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Comment by H8crilA | Hacker News Reader

One thing I've observed is population growth control - be it reducing the growth or encouraging growth - always fails miserably. For example many people have heard of the one child policy in China, but the facts are that both the introduction and the removal of the policy had no perceptible effect on fertility rates.

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This is definitely not true. There was a decade of population growth control mechanisms in the decade before the official, universal one child policy. Over that decade (the 70s) China experienced an incredibly sharp reduction in fertility.

It’s likely that increasing socioeconomic wealth would have naturally followed that trajectory, but it’s unarguable that Chinas fertility policies accelerated the drop.

I mean, I still don't see anything out of trend here between the 60s and the 70s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:B...

It's pretty obvious if you ignore the great leap backwards... I mean forward, coming down from ~40 births/1000 in the 1950s and 1960s to ~20 in the late 70s and after.

You mean to ignore the dip during the leap, ignore the spike in the 1960 (assuming this is the recovery from the leap), so that we would have ~flat line up to year 1970?

Yes, exactly!

That does make sense. I stand corrected, thanks!

I disagree

I think the latter Chinese policy in particular wasn't too restrictive and 2 children were a large enough limit to not skew numbers too much. That policy didn't push people from stopping to want those 2 children. Their previous policy worked much better.

If I wanted to stop people from having children I would promote hookup culture, feminism and economically reward unstable families. A touch of propaganda on how scary and life ruining it is to have a baby and in a couple of generations the birth rate should drop below replacement rate.

Interesting. Do you have a good source for this? Googling it is just the same (Chinese source) line repeated over and over:

> National Health and Family Planning Commission spokesman Mao Qunan said the agency’s work had reduced the number of births in China over the years by “400 million”.

Nothing much about the effect of the removal of the policy either.

https://www.google.com/search?q=china+fertility+rate

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy#/media/File:B...

It was introduced (officially) in the 80s

The reduce of population is not the effect of the policy, but the effect of economic growth. It would have happened without the policy. On the other hand, the policy created tons of horrible human rights violations, such as forced abortion against the mother’s will and gave her the dead body of her child. http://funtobebad.blogspot.com/2012/06/china-forces-seven-mo...

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