March 24, 2016
That’s what readers would learn from reading this NYT piece on a Chinese scientist living in exile in Wisconsin, Yi Fuxian, who has been a critic of China’s family planning policies. According to the piece, Dr. Yi has warned that China will see a rapid decline in population which will prevent its economy from ever surpassing the United States.
It is not clear what metric Dr. Yi would be using. Presumably he means in GDP, but he is then too late for his warning. According to the I.M.F., China’s economy is already more than 10 percent larger than the U.S. economy using a purchasing power parity measure of GDP (15 percent including Hong Kong). According to its projections, China’s economy will be more than 30 percent larger by the end of the decade.
While the media like to hype the impact of rising ratios of retirees to workers as somehow devastating to the economy, arithmetic fans know that the impact of demographics is swamped by the impact of productivity growth. If this sounds complicated, 150 years ago more than half of the U.S. population was working in agriculture. Today less than one percent of the workforce is in agriculture, yet we have plenty of food. It makes sense to promote concerns about demographics if the goal is to cut back benefits for seniors, but not if the intention is to discuss economic reality.
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