Three-child policy: China lifts cap on births in major policy shift | Hacker News Reader

Three-child policy: China lifts cap on births in major policy shift

reuters.com

19 points1cvmask14 comments

The truth is that throughout history most people have been born as either wealth generating workers or undesired pregnancies. Children are no longer profitable in modern economies, and not a reliable retirement plan, so there is no longer an economic incentive to having them. Unwanted pregnancies can now be prevented or resolved quite easily so there are many fewer of those. All that remains today are those people who wish to have children for the url love of children and childrearing. While there are more of those now than ever -both in proportion and in total number- it is nothing in the face of the other two factors.

The problem is that any incentive to have children will. likely encourage those least capable of raising them effectively, and do nothing for those who can best be role models (because child educational achievement correlates strongly with that of their parents)... but something like free childcare but only for those couples where both have post-secondary education will go over like a lead balloon.

What history? American? When were children ever a profitable venture? Atleast in my country having children was never a profit loss statement. Where I'm from its was considered an extension of the family tree. Though some communities considered girls chikd a burden because of dowry, this was tried to overcome by trying to have a boy. If your statement has any weight many underdeveloped nations would've never had children.

> What history?

Pretty much all of it. Children were the people who would continue to do the work required to gather food once you were too old to do it yourself.

> an extension of the family tree

Yes, but why does this matter?

> If your statement has any weight many underdeveloped nations would've never had children.

No, this argument is exactly why many underdeveloped nations continue to have high birth rates (this and higher child mortality requiring you to have even more kids per adult)

It seems this will change very little especially in expensive urban areas:

"People are held back not by the two-children limit, but by the incredibly high costs of raising children in today's China. Housing, extracurricular activities, food, trips, and everything else add up quickly," Yifei Li, a sociologist at NYU Shanghai, told Reuters.

"Raising the limit itself is unlikely to tilt anyone's calculus in a meaningful way, in my view."

I don't disagree but it's worth noting the main way people have more kids is to pay a "fine" for the extras. So removing that fine will encourage at least some margin cases to have that extra baby.

Depends on the people; I was under the impression that another strategy is to not worry about whether the extra kid gets a hukou.

TIL:

> Hukou: A household registration record officially identifies a person as a permanent resident of an area and includes identifying information such as name, parents, spouse and date of birth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou

I don’t believe so. There is already a male:female gender imbalance in the Chinese dating marketplace. With the rapid inflation in real estate assets, and the requirement that a man have property before a woman will view him as a worthy suitor, I don’t believe this policy will move the needle at all.

https://youtu.be/jDIhTc6CJYY

https://www.mingtiandi.com/real-estate/china-real-estate-res...

https://voxdev.org/topic/macroeconomics-growth/relationship-...

More or less 40 years later, CCP learned nothing from it. They do seem to know why people were willing to have more children in the past, neither do they understand why almost no one want to have two or more kids. They first imitated USSR that household essentials to be distributed by headcount regardless the age and/or other situation of the individual differences. Given everything was scarce from ~50s to ~80s, the only logical move would be having more babies as babies obviously don't need as much food as adults and thus the other family members will have more to share in comparison to those have less or no babies. In other words, people chose to have more babies and let those did not have as many to feed them instead of having less babies and feeding other families had more babies. In 80s, such economical incentive was gone, CCP did not have to anything really to make the birth rate drop as people were bound by their economic capabilities again. Unfortunately, they again made a mistake that could not be bigger by adopting birth control and introduced the birth fine/fee. They had their chances to revert the trend by cancelling it in 00s as there were still some momentum. At the same time, Wen Jiabao started serials of economical changes that made everything related with babies extremely expensive: healthcare, housing and education. Note that I don't even mention baby food, clothing and accessories etc. For those who born in 80s, they may still have brothers/sisters so it might be easier for them but again, they are now in their late 30s or earlier 40s, not really the best age to have babies. For those born in 90s or 00s, I would say 99.99% of them were the only child in the family. Now, I would say at least 80% of them make no more than RMB5000 per month, which is barely enough feeding themselves. For a couple, they are most likely have to support 4 elders, some might event have to support 6 or more(their parents and maybe grandparents, most of them have no pensions at all). And now, they are told that they can have 3 children. Wow, so "generous", but how are they going to support them?

Will this result in more girls?

Currently people tend to stop having kids once they have a girl.

There are many families with an older sister and a younger brother(maybe why Peppa Pig is so popular) but far fewer with an older boy and a younger girl.

if everyone stops after the first boy (I'm assuming a typo in gp) then there's a 50% chance of one boy, 25% chance of one each, 12.5% chance of 2 girls 1 boy, etc.

Let's assume a 4 child/family cap.

So for 100 couples you'll get 50 boys + 25 boys + 12.5 boys + 6.25 boys = 93.75 boys, vs 0 girls + 25 girls + 25 girls + 18.75 girls + ...

Germany had once 60mil and is now at 80mil.

What's a good number for a country though besides having more kids for protecting a retirement?

Same question for china.

Germany had about 65 million in the 1930s, before WW2 and it's annexation binge.

That increased to 80 million because of migration. Yes, you can always import more people from countries that have a lower standard of living than yours. Importing people from countries with higher standards of living is not so easy. And there are significant long term costs to that approach as well as benefits, especially the costs of integration, which is often very hard to accomplish, as well as ethnic strife and racialization of politics. But migration is not something that China (or most Asian nations) are interested in. They will need to maintain their population organically. And I really see no reason why places like China or Japan would be worse off with fewer people. Once the population drops, land becomes cheaper and those less likely to have kids exit the gene pool. Things stabilize at a lower level where cities are less crowded. Declining population is a sign that the society isn't conducive to reproduction and it comes with its own solution of population declines until things are brought back into balance.

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27342258

Reply on news.ycombinator.com