China updates children policy and will allow couples to have three children.

 

BBC/EPA.

China has announced that they are changing their children policy and will couples to have as many as three children. BBC. China famously had a one child policy that limited couples to having a single child. That limit was changed to two in 2016 and has now been changed again to three. The one child policy led to consequences including demographic changes and gender issues. It is unclear that reversing the policy will change China's demographic problems due to the high cost raising children in the country. 

My Comment:

China's one child policy was clearly a disaster. It did accomplish the goal of reducing the population but it had major problems. Getting rid of population did not turn out to be a good thing as older people retire there are fewer people to tax and take care of them. This should have been a predictable outcome for the Chinese government but I guess it wasn't. 

But the biggest problem is the gender discrepancy the policy created. Chinese people value sons over daughters and many of the people that had their one child did whatever they could, up to and including abortion and infanticide, to make sure they had a son. This lead to a huge surplus of males with little to no hope of ever getting married. 

This has always been a recipe for disaster. Having a large number of men with no prospects is a recipe for revolution and disaster and many of the normal historical ways to fix this problem, mostly warfare and raiding, are not available for China, with the possible exception of a conflict with Taiwan. 

The damage that the one child policy has done is not easily reversed. A couple of generations of people there are now used to small families and the old culture of multiple children is dead. The cultural pressure is not to be underestimated and even efforts from a totalitarian Chinese government might not be enough to change things overnight. It might take effect in a decade or so but it won't do so on the short term.

Plus the birth rate is falling across the world, outside of a few places like sub-Saharan Africa. There is something about modern life that makes people not have kids. Part of it might due to be pollution and other problems. But my guess is that it's just too expensive to raise children. That's certainly the case here in the United States but I think it it's just as true in China.

I do think the one thing we can't expect is that China admitting that it screwed up with its one child policy. It's clear to me that they made a huge mistake and reversing the policy is an admission that it wasn't working but they won't say out loud the obvious.