Unpleasant choices for China

Time to combine my two recent blogging obsessions into a single subject - China and the resource crash!

NPR has a story that echoes a growing international chorus urging China to drop its one-child policy. They're worried about the rising proportion of seniors and the huge gender imbalance. If China doesn't have more babies, they say, the country's low-cost labor advantage will be eroded, the social safety net will be overwhelmed, and 40 million men will be without wives.

But China has 1.3 billion people. And skyrocketing prices for food and oil are nature's way of telling us, those 1.3 billion people simply can't become as rich as Americans, Western Europeans, and Japanese people are today. It just isn't going to happen, until and unless major technological breakthroughs save our asses.

In the meantime, if China has more kids, they'll just be poor and hungry. They won't be able to support their elder; their elders will have to support them! The only way for China's per capita living standards to continue to grow past 2020 or so will be for the denominator - the size of the population - to fall. And that means a whole lot of old Chinese people will have to die poor and cold and alone. That sucks. But when you have 1.3 billion people, there just aren't any other choices, period. Mao should have thought of that before he called on Chinese people to have big families.