China, World’s Oldest Living Civilization, Is Aging

..Atheist.

Thursday, 26 January 2017
China, World’s Oldest Living Civilization, Is Aging (Because of Atheism?)
Written by  Selwyn Duke

China has long entertained dreams of being the world’s dominant power, but it has at least one notable impediment: Its population is aging at a rapid rate.

Still the world’s most populous country, the “Middle Kingdom” had a robust fertility rate (FR) of 3.50 children per woman in 1976. But the “one-child policy” instituted in 1979, along with further movement into modernity, changed this. Now China’s FR stands at a low 1.66 — well below replacement level (2.10).

How is this a problem in a nation with 1.357 billion people? Bloomberg explains:

Aging has big implications for China’s economic growth, which could be undermined as the labor force declines sharply from 2021 to 2030. It also strains the nation’s expenditures for public services, insurance, and health care, and puts a dent in domestic consumption.

China’s latest population development plan, released by the State Council late Wednesday, projects that about a quarter of China’s population will be 60 or older by 2030. That’s up from 13.3 percent of the population in the country’s latest census in 2010.

With the modern psyche having been shaped by the Malthusian idea of an ever increasing population yielding a Soylent Green dystopia, the negative effects of a graying population are rarely understood. Yet approximately 80 countries have a FR below replacement level, and more nations are poised to join this group over time. Thus, the world doesn’t face an unending population explosion, but a population implosion.

This has some serious implications. As I wrote in 2009:

Normally, a civilization can be represented with a population pyramid standing right-side-up, with the youngest people at the bottom and the age increasing as you move up (okay, we'll forget pharaoh buried underneath). So the aged would be at the very top, with lots of youngsters down below to do civilization's heavy lifting.

When birthrates collapse, however, this pyramid is turned on its head, with the elderly outnumbering the very young.  This usually means hardship, as the young often have to care for their elders.… Worse still, it can create a vicious circle: as the young pay progressively higher taxes, the financial strain makes it even less likely that they will have children. It's a recipe for the winding down of a civilization toward the nadir of non-existence.

Yet there are problems even when social programs are removed from the equation. The young and vibrant are the worker bees; they are the inventors, innovators and creators of wealth. They drive the economy. Of course, the elderly may take jobs out of necessity or boredom, but they can match the economic engine of a peak-working-years population little more than they could match it on the athletic field.  This is part of the reason why famed economist Adam Smith taught that decreasing population correlates with economic depression.

Consequently, “A shrinking labor force would further erode China’s competitive edge in manufacturing but would also be a drag on consumption, now a major pillar of the economy as it transitions away from old smokestack drivers of growth,” wrote Bloomberg.

Recognizing this problem, China began phasing out its one-child policy (which always offered many exceptions) in 2015. Yet this hasn’t yielded much fecundity.

The reason? Low fertility rates aren’t mainly caused by government policy, and they can’t be remedied by it. In fact, according to the excellent documentary Demographic Winter, there are five primary causes of fertility collapse: the sexual revolution, prosperity, the divorce revolution, inaccurate assumptions (e.g., concern about overpopulation), and female careerism.  

The last is especially significant because when women trade domestic dreams for workaday ones, they delay childbearing or forego it altogether.

The only good news for China is, again, that it has a lot of company in its demographic misery. Western Europe’s FR is approximately 1.50, with northern Italy and parts of Spain coming in at below one. “As a result,” I reported in 2008, “Europe’s 65-year-olds now outnumber her 14-year-olds, and one German province had to close 220 schools in 2006. Children were present in 80 percent of U.S. households a century ago; that number is now 32 percent.”

The picture in Eastern Europe is no better. And Russia is losing 700,000 people per year, presenting the possibility that her population could be halved by 2050.

In fact, as pointed out by demographer Phillip Longman, author of The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten Prosperity, only devoutly religious people are having large families today.

This gets at China’s main problem: It has a higher percentage of convinced atheists, by far, than any other nation on Earth. And as Longman put it, “Single-child families are becoming the norm among those who do not feel themselves commanded by God ‘to go forth and multiply.’”

So it turns out that atheism is the most effective one-child policy in the world. And thus will the religious inherit the Earth.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/wo ... -because-of-atheism


harap china belajar membiak cam tikus dan lipas kat afghanistan supaya boleh menghabiskan sumber asli di dunia ini  

..Atheist.

komen ni menarik  

Dean Jackson • 3 days ago
"Bloomberg explains:

Aging has big implications for China’s
economic growth, which could be undermined as the labor force declines
sharply from 2021 to 2030. It also strains the nation’s expenditures for
public services, insurance, and health care, and puts a dent in
domestic consumption."

Why quote the fake Marxist economic analyses Bloomberg uses for other nations, thereby ensuring the economic sabotage of the target nation's economy? As a nation ages it's a good thing that consumption is cut back, because consumption adds nothing new in the realm of new business ventures...obviously. As the elderly save more (and thereby consume less), those increased savings then go towards the new productive enterprises, making the nation richer, not poorer!

Price Controls on Capital

When a central bank places ruinous price controls on interest rates it effectively negates any new business ventures that require huge initial outlays of loaned capital for startup. Economic growth can only occur by an increase in savings (less consumption) for future greater consumption brought about by those savings. The savings that go into production, and not used for consumption, decrease the general price level via cheaper commodities and lower costs of business. Increasing consumption does nothing to enhance productivity since no new commodities/technologies are created by consumption. Consumption is merely consuming what already exists.

We are witnesses to an economic doctrine, only recently devised by Marxist saboteurs, that is a tautology...

“Capital has a cost; therefore the employment of capital is based on cost.”

The cost of capital isn't based on cost - a tautology - it's based on (1) the quantity of capital loaned; and (2) the time it takes to pay back the capital loaned...

A classic tautology…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPa5oVG-nII

The cost of capital - interest - depends on the magnitude borrowed (and time needed to pay back the loan). If one borrows a capital outlay of X, the cost of X will be less than a capital outlay of 6X, but if a central bank maintains interest rates at the artificially low X level, there can be no loans for capital outlays between X and 6X. By implementing low cost interest rates, central banks have set in motion ruinous price controls on capital, thereby impeding the employment of capital.

The Essence of Productivity

The following will illustrate how net (new) investment (productivity increases) took place before medium of exchange - during the hunter-gatherer period - while also illustrating how such net (new) investments spurred trade between separated communities. We will then insert into the hunter-gatherer period a central bank, examining the central bank's deleterious effects on productivity.

In order to build a new fishing implement...a fishing net for capturing greater amounts of fish per attempt...a community would need to spend less time foraging for food while the fishing net was being built. Less time spent foraging for food = less consumption of food = savings; and time spent on the production of the new fishing net = investment for the future; present consumption has been saved (diminished) for investment, investment being the same thing as greater future consumption.

Result when the fishing net is completed: Thanks to a sacrifice in present consumption in order to build the fishing net, Tribe A now can increase its consumption of fish, resulting in a net increase of food intake, even when one factors in the time now spent in repairing the fishing net, called depreciation costs in the modern economy.

In modern economies where money is the entity saved (not 'saved time' searching for food, as in the example above), the lure for such savings is interest. In the example above, the lure was the fish, that is catching more fish per attempt.

Tribe A saved more by looking for food less, placing that 'saved time' into creating a net that would increase the catch of fish. We can say that Tribe A has a greater productive edge than does Tribe B, whose members are still using sharpened sticks to catch fish--very laborious and relatively unproductive.

Now Tribe A decides, due to its higher productivity/wealth, it can afford to save more time, adding this 'saved time' to the 'saved time' it used for making fishing nets, and build a boat that will allow their nets to catch even more fish. Being busy building boats, Tribe A teaches Tribe B to build the nets--a less productive venture than the new boat-building venture is. Tribe A's greater productivity thanks to fishing boats (and greater wealth thanks to fishing boats) allows for more children, increasing the tribe's population, allowing for a larger labor supply in the near future that will be available for procuring other innovative, labor-saving inventions.

Now imagine that a central bank enters the picture and instructs Tribe A to construct less productive (less needed) tables and chairs instead of the critically needed and more productive fishing net. Well, not only has Tribe A wasted precious time, it now consumes less food. A table and chairs are consumption-based wasteful goods, while a fishing net is a new and critical capital good investment in the future greater abundance in food. The central bank has shifted production to wasteful consumption - tables and chairs - thereby making our hunter-gatherer community poorer by consuming capital (capital decumulation as opposed to capital accumulation) in the process. In the modern society central banks shift production away from long-term business ventures – that require large capital outlays that have higher costs (higher interest charged) - towards short-term consumption-based production by lowering interest rates.

The deleterious effects of low interest rates are apparent to those who rely on interest payment dividends from a Certificate of Deposit to supplement a major proportion of every day living expenses. As the interest rate declines on longer maturing CDs to abysmally low levels, many are forced out of CDs because the dividend of the longer maturing CD is no longer covering the living expenses it once did, and consumers need the principal now. Others transfer to shorter maturity CDs, just in case the principal is needed. This results in less capital available for business projects that require relatively longer time periods to begin to pay back loans.

The Icelandic Economic Recovery

Iceland recapitalized weak surviving banks with interest rates that hit rates as high as 18%, slowly bringing the interest rate down to market levels…

https://www.washingtonpost.com/n ... s-story-of-iceland/

The benchmark interest rate in Iceland was last recorded at 5.25%…

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/iceland/interest-rate

Deposit accounts in Iceland earn up to 5.70%, for a five-year CD, where a 3 month CD brings in a robust return of 4.45%…

http://iceland.deposits.org/deposits/

An economy only grows with high, market rate, interest rates, hence the intentional economic sabotage taking place in the United States (Federal funds rate of 0.25%), United Kingdom (bank rate of 0.5%) and the European Union (benchmark refinancing rate of 0.0%).

Infrastructure: Consumption, not Production

Nothing new is produced for infrastructure, merely monies spent on CONSUMING EXISTING commodities. If the Federal government takes on projects to rebuild the nation's crumbling network of roads, we witness consumption spending. However, if a fraction of those monies meant for reconstruction went instead towards new business projects that brought down the costs of of such reconstruction, then we witness true production.

fw280289

orang yang buta sejarah saja yg acknowledge china as the oldest civilisation

..Atheist.

fw280289 replied at 30-1-2017 01:24 PM
orang yang buta sejarah saja yg acknowledge china as the oldest civilisation

jeles laa tu....