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| Entry tags: | economics |
The economics of population control
Last weekend I had occasion to speak with an interesting young man who left China several months ago to learn English in Canada. He told me many surprising things about the inner workings of China, although I'm not entirely sure how biased some of his views are. One things that caught my attention in particular was his revelation that, despite all we've heard about China's infamous one-child policy, he had a younger sister. Apparently families are now allowed to have a 2nd child if they pony up a substantial fee and the 2nd child is a girl.
That's fascinating because it reveals that the ostensibly communist government has actually been applying a strange sort of market system to birth-control. In some parts of the world, people lack the knowledge or means to control the number of offspring they produce. In most industrialized nations women have a high degree of control over the number and timing of their children; a free market of sorts. In China, anomalously, the state has a monopoly on the right to give birth, although "the first one is free". Regardless of the frightening impact this implies upon individual freedoms, they can make a reasonable case for resorting to such a measure given their alarming population growth. Of course, cultural artifacts ended up biasing parents in favour of male children to such a degree that China ended up with a huge imbalance (dozens of millions). The effects of this on society are hard to predict accurately but I imagine they are unpleasant.
To solve this problem, the state threw in a deal that tips the balance in favour of female children. Of course, if they simply left it at that, it would unleash a flood of 2nd children and their iron fisted approach to population control would be thwarted. Instead they cleverly employed a market-inspired control: price. This gives them pretty fine-grained, albeit chronologically impaired, throttle on the number of "extra" girls that society produces. They could have tried a queue or a lottery instead but this approach has the appealing side-effect of raising the state's revenue so it's hardly surprising that they opted for it.
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quikchange) wrote,
