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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

It seems like you're saying that 6 million excess deaths a year in a country has been the norm throughout history, but I don't think that's the case. Even if we just think about it as a percentage of the total population, 300MM into 1.4B is ~21% of total population dead in 50 years, which would be catastrophic for a country's ability to maintain its economy, among other things. It's not exactly as bad as the bubonic plague, but much worse than Covid in any country, and much worse than any wars I can think of, so I think it would have a pretty large effect.

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> 300MM into 1.4B is ~21% of total population dead in 50 years

This is old age we're talking about. All of those three hundred million people are going to die anyway over that time period.

> much worse than any wars I can think of

The Taiping rebellion killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million people, approximately 5-10% of the population of China at the time. See if you can spot it on this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_China - it's lost somewhere in the steep vertical climb on the right.

For a part of that period of dramatic population growth, China famously had a (badly enforced) one child policy.

(also, I guarantee you that there's some maniac in the Chinese ministry of defence looking at a prediction of deaths in a nuclear exchange with the United States that runs into the hundreds of millions, and declaring it winnable. There certainly were on both sides of the US-Russia Cold War, fortunately ignored all the time)

They would, but the ‘support staff of the dying’ to ‘dying of old age’ ratio is going to change by orders of magnitude. It will be a difference of kind.

> catastrophic for a country's ability to maintain its economy

Productivity of 10s of new STEM every few years > productivity of 300m of subsistence farmers / low skill workers in informal economy. Having a lot of surplus people helps in some domains of development / consumption, it's a drag in others, i.e. per capita food/energy security. Thinking about PRC being just 20% less crowded during holidays/events is still pretty stressful.

I am asking why sub-replacement fertility at that rate would lead to an inability to keep up with the demand for final disposition.

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