The Consequences of China’s One-child Policy?

Yesterday, the Chinese government announced the first major change to its one-child policy in thirty years; the government will now allow parents to have a second child if one or both is a single child (“China easing one-child policy amid elderly boom,” and “China to ease one-child policy, abolish labor camps, report says”).  The government implemented the program fearing Malthus’s four horsemen of natural population control: famine, misery, plague and war.  In “What to Expect when No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster,” Jonathan Last outlines some of the social problems the one-child policy has birthed: too few workers, i.e. taxpayers, to fund the retirement of the elderly, a labor shortage, and a dangerous sex imbalance of 1.23 boys for every girl. On the sex imbalance, Last writes

The inevitable result of this is a large cohort of men who—as a matter of mathematics—cannot marry.  The world has seen sex imbalances before.  From ancient Athens to Bleeding Kansas to China’s Taiping Rebellion, a skewed sex ratio has often preceded intense violence and instability.  So in addition to everything else, the Chinese will have a large cohort of military aged, unmarried men—tens of millions of them—floating around at precisely the moment when the country is facing the burden of its uncared-for elderly…

All of which suggests that what America needs to prepare for in the coming decades is not a shooting war with an expansionist China, but a declining superpower with a rapidly contracting economic base and an unstable political structure…

By midcentury, China will be losing 20 million people every five years and engineering a soft landing at an “ideal” birth rate will be difficult.  He suggest that supporting religion as a solution noting that “People who regularly attend church have more children than those who do not.”  I know of one religion that would be happy to supply missionaries to preach the gospel. 

Demographics

Our children are our future and the number of children is dependent on the birthrate.  Is there an optimal population and have we exceeded it?  Two articles present very different views of the future of our country and the world based on birth rate.  They both address the Malthusian conclusion that mankind faces an economically bleak future because population growth will outpace economic development.  Hunger, disease and war are positive checks that limit population growth to the world’s resource base.  A slightly more modern version paints the world as a spaceship with limited resources.  The more people that inhabit the spaceship, the fewer resources per person.  The problem with the theory is that it is not supported by empirical facts.  The world has never been economically better off.  Scarcity has caused innovation and the world is richer than at any time in the past.  While there must be an optimal maximum population, we have not reached it.

The first, “Let’s Talk About Sex: Why More Babies Means More Economic Growth,” is by Jerry Bowyer who believes that many countries face economic and political decline because their birthrates are well below replacement levels.  Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the United States and China, just to name a few prominent countries all have birthrates below the replacement level.

The Church As An Inclusive Institution

While serving as a missionary in Santiago del Estero, part of the Argentina Cordoba Mission, during the Dirty War, my companion and I were approached by a young woman maybe a little older than us.  She asked why we were proselytizing rather than helping those trying to change the Argentine government.  This by chance meeting haunted me even before I learned that young people like her simply disappeared, hidden victims of a silent war.  She was sincere and scared.  We asked for an opportunity to teach her but she declined stating that we would not be safe associating with her.  

I did have an immediate answer for her.  By converting people through the Spirit, their lives and behavior change; they will have “no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually” (Mosiah 5:2).   Recent work by Acemoglu and Robinson summarized in Why Nations Fail provides a second answer that is secular.  They divide man-made political institutions into two types, extractive and inclusive.  Extractive political institutions grant power to a narrow elite and place few constraints on their application of power.  Extractive economic institutions are created by the political elite to marshal the resources for the political and economic benefit of the elite. Argentina was dominated by extractive institutions then and is little better today.  Inclusive political institutions broadly disperse political power within a state sufficiently centralized to police its borders.  Inclusive economic institutions allow a broad segment of society to freely participate in and benefit from economic activities.  Property rights are well defined, secure and easily enforced, and support the entry of new businesses into an industry.  

The Church is an inclusive organization.  Wards (congregations) are organized geographically and, in my experience, come close to maximizing the heterogeneity of the membership that speaks a common language.  All members, regardless of income level and social position, are expected to conform to a common socially healthy set of beliefs and life style.  Members are expected to help one another including support for their poor.  This help includes not only traditional goods and services but investments in human capital as well.  

My original answer did not satisfy this young woman and the second may have been rejected too but I believe Ezra Taft Benson’s description of missionary work in a war weary world.

We are commanded by God to take this gospel to all the world.  That is the cause that must unite us today.  Only the gospel will save the world from the calamity of its own self-destruction.  Only the gospel will unite men of all races and nationalities in peace. Only the gospel will bring joy, happiness, and salvation to the human family