Why Can't Birth Rates Be "Brought Back" Once The TFR Fall Below 1.5? The Truth About the 30-Year "Demographic Debt"
A piece of news was posted in one of my WhatsApp chat group today: Global Times reported that Beijing is expected to become a "super-aged society" by 2035, with one in three people aged 60 or above. In the group chat, one reaction was "immigration," and I could have added "subsidies" for having children.
But after having watched a Prior Signal video on YouTube, I realized we might have been thinking about the direction wrong.
(TFR is the replacement rate, for maintaining the current population, TFR needs to be at 2.1 child per couple)
Not "Fewer People Being Born," but "Fewer People Who Can Give Birth"
When fertility rates fall below 1.5, what truly determines the future is not how many children each woman has, but how many women there are.
The Prior Signal video mentioned a detail: once fertility rates enter the low range, every 30 years, the number of women of childbearing age shrinks by an order of magnitude. Today's newborns become mothers thirty years from now. If today's birth count is half of what it was thirty years ago, then thirty years from now, the base number of women who can give birth will simply be cut in half - no matter how generous the subsidies or how perfect the policies, you can't make a woman who doesn't exist give birth.
This is the "determinism" that the video conveys: problems don't begin thirty years after birth rates decline; rather, the seeds of problems are planted the moment fertility rates fall below the line of no return.
The Chain of Community Collapse: From "School Closure" to "Everything Gone"
Starting from the rural and suburban communities; schools, hospitals, buses, post offices start disappearing. It has been happening in the real world.
The UK Parliament's science and technology office once summarized the impact of declining fertility rates: in the short term, it's a decrease in the school-age population, leading to school consolidations; long term, it's a surge in the oldest-old population and a blowout in care needs, putting enormous pressure on public services. Japan is a ready-made example (TFR dropped below 1.5 in 1995) - due to insufficient student numbers, over 10,000 school buildings across the country have been closed.
Greece is more visual: this year, 75 schools were shut down, and over 400 suspended classes. On the remote island of Kalymnos, the last school has only two students left; once they leave next year, the school closes, the teacher leaves, and young people have even less reason to stay. Population decline → service cuts → young people flee → birth rates fall further. This is the vicious cycle.
Why Can't Subsidies and Immigration Reverse It?
The video's conclusion is harsh but honest: subsidies can at most stabilize, but cannot reverse. Because the policy targets "people who might give birth", but the pool of people who might give birth is shrinking.
Immigration can "supplement" the labor force, but it cannot supplement the social structure that has already collapsed. When a place's schools are gone, hospitals are gone, and bus routes are cut, immigrants won't go there. Even if they do, they themselves will age, and their children will also be affected by the local low fertility culture. Israel is the only counterexample cited in the video: the reason is cultural - children are seen as "existentially meaningful (growing the number of God's Chosen?)" and the fertility rate remains at 2.79. But that is culture, not policy, and it cannot be replicated through subsidies.
Returning to the Beijing News
The Global Times article says that by 2035, one in three people in Beijing will be elderly. On the surface, this is an "aging problem," but behind it is the inevitable result of low fertility accumulated over the past thirty years.
The social discussion triggered by the Prior Signal video, at its core, is not "persuading people to have children," but rather recognizing a time lag: the demographic structure we see today is a foregone conclusion determined by the birth rates of thirty years ago; and the birth rates of today will determine the social landscape thirty years from now that cannot be changed by any policy.
So it's better to first understand this: once the number of wombs falls below the line, all the "solutions" discussed later are merely variations of slowing down the decline.
(Assisted by DeepSeek, based on my prompts. Note that DeepSeek is willing to discuss issues affecting Beijing and Chinese Birthrates).
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