China, for the first time in 60 years has seen it's population fall. Why do some people consider that a bad thing? If anything, China will be better off, as less people means there will be less competition for resources.

中国60年来首次出现人口下降。为什么有些人认为这是一件坏事？人口减少意味着对资源的竞争也会减少，中国会更好才对呀

以下是Quora网友的评论：

Sage

China's population decline is a complex issue with multiple factors at play. Some experts believe that the country's one-child policy, which was in effect from 1979 to 2015, has played a significant role in the decline. The policy led to a significant decrease in the birth rate and an aging population. This could have negative consequences for the country's economy and workforce.Additionally, some experts argue that a population decline could also lead to a decrease in domestic consumption and investment, which could negatively impact economic growth. It could also lead to a shortage of workers, which could drive up wages and lead to a decline in productivity.On the other hand, some experts argue that a population decline could have positive effects on the environment and resources, as there would be less competition for resources and fewer people putting strain on the planet.Overall, it's important to consider both the potential negative and positive consequences of China's population decline and to carefully evaluate the long-term implications.

中国的人口下降是一个复杂的问题，是多种因素共同作用的结果。一些专家认为，1979年至2015年实施的独生子女政策在人口下降中发挥了重要作用。

这一政策导致了出生率的显著下降和人口老龄化。

这可能会对中国的经济和劳动力产生负面影响。

一些专家还认为，人口减少还可能导致国内消费和投资降低，从而对经济增长产生负面影响。

人口减少还可能导致劳动力短缺，从而推高工资，导致生产率下降。

另一方面，一些专家认为人口减少对环境和资源有积极正面的影响，因为对资源的竞争会减少，给地球带来压力的人也会减少。

总的来说，考虑中国人口下降的潜在的消极和积极后果，并仔细评估长期影响是很重要的。

David Levy

Question: Why do a lot of people think China cannot catch up in average living standards because of its large population?

Because they have never seen anything like the enormous transformation China has experienced, can’t imagine it, and therefore find it unlikely.

问：为什么很多人认为中国人口众多，无法达到平均生活水平？

因为他们从未见过中国经历过的巨大变革，所以无法想象，因此觉得不可能。

I arrived in China in 1986 from my hometown of Ridgewood, New Jersey. Most families, it seems, had two cars, at least 2 TV sets, telephones in every room, vacations every year, and the likelihood of a university education for most of their children. We could imagine families without a car (very poor, or inside the city) but could not imagine (and never saw) houses without multiple TVs, telephones, one large fridge, etc.

1986年我从新泽西州里奇伍德的家里出发来到中国。美国多数家庭基本上都有两辆车，至少两台电视机，每个房间都有电话，每年还要度度假，大多数孩子可能都接受了大学教育。我们可以想象一个家庭没有汽车(很穷，或住在市区)，但无法想象(也从未见过)一个家里没有多台电视、没有电话、也没有大冰箱等。

The China I stepped into was poor and isolated. Almost no one knew anything about the world outside China and, in most cases, about life outside their own province. Almost no one owned a TV or a telephone. They hardly ever saw a foreign movie. Seeing a foreign person inside China was a rare event (outside of Shanghai, Beiing or a few hotspots), and actually talking to one was the stuff of fantasy. There was no outbound tourism; pretty much the only outbound travel was for business (insignificant) and for education (mostly the students stayed overseas).

我刚来中国时，中国贫困闭塞。几乎没有人了解中国以外的世界，甚至对大多数人而言，他们对自己省份以外的生活都一无所知。几乎没有人拥有电视或电话，也几乎没有人看过外国电影。在中国境内(除了上海、北京或一些热点地区)见到外国人都是十分稀罕的事情，真的能跟外国人交谈更是一种幻想。也不存在出境旅游，出境几乎只为了商务（极少）和教育，留学生基本上都会留在海外。

The economy was disconnected from the rest of the world, too. RMB was not convertible, and imported goods were almost impossible to buy using local currency. Most people in my City (inan, Shandong) wore identical blue or green suits.

There were no private cars. Illiteracy was not uncommon (nor was it pervasive, though).

当时的中国经济也和其他国家脱节。人民币无法兑换，进口商品不能用人民币购买。我当时在山东济南，当地人几乎都穿着相同的蓝色或绿色套装。

当时的中国也没有私家车。文盲很多，但也不至于遍地都是文盲

So when I arrived in China in 1986 it was like getting out of a time machine. But since then, China has built beautiful, towering cities, modern highways, high-speed trains, gleaming subways, etc. Chinese travel everywhere and spend lots of money doing it. There is nothing western people “have” that Chinese don’t, and despite official censorship sha their opinions, there is not information about the outside world they can’t access. There is no technology or social trend of which they can be said to be ignorant.

所以当我在1986年初来中国时，我感觉自己就像乘坐时光机穿越了一样。但从那时起，中国慢慢建起了崭新靓丽、高楼林立的城市，现代化的高速公路，高铁列车和地铁等。中国人到处旅游，一掷千金。西方人“拥有”的，中国人也都一应俱全，虽然官方左右了他们的观点，但他们也可以洞悉国际事务。他们对任何技术或社会潮流都了如指掌。

People who haven’t been here in China over the past few decades have never experienced this rate of change, so they can’t imagine it’s possible. For those lucky enough to have experienced it, almost ANYTHING seems possible.

在过去的几十年里，没来过中国的人绝对没有经历过这种变化速度，所以他们无法想象、不敢相信。但对于那些有幸经历过的人来说，一切皆有可能。

Feng ian

Here is a tip.

Automation in some Chinese factories is purposely slowed down or halted and replaced by labor because of the demand from the local authority for employement.

Back to 2013, I have already read the positive prediction about China in 2020 from the Chinese authority in Shenzhen. Some predicted that automation will replace most of works in factories (like 90%, and the 10% will be engineers to fix machines and workers to carry the products to trucks). But this doesn’t occur in the year 2023 due to both technological limitation but also employement.

给你们一点提示。

因为地方政府对就业的指标需求，一些中国工厂的取代人工的自动化进程被刻意放缓或停止了。

早在2013年，我就已经看到深圳有关部门对2020年中国的积极预测。有人预测，自动化生产设备将取代工厂的大部分岗位(可能达到90%，剩余10%的岗位是修理机器的工程师和把产品搬到卡车上的工人)。但由于技术限制，这种情况在2023年还不会发生。

职位。

Likewise, there are some “retarded” jobs like security check in metro stations that at least 50% of them can be fired or replaced by programs but the jobs exst because otherwise they will become unemployeed and then mass murders on the street like GTA.

Now Chatgpt is trending, but I doubt you will suddenly see a massive increase of unemployment rate around the world, especially the transnational corporations which the local government only permits for the sake of job creation and taxzation, but rather those slowassed workers use AI like Chatgpt to continue their legworks.

同样，还有一些“低级”的工作，比如地铁站的安检等，起码可以解雇或用程序取代50%的岗位，但这些工作仍会存在，因为否则他们就得失业，可能就会像《侠盗猎车手》里描述的那样，发生大规模当街谋杀案。

现在Chatgpt是个趋势，但我觉得世界各地的失业率不会突然大幅上升，特别是跨国公司，当地政府关心的就是创造就业机会和征收税金，不会让Chatgpt这样的人工智能来取代工人的跑腿活。

So technological progression has to match the population (this is important because we are human, not capitals). But in theory, if there is less population, there is more incentives to invest in tech and go for capital than human intensive economic model. So I’m more optimistic to the population reduction thing.

因此，科技的进步必须跟人口规模相匹配，这很重要，因为我们是人，不是资本。但从理论上讲，如果人口减少，就会有更多的动力去投资科技和资本，而不是继续搞人力密集型的经济模式。所以我对人口减少还是持乐观态度。

Louis Cohen

Every place with a population drop gets excited about it and tries to get more babies, I agree with you that this is bad policy.

If you need more workers, let immigrants in

And/Or encourage more people to work, typically women

Expect robots to take more jobs

每一个人口下降的国家都反应很大，鼓励大家多生孩子，我同意你的观点，这是一个糟糕的政策。

如果你需要更多劳动力，就引进移民吧

鼓励更多人参加工作，尤其是女性

允许机器人承担更多的工作

Matt Riggsby

It’s less about the absolute numbers and more about the distribution.

On one hand, it’s true that an absolute drop in population isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Fewer people means fewer resources used, which is something the planet could use. However, declines in population aren’t distributed evenly. If people have fewer kids, as in the case in China, there are smaller generations coming up who will eventually need to support proportionately more older people who can’t work than before, or at least can’t work as much as age-related disability catches up with them. It also means a significant increase in medical costs spread through society. In the medium term, then, there’s a relatively small working population supporting a relatively large non-working population, which blunts growth and harms quality of life. We’re already seeing this in Japan, and it’s going to hit China in a big way in a decade or two. Given China’s outsized role in the global economy, that’s going to have international implications.

这和人口的绝对数字无关，但跟人口分布情况有关。

一方面，人口的绝对下降不一定是坏事，这是真的。

人少了，意味着占用的资源也少了，地球因此得以喘息。

但人口数量的下降并不是均匀分布的。

如果孩子变少，就像中国的情况一样，未来人口就会更少，

他们最终将不得不赡养越来越多的老年人，这些老年人无法像年轻时那样工作，或者至少因为年龄的增长导致身体机能下降，无力承担太多工作。

这也意味着整个社会的医疗费用将大幅增加。

从中期来看，较少的劳动力支撑着相对较多的非工作人口，就会阻碍经济的增长，降低生活质量。

日本就是一个很好的例子，这个问题将在10年或20年内对中国产生重大影响。

鉴于中国在全球经济中的巨大作用，这个问题也将对国际社会造成影响。

Paul Denlinger

The main issue here is how a population drop affects the pace and momentum of national economic development. Traditional economics says that a smaller population means fewer inputs through human productivity into the economy. This translates into fewer outputs which means less economic growth, which most economists and politicians agree is not a good thing.

But if we take a closer look, the answer is less clear. There are tiers of human productivity: in today’s world, an AI engineer is more productive than a truck driver.

主要问题在于人口下降如何影响国家经济发展的速度和势头。传统经济学认为，人口减少意味着通过人类生产力对经济的投入也减少了。这意味着产出的减少，意味着经济增长的放缓，大多数经济学家和政治家都认为这并非好事。

但如果我们仔细分析，答案就不是那么绝对了。人类的生产力是分等级的：在当今世界，人工智能工程师的生产力高于卡车司机。

China has a manufacturing-driven economy where government policy often drives the allocation of resources. In contrast, the US economy is driven by the allocation of capital by Wall Street. The Chinese government is more willing to wait for return on investment than Wall Street.

中国的经济是由制造业驱动的，政府政策往往决定着资源的配置。相比之下，美国经济是由华尔街的资本配置驱动的。中国比华尔街更有耐心等待投资回报。

For this reason, it is really too early to say if China’s fall in population will have an effect on productivity growth especially when automation is becoming a more important contributor to manufacturing productivity than human labor. Not only is this happening with manufacturing, but this is also happening in services, which take the largest part of the developed economies in the west and Japan.

To sum up, we don’t know yet if the population drop in China is significant. We will have to wait and see.

因此，现在就说中国人口的减少会不会对生产率增长产生影响，还有些为时过早，尤其是在自动化对制造业生产率的贡献正在超过人类劳动力的情况下。这种情况不仅发生在制造业，服务业也是如此。在西方各大发达经济体和日本，服务业所占的比重最大。

综上所述，我们还不知道中国的人口下降有什么深远影响。我们拭目以待吧。

Bruce Hyland

Natural populations are declining in just about every developed countries, so the trend is hardly limited to China. The difference is that other countries, with the notable exception of Japan, make up the deficit through immigration. Until now, China has not pursued immigration but that could change. However, it would require an adjustment in the social system that doesn’t seem on the cards any time soon.

几乎所有发达国家的自然人口都在减少，这种趋势并不仅限于中国。不同之处在于，除了日本，其他国家都是通过移民来弥补赤字的。到目前为止，中国还没有引入移民，但未来这种情况可能会改变。但是这需要对社会体系进行调整，不过这种调整短期内应该不会出现。

In the meantime, it means an aging population with a declining workforce. There are also structural problems in the gender imbalance of the population pyramid. China is already a relatively poor country (median wealth per capita of $28,258), so some dramatic changes in automation and the use of AI will be necessary, to keep up the economic output required to maintain and improve living standards. The Chinese are very disciplined and adaptable, so I am quite optimistic that the country will adjust to the changing conditions.

与此同时，人口的减少意味着人口老龄化和劳动力的减少。人口金字塔的性别失衡也存在结构性问题。中国是一个相对贫穷的国家(人均财富中位数为28258美元)，因此在自动化和人工智能的使用方面进行一些重大变革是必要的措施，如此才能保证维持和提高生活水平所需的经济产量。中国人纪律严明，适应性强，所以我对中国能否适应不断变化的环境持乐观态度。