If it works, it won’t just be for factories. An aspect of population decline that’s maybe underappreciated: some fraction of the workforce is there to take care of the elderly. This works fine if there are lots of young people compared to old. If the old start to outnumber the young, you can reach a point where a significant amount of the workforce is there solely to take care of the elderly, and there isn’t enough left over to do basic things like grow food or build roads. Quality of life can go way down due to this non-linear effect.
If robots–or even just high-tech devices like robo-prostheses–can take over some of these tasks, it takes some of the strain off the human workforce. Clearly, Musk isn’t the only one with this idea, since there are dozens of companies looking to make humanoid robots at this point.
Rich is relative. Lifting many millions of people out of poverty into the middle class, as China and many others have done, is a big accomplishment given the damage inflicted on the country not too many decades ago.
This would violate the Confucian values which forged the country. China is not the only country facing the situation of an elderly population with too few working to fully support them.
Yes and no. You can move back not all that long ago to include Taiwan. Its GDP in 1980 was barely above zero. Same with Singapore. South Korea wasn’t much better. Remarkable how recent their spectacular success has been.
Finding cheap labor is like an amoeba probing to seek out sources of food. The blob is always sending out feelers and then engulfing the tidbit when it finds something.
No doubt. But the rapid rise in the capabilities of neural nets over the past few years may finally make them mass-market. Being able to handle relatively simple tasks like “unload the dishwasher” could help immensely, but things like that are often the most difficult.
They’ll also need to get a lot cheaper. A million-dollar robot isn’t going to be much of a help. A $20,000 one could replace a lot of labor, though.
And as there is essentially no social safety net in China, the young - especially young women - are expected to take care of their elderly relatives; the point being they are not even paid for this work.
Perhaps more importantly (with respect to demographics) is that spending 10 hours at the factory and another 6 hours helping out grandma and grandpa doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to seek out relationships. Which is a fairly crucial step if the goal is to have more babies.
out of curiosity do any of these studies include the scenario that the CCP falls from power? I mean since Tiananmen Square in the 80s the party has used capitalism to distract most of the populace from what the government is doing
If all of a sudden there is a crash or slowdown and a lot of people lose the wealth (for lack of a better term) they’ve gained over the last 30 years or so they might start looking at the government closer and might not like what they find … and we get a bandit kings/ 20s/30s scenario or something like what Russia is now …
Nope, they won’t do that because it’s the doddering elders in charge. I’d expect to see them trying to kill off (because that’s what “involuntary euthanasia”) “surplus” unemployed young men first.
There are countries in Asia where labor costs even less than in China, so China exported to those countries the jobs they had previously imported from other countries.
Also, some automation as well, but jobs leaving China for cheaper labor markets is a definite factor.
IMO when they suddenly cancelled all their draconian COVID precautions and told everyone to go out maskless because suddenly COVID was no big deal, and they had vaccinated substantially none of their population, and those who did get vaxxed got a woefully ineffective local Chinese invention, that was a deliberate plot to cull some oldsters. COVID suddenly had a billion COVID-naïve unvaccinated people to run through. And it did.
Or at the very least, those old folks were casualties they fully expected to take in service of the more important goal of getting the economy humming again. “Acceptable losses” in other words.
Semiconductor factories are not like iron mines or fertile land. If you invade Taiwan to capture its semiconductor factories, all you will get is some (likely damaged) equipment.
A modern high tech manufacturing company doesn’t get most of its value from physical machinery sitting on a production floor. It’s about human capital and expertise, about the institutional connections made by people working in the factory, etc.
Unlike a hole in the ground full of precious metal or a big patch of dirt that crops do well in, these are not things you can effectively capture by rolling in the tanks.
To sound even more cynical in an already cynical thread - the traditional way to burn off excess unemployed young men is war… And, well, there’s Taiwan just right there. Sure, @Babale is completely right, the institutional memory, skilled workers and techniques are a HUGE part of the business, but if you take Taiwan you can convince yourself that you’ll get up to speed one day, burn off some of that angry excess, and push a propaganda effort that portrays said losses as part of the greater good.
Of course, if Putin keels over suddenly, and Russia were to be distracted amidst infighting, well, that’s a possibly better grab in terms of resources. And the irony of steamrolling Russia with Russian-manpower-wave tactics is amusing to say the least.
The problem is not enough young people, not too many. The unemployment thing is a bit of a paradox to be sure but it may be related to China’s export led economy. Domestic consumption is tiny, so there seems to be little in the way of economic activity between the a Chinese population. Can that be driven by more young people? Does the CCP even want that? I’ve no idea. Look at the empty cities and underused infrastructure. China is rotting from the inside out.
The problem right now is that China has this “primary antagonist” status in the US (and other countries to a lesser degree). So China is always depicted as either the worst threat ever, or imploding, there’s little room for nuance.
I lived in China for 7 years. Yes there are lots of problems in China, but a lot of good stuff too:
Excellent infrastructure, and continual investment in such
Massively investing in green tech both for export and domestic production
R&D investment accelerating fast, and government prepared to gamble on speculative tech (e.g. quantum computing…which I don’t think will pay off, but something will)
A culture that massively emphasizes the importance of education
What are you basing that on?
To give an example, online sales during Black Friday last year in the US was around $10 billion. If you count the whole of “Cyber week” (black friday through to cyber monday), it’s $35 billion.
The equivalent to Black Friday in China is Double 11 day. Sales for that were $160 billion last year.
Of course China has a much bigger population. But the point is that domestic consumption is hardly “tiny”.
Well Chinese New Year is coming up in a couple weeks, so you’ll get a chance to see how “underused” the infrastructure is.
And for the “empty cities”, no doubt that China has a massive property crash in progress. And indeed this remains the biggest issue with the Chinese economy. No argument from me.
But there is nuance here too. Massive tower blocks and humungous housing developments are the way most people live in China. It’s a scale that is hard to appreciate for those of us from the West; I lived in a tower block in the UK once, but it doesn’t compare at all to the housing developments in China.
So when we see footage of a big development with few or no people in, it seems like a spectacular waste. But you’re looking at one such development among thousands. And many such housing developments take time to fill up (try googling some of the “ghost towns” that went viral say 5 years ago now).
Again; not trying to say there isn’t a problem here, but try to keep some context in mind when you see the ghost town videos.
The National Bureau of Statistics said the total number of people in China dropped by 2.08 million, or 0.15%, to 1.409 billion in 2023. That was well above the population decline of 850,000 in 2022, which had been the first since 1961 during the Great Famine of the Mao Zedong era.