Whilst 2016 saw 18 million babies born in China, 2020 saw only 12 million.
Before the 1965 Immigration Act, the US was approaching zero population growth. The “land of the free and home of the brave,” as we call ourselves, has had below-replacement fertility since the early 1970s. We now see that fifty years of importing a new people merely delayed the inevitable. Immigration, which has slackened of late, […]
It’s a long-held political axiom among nationalists in the north that the demographic trend would eventually put Sinn Féin in power in Northern Ireland. Because Catholics tended to have larger families they would eventually outvote unionists, or so it was commonly believed. This, of course, contributed to the sectarian violence and terrorism of unionist militias, from […]
Ma Yinchu was born in 1882 in Zhejiang, China. The son of a small business owner, he was inclined towards scholarship. After earning an undergraduate degree at Tianjin University, he studied at Yale, subsequently earning a PhD in economics and philosophy from Columbia University. He returned to China and helped found the Shanghai College of […]
People who travel to South Korea often say that the most delightful aspect of their visit was the Korean people, who are hospitable, friendly, and “civic minded.” But those notoriously nice people come up way short in one very important aspect: reproducing. In 1960, South Korea’s fertility rate was 6.0. In 2020, it was 0.84. […]
The so-called Enlightenment placed man at the center of the universe, edging aside the “God-centered” worldview once prevalent among Western elites. Then came the Industrial Revolution, spawning the age of “Economic Man.” Matters of consequence came to be viewed primarily through the prism of economic impact. That is something that both Karl Marx and the robber barons […]
“Armenia is facing a demographic catastrophe,” Nune Pashayan, a health department official, told a news conference this week. The government plans to triple funding for reproductive programs. Mr Pashayan cited a number of statistics. The fertility rate is 1.6 (and needs to be 2.1 to maintain the population). According to the latest data, 14.9% of women […]
Ms. magazine is the unabashed holy grail of feminism. Right on the masthead it says “More than a Magazine, a Movement.” But just what is feminism? Like many buzz words in our pestilential popular culture, the term is used like a sledgehammer to set the parameters of permissible public discourse. It is a set piece of […]
The number of registered births in China has dropped for the fourth consecutive year, despite the nation’s new two-child policy. Figures from the Public Security Ministry released this week showed 10.04 million births were registered in 2020, a staggering 15% drop from 2019. The sex ratio was 1.11 boys for every girl, which suggests that […]
Promoting marriage is likely the most successful way to promote more births in Asia, according to recent research by Mengni Chen, a research scientist at the University of Cologne in Germany and University of Louvain in Belgium, and Paul Yip, the chair professor (population health) at the University of Hong Kong. 2020 estimates continue to place the […]
Remember in the first weeks of the pandemic last year when Italy was the focus of the outbreak? News out of China was sketchy, so most of what we saw and heard of the new virus was from northern Italy: ambulances racing along narrow and dark streets, locked down towns, rows of coffins in churches […]
It is a good time to be a worker. Well, apart from the lockdowns. And it’s probably not great if you are in hospitality. Or tourism. Or in the airline industry. Ok, let’s start again. Leaving aside COVID (who doesn’t want to do that!?) the next few years and decades will be a good […]