For more than 40 years, China has restricted the number of children that families are allowed to have. Does this mean that the Chinese government places no value on personal freedom? Not necessarily. One might argue that competing values are at stake; the value of freedom of choice and the value of avoiding the harm caused by overpopulation.
However, I don’t find that explanation to be plausible. To see why, consider this recent news report:
Faced with an aging population and declining birth rate, northwestern China’s Shaanxi province has suggested abolishing family planning restrictions “when the time is right,” according to a recent provincial report.
China in 2016 allowed married couples to have two kids after decades of restricting many people to just one child. But the subsequent increase in births has been lower than expected.
In its 2017 population report — made public at the end of June but only widely reported on by media in recent days — the Shaanxi statistics department notes that, compared with 2016, the province’s birth rate dropped, the labor force shrank, and the proportion of elderly residents increased. These trends are in line with national figures.
Besides dropping restrictions on family size, the report suggests the province implement financial incentives to “increase desire to procreate” and improve the conditions for raising children.
Do you see the problem? Suppose the Chinese government valued the personal freedom to procreate at $100 billion, about $75 per capita. Also suppose that the one child policy (later changed to 2 children) was introduced because they perceived the cost of population growth to exceed the benefit of personal freedom. Over time, the cost of population growth might fall, as the birth rate declined. When the total cost of allowing free choice in procreation fell below $100 billion, the restrictions would be removed. That’s all pretty straightforward.
Here’s the part that is less obvious. At the moment the cost of overpopulation falls below $100 billion, the cost remains very large in absolute value. It would still be the case that, on balance, the Chinese government would view population growth as a strong negative, perhaps with a cost of $90 billion, or $80 billion. Because these trends tend to change smoothly over time, it would take a number of years for the cost of excess population growth to fall to zero. Only when the cost fell well below zero, when the birthrate is well below the perceived socially optimal level, would the Chinese government start to think in terms of costly programs such as birth subsidies.
So if the Chinese government placed a strong weight on personal freedom, then during a period of declining birth rates the restrictions on children would be phased out, and this would be followed by a long period of no intervention, and then perhaps much later on by birth subsidies. But the article suggests that a provincial Chinese government is thinking about transitioning directly from birth restrictions to birth subsidies, with no intervening period of freedom. I conclude that the Chinese government places relatively little value on personal freedom.
Most of my readers are probably thinking “duh”. But I do recall back in the 1980s hearing lots of people (even in the West) justifying this policy on a cost/benefit basis. Thus it’s worth noting that the Chinese government does not seem to have adopted the policy as a drastic but unfortunately necessary solution to overpopulation, but rather as a technocratic way of micromanaging the birthrate of Chinese citizens, with almost no regard for personal freedom.
One other point. It’s true that this article refers to just one province. But it’s well known that China is rapidly transitioning to a Japanese style situation of low birth rates and falling population. I have little doubt that within a few years the national government will be worried about too few babies. The fact that birth restrictions are still in place in 2018 is quite telling. And I’d say the same about barriers to internal migration within China.
This is an interesting graph:
READER COMMENTS
XVO
Jul 27 2018 at 2:58pm
Under your theory, why did they implement the one child policy? It had to be a politically costly decision unpopular among almost everyone in China.
Maybe they value freedom (although not as much as Americans) but are short sighted and stupid?
XVO
Jul 27 2018 at 3:13pm
“but rather as a technocratic way of micromanaging the birthrate of Chinese citizens, with almost no regard for personal freedom.”
Guess I missed this partial explanation.
Why don’t Chinese people value personal freedom? Why do they want to micromanage the birthrate?
A nations power is determined by their economy and the value of a nations economy is largely determined by their population. One would think the Chinese would want to be powerful.
Grant Gould
Jul 27 2018 at 3:40pm
Another possibility to consider is that the real concern is not the number of children but the number of parents.
I don’t know about China, but in the US at least parents are much less likely than non-parents to protest the government or vote for radical changes. As such, a status-quo government might strongly prefer that however many children there are, they should be spread fairly evenly across the population so as to minimize childlessness. That would argue for a jump to pro-natalist policies at the first available juncture.
Scott Sumner
Jul 28 2018 at 1:18am
XVO, The Chinese people probably do value freedom., The Chinese government is another story.
EB
Jul 28 2018 at 8:25am
This is a post about the preferences of the Chinese government since Mao’s death. Wow. We can hardly say that we know what the preferences of the Cuban government have been since Fidel took power (almost 60 years ago), and we pretend to understand the Chinese’s ones. Yes, we can say that the Party runs the government but we don’t know how the Party works and much less how it runs the government of such a large country (I also wonder how much the role of the military has changed with the great transformation of the economy, but I bet that in the 1990s it changed a lot). We don’t know how the one-child policy worked (I have some ideas because I lived there a few years, and my children used to visit different places living with Chinese families but I would never speculate on the basis of my children’s anecdotes). What I know is that enforcement differed greatly across China, as much as that of any other law or regulation from Beijing. In addition, the data we have is not reliable, and irrelevant for any serious analysis of China’s social problems (most data are from state agencies’ supervisory work).
Scott Sumner
Jul 29 2018 at 11:56am
EB, How does you comment relate to this post?
EB
Aug 1 2018 at 8:11am
By pointing out that your assumptions about China are not based on any knowledge of what has been happening there since Mao’s death. If your intention is to speculate about population policy in general, please use as examples countries you know.
My point is reinforced by other readers’ comments. They make clear that they know nothing about China and they largely refer to topics unrelated to population policy.
BTW, the Martians may value liberty but their government may not.
nobody.really
Jul 31 2018 at 1:59pm
Context:
Externalities arise when the consequences of decisions get imposed upon those who don’t participate in the decision-making.
Procreation/child rearing generate externalities. The people making the procreation/child rearing decisions generally expect that the consequences of their decisions will outlive them. Ergo, most societies intervene to influence these decisions. For example, many societies insist that kids get some minimum amount of education. Some people/parents may regard this as an affront to their personal freedom, but they tend to be overruled.
Evidence suggests that, on average, procreation/child rearing generates POSITIVE externalities.
Given all this, why would China adopt a one-child policy? Who knows—but when resources are scarce, having “one more mouth to feed” no longer seems like such a positive outcome.
Consider China’s history: When Mao took over in 1949, the US declared Communist China an enemy. And the US had just nuked Japan in 1946. Confronted with this potentially existential threat, Mao adopted the defensive measure of asking his people to procreate like crazy; if they couldn’t defend against a nuclear attack, they could at least maximize their chances of surviving the blow. The population grew from 550 million to over 900 million. But thanks to Mao’s Great Leap Forward (a disastrous economic and social reform project), from 1958-61 an estimated 45 million Chinese starved to death.
Think about that: We in the West are still traumatized by the roughly 12 million people killed by the Nazis back in the 1940s. Meanwhile, millions of 60-yr-old Chinese bureaucrats grew up in households still grieving over watching family members starve. People who grew up in this context—and in the context of the general anxiety about world overpopulation that arose after the publication of “The Population Bomb” in 1968—are understandably sensitive to the risk that the population might exceed the food supply.
nobody.really
Jul 31 2018 at 2:00pm
Why?
It takes a long time to turn an aircraft carrier. People who want it to turn need to START the turn well before they actually want or expect it to turn. And I expect that steering an aircraft carrier is child’s play compared to steering the population growth of China.
Moreover, I don’t understand why providing subsidies for procreation impinges upon personal freedom. What people want often differs from what is social optimal. Every society seeks out ways to “nudge” people into behaving in socially optimal ways. Subsidies seem like a pretty benign nudge.
As we’re discussing in the context of carbon taxes, I tend to favor Pagouvian taxes (and subsidies). So I see nothing especially pernicious about government taxing negative externalities in proportion to their harms, and subsidizing positive externalities in proportion to their benefits. If the social benefits of procreation was negative, but gradually increasing to the point where it became positive, I wouldn’t object if government had a policy that imposed ever lighter taxes on the practice until the net costs became zero, and then transitioning to granting ever-growing subsidies thereafter.
In PRACTICE governments rarely have the administrative wherewithal to implement such a policy. In PRACTICE, policies then to lag the data. So a knowledgeable government official observing changing trends might well propose policies designed to for the world as we expect it to be when the policy will be implemented, not as the world is today. Remember, the quarterback throws the ball to where the receiver will be when the ball arrives, not where the receiver is when the ball is thrown.
Comments are closed.