China birth rate not recovering:
An article (“Tales of the Unexpected” Economist vol. 416 no. 8946 July 11, 2015 page 41.) They have relaxed the “One Child Policy” in China and guess what happened: exactly nothing. Oh maybe there was a whiff, but really nothing. Nationwide the new rules permit maybe 11 million more legal babies. The number permitted is only a second child in such cases as when both parents are only children. Still, one would expect that if there were couples straining at the bit for a chance for a second child, the number they would have under the relaxed rules compared with the old rules would be 11 million more babies. Anything less would be evidence for the ineffectiveness of the rules, draconian and harshly imposed though they were. (Sorry. It’s hard to focus here without euphemism and understatement. That “harsh” includes infanticide.)
The relevant government agency predicted, rather conservatively, that there would be 2 million more applications to have a child. Evidently they already smelled trouble. In the event fewer than 1.1 million applied. That’s the number who are even interested in having a second child; fewer will actually have one. That number is known pretty well, though. A team that included Cai Yong of the University of North Carolina did a study of one costal province from 2007 through 2010 where the one child rule had been relaxed at that time. Of 2,500 women they spoke with who they found were entitled to have a second child, only 6.5% did.
All right. I can believe that one. Hold people at gunpoint and tell them not to have a child they don’t “want to have” or to have a child they “don’t want to have,” and you will be somewhere around 5% effective. And what determines how many children a couple “wants to have”? It’s their kinship and that of their ancestors.
I have been saying this for years.
Forgive me while I stamp, scream, stand on my head and put out my tongue and screech: “Kinship over multiple generations determines fertility!”
I could have told you that result years ago. I will predict that result in the future. It was happening, is happening and will happen until the “bad thing” comes along.
When the experiment was done in mice of establishing an urban population starting with an ideal gene pool size and letting it go without restrain, the number of mouse pups fell to zero. There was plenty of food, space and bedding material. There was no war, plague or famine. Everything was perfect. But on a day, on a single day, after having fallen and stabilized, the birth rate fell to zero, there to remain until every mouse was to old to be fertile under any circumstances. Look up the graph in the article: China, the US, South Korea, Japan, all fall to below replacement and then level off with India pounding down the track behind them. There are many other countries, all the rich ones and lots of not-so-rich in exactly the same boat. Don’t make me type in the references; they are in the last New Year’s summary. They will be in the next.
We are all doing just what the mice did: when you urbanize the birth rate falls from far above replacement to below replacement, stabilizes, and in time goes to zero.
Worried yet?
Get off your seat. There is nothing, can be nothing, so important on this green and strife torn earth.
There have been 157 intrepid visitors over the past month and “Babies Triumph over Evil” has been run 111 times on you tube, mostly by me checking to see whether there’s any other traffic at all, which there almost never is. Meanwhile YouTube has decided that Ultimate Evil and spooky apocalypse are the things that interest me and make suggestions totally inappropriate to someone who is looking at cold, hard science. But if you want the creepy stuff, just write me at info@nobabies.net and say you read this far and I’ll get together some links for you.