Rather, state started strong family planning in 1970. Population was responsive because of low death rates, but also the whole society was collectivised, so it was much easier for planning to be implemented swiftly and with effect. That’s why fertility fell to almost replacement before the OCP.

I don’t think you can make the argument about standard of living in the 1970s, except re improved health & education. There wasn’t much urbanisation in the 1970s (started in 1980s), incomes were still very low, etc.

China is case that started pushing demographic theory away from sof explanations.

That’s also a problem in the recent wave of unequal exchange articles. I do not know how they get through peer review, except by being reviewed by people without technical expertise in the area.

Like, tucked deep into the article is a btw moment that was screaming for more attention: “A preliminary ruling at the High Court in London in December 2024 found that report had been ‘defamatory’.”

I think there is a lot of innuendo in this story that is not being said.

MDPI alone probably publishes a good share of these…

This trope has been the right wing go-to explanation for the unequal & dysfunctional US health care system for decades now. Fox was blowing this dog whistle during Obama’s attempts to reform, as far as I recall.

You are doing fantastic work on this Saloni. I really appreciate your correctives to the population collapse panic.

Indeed, through successive tweets, I am convinced that Elmo thinks that negative growth will result in something becoming exponentially negative, rather than just dwindling out slower and slower...

My thoughts exactly.

Also, besides all the other questions with the simple correlations in the FT piece, what if the interpretation is actually the opposite? If having kids makes people more conservative? Then the opposite conclusion follows (just to say how silly it is as an argument).

We know. And the rest of our trade is actually in deficit with the US.

As far as I can tell, Japan and South Korea are way ahead of China in per capita terms. Even Germany is ahead. Just the US is behind among those top five.

Yes, the “this is the biggest crisis of the century” crowd annoys the heck out of me. The worst is that it plays into far right Elmo politics.

Good to know. It is just that you cited econ dev and cultural contagion as the reasons, and I thought you were citing the article.

I really wish economists would read demographers, realise that they have been showing & saying this for decades, but that it is not fundamentally due to econ dev, but to mortality.

My latest short commentary on this: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I meant that social scientists often complain about the 2 yr IF, that it is biased towards medical & physical sci where things get cited much faster after they are pub’ed. So, there is a pref for the 5-yr bc it gives more time for getting cited. But I find it makes almost no diff to the rankings.

The logic is that it takes longer to get cited in social sciences than in medicine or physical sciences, hence the 5-yr IF is supposed to better capture that.

So, they are averages of sorts, but of very narrow and specific date ranges.