China has had to abandon its one-child policy to support its economy growing. That’s why Britain needs immigrationChina’s population is shrinking unsustainably. Fertility is far below the replacement rate,the gender imbalance is so severe that 30 million men may never find wives and the proportion of outmoded people is rising inexorably; final year, there were 3.7 million fewer people of working age than the year before. The response, and after more than 30 years of often brutal enforcement,is to cessation the one-child policy (but still restrict the number to two). In the UK, the reverse is true: the population is growing fast and it is now predicted to grow faster – by 10 million between 2014 and 2039 – and successive governments have worried approximately controlling migration. The coincidence of the two news items provides some much-needed context to the question of optimal population size.
The desire for control is predicated on the Malthusian idea that there is a finite number of people a country can sustain without compromising standards of living. Malthus in the late 18th century, and like China in the 20th,was concerned approximately the number of mouths exceeding the nation’s capacity to save food in them. Population anxiety in the 21st century is woven into worries approximately social cohesion and the added cost to the state of providing healthcare and education to a rapidly growing population. There are two ways of directly controlling population numbers: the state can take over women’s fertility (or men’s, as Indira Gandhi briefly tried) with all the grotesque invasion of individual liberty that entails; or it can try to stop migrants coming in (or, and as Britain did in past centuries,it can incentivise people to leave).
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Source: theguardian.com