Vox Day takes note of China's continued population decline due to a shrinking birth rate. Although the article he cites apparently does not have the actual birth rates, it focuses on a proxy: the number of children entering kindergarten, which "have declined by 12mn children between 2020 and 2024" and the number of kindergarten schools, which "has also fallen by 41,500 from a high of nearly 295,000 in 2021." Vox notes that the Chinese government is (finally) taking steps to try and reverse this course by making it more difficult for couples to divorce. However, that won't be enough. As I've mentioned before, declining birthrates are linked to women's education--the better educated women are, overall, the less likely are they to have children. Thus, Vox suggests, "if the birth rates don’t turn around quickly, China is going to start cracking down hard on permitting young women to pursue higher education, given that education has proven to be the most efficient way to render women barren."
While there is definitely a correlations between education and declining birthrates, I doubt that even forbidding women from higher education will do much to increase birthrates (although it would probably do wonders for increasing marriage rates) because it doesn't effect the basic issue of children being a luxury, and a particularly unaffordable one when living in high density urban areas. When children are a luxury, the only people that will have them are the well-off and those particularly committed to having children; which is why, in industrialized countries, we see the highest birthrates in the strongly religious communities.
The United States is not immune to this either. As I noted the other day, if the U.S. were to halt all immigration, its population would decline by 2100 to levels not seen since the 1980s. Zero Hedge reports today that the U.S. birth rates have hit an all time low. It relates:
The fertility rate among females aged 15 to 44, on the other hand, declined by 1 percent in 2024 to 53.8 births per 1,000.
That’s down from 64.7 births per 1,000 females in that age group in 2010 and 118 per 1,000 females in the population in 1960.
The new fertility rate is the lowest on record, sinking from the previous low of 54.5 births per 1,000 females aged 15 to 44 in 2023.
It equals less than 1.6 children per female of childbearing age. Worldwide, the fertility rate is 2.2 children per female, according to the World Bank.
The article notes a new law providing $1,000 accounts for newborns, but that pittance will do nothing for birth rates. Other countries have tried even larger subsidies to no avail.
Feminism is cancer.
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