in the collective West have is telling though. I don't see any countries choosing to step back from the supposed advances we've made and making the conscious decision to live a 1900 life.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't major flaws in our system and that (as always happens through evolution) we can't re-evaluate and change the way we do things to make our society more sustainable (economically, socially and environmentally).

I just don't see the point in blaming those before us that did not foresee the future as well as we are able to see in hindsight for all of our existing problems. How could people in the early 20th Century KNOW for certainty that economic growth, equal rights, birth control, etc. would lead to a birth rate decline? And once they noticed that there was a birth rate decline how could they know that immigration (which has been a constant and very major element in Canada's population growth right from our establishment) would begin to slow at the birth rates in those nations declined as well? Along with every other major change that has impacted our society and economy during their lifetimes (automation, global supply chains, the internet, etc.).

 

[Halifax Tar]

I guess that's the question. The fact that literally every country on the planet is striving to live the kind of life that we in the collective West have is telling though. I don't see any countries choosing to step back from the supposed advances we've made and making the conscious decision to live a 1900 life.

I'm not suggesting that there aren't major flaws in our system and that (as always happens through evolution) we can't re-evaluate and change the way we do things to make our society more sustainable (economically, socially and environmentally).

I just don't see the point in blaming those before us that did not foresee the future as well as we are able to see in hindsight for all of our existing problems. How could people in the early 20th Century KNOW for certainty that economic growth, equal rights, birth control, etc. would lead to a birth rate decline? And once they noticed that there was a birth rate decline how could they know that immigration (which has been a constant and very major element in Canada's population growth right from our establishment) would begin to slow at the birth rates in those nations declined as well? Along with every other major change that has impacted our society and economy during their lifetimes (automation, global supply chains, the internet, etc.).

I'm not blaming the Boomers, its a fact. They brought us to this point. Its not blame, its a fact. Right or wrong. Good and bad. And they still have massive pull on where we go. Which could have dangerous results 50 years + down the road if we don't manage that correctly.

My suggestion isn't to punish them in some way, its to try to plan for our future, long term, and not just put out fires today. Suffer today, to gain tomorrow.