Just adding numbers doesn't mean something can or can't be washed away. First of all, the US has absolute domination over India in every aspect despite having a quarter of the population. That in itself shows that raw population is not the key to success. Secondly, those other countries being added to the US side, actually will sway depending on the power balance. When China is definitively more powerful than the US and it is known that siding with China will get you reward and siding with the US will get you punishment, those numbers, and likely more, to include China's allies like Russia, will be added to China's side instead.
Just military or economic power doesn't lead to alliances. What also matters is culture, values, and interests.
A very interesting case is Australia. Australian economy is completely complementary to China's. In fact Australia gained immensely in economic sense from China's economic miracle. Australia is far from China, has no territorial disputes, no bad history, nothing.
However, despite that Australian politics is seriously anti-China, and they were among the first ones to ban Huawei, even before the UK.
That is because Australia considers it part of the broader West in general, and Anglophone world in particular. They are culturally the same, have benefited historically from American power, etc. etc. You can't just force all of that away.
When the Toyotomi Hideyoshi asked Joseon Korea to submit and clear their way for an invasion of Ming, not only did Joseon refuse, they were aghast at Japanese temerity to even ask that. Joseon Korea had incredibly close relations with Ming, looked up to Ming culturally, politically, economically etc.
I don't mean to say that hard power doesn't play in here, however people, the communities they form, and the nations that they belong to, are more than just mere calculations of who is above or below. They are made of emotions.
Apart from that you are severely underestimating India in my opinion. It might not be the next China, but it is already the 3rd largest economy in Asia, soon will be in the world. Almost all major American/Western tech companies have a huge number of Indians, and this skill pollinates the Indian tech sector as well.
"Reflect with a significant lag" means to 1. decline slowly with warning and 2. allow a large margin for the development of tools and machines to take over as much as possible. A China with 2/3rds the population is still almost a billion people. Look at what the US can do with 330 million. And those 330 million are scholastically much lazier and stupider than Chinese kids. We need to shoot for person-to-person parity and overmatch of power, to be stronger than 3 or more Americas through technology, NOT to fear being 2/3rds as strong as the old China with 1.4 billion people.
Chinese birth rates have declined by almost 2/3rd, so the children born today are just 1/3rd of the peak. Hence, the population will gradually follow the same trend. Beyond that, while yes US might have just 330 million people, it is the magnet of world's top talent. That also includes Chinese talent. When I read research papers from top US labs, at least 20-25% of the names are clearly Mainland Chinese. There are insane number of very talented Eastern Europeans (Eastern Europeans are quite talented programmers).
I was just perusing Nature (main journal). In some editions, there are 4-5 articles that have the first (and majority share) of authors who are clearly mainland chinese (can get to know using pinyin names), but all of their affiliations are in the US.
In Nature and Science, there is more contribution of Mainland Chinese who are working in US, than there is from China.
(Of course this doesn't at all mean to negate the HUGE and RAPID progress China and Chinese science has achieved)
Saying that technology threatens jobs is looking it it from a helpless person's view; this person has no desire to improve himself and thinks that the economy and society was made to provide him a living. He is not what I would call and intelligent, educated and socially-valuable person. An intelligent, educated and socially-valuable person instead looks at the oppertunity of automation and asks, "What can I move upwards to now that I am freed up from my previous labor?" These people are the key to a high tech high income advanced society.
This 'threatening of jobs" firstly shows that technology is very much capable of countering population decline. If we're worried about jobless people, then we're not worried that our population is too low. They can disappear and the machines would hold down the fort.
But on top of that, it goes back to the core people who want to learn and improve so that they keep ahead of automation and instead of being driven jobless by it, master it to produce more with less. These people will thrive and grow, and it is with this harmony of high quality educated people and increasingly sophisticated technology that smaller societies can absolutely dominate much larger societies while increasing their own standard of living.
So the conclusion is what I said before; it's not the size of the raw population but the size of the educated contributing population.
You are misunderstanding my point. What I meant was that the menial work isn't getting automated away. You still need people to harvest crops and in variety of other menial or vocational labor type roles. This is the reason why a lot of countries import labor from abroad. Korea is expanding for example it's seasonal worker visa.
Not a big fan of heavy taxation. Childless people are not useless; they are often super high achievers and this might end up driving them out of the country.
Positive Incentives have not worked, some negative incentives need to be there. And yes, these have to be callibrated based on a person's contribution. So people with PhDs in important STEM fields for example, can have no or lower childless tax.
I dunno... It seems too intrusive and many people simply can't have 3 kids even though they are very talented workers and capable managers. A lot of women who don't start in their early years would be lucky to have 1 or 2 kids, even when trying their best to conceive and even with IVF+surrogacy help. So it can be very discriminatory against a lot of very talented people who have invested their early lives and most productive learning years into becoming very very capable and useful people.
You can introduce it as scaled, so obviously people already in their 30s, might just be expected to have 2 kids, while those below 25 might be expected to have more kids.
That's... a cool angle. I want 4 kids but I dunno if I want 4 of the same kid... Still, would be great to have the technology.
Twins need not be identical. Twins can be fraternal, with separate genes.
o actually, one of the critical problems of Israeli high TRF is that it's not high were it needs to be. From what I understand, the Israelis who are educated, hardworking, and invested in technological advancement are actually not having that many kids while the Israelis whom are dedicated to religion are having kids by the droves, and training those kids to, just like them, invest only in bible studies. Those people have a religion and culture where the women take care of household chores and it's regarded as a man's job to research deeper and deeper into the words of their bibles. Of course, this produces a much much easier lifestyle where there's no performance expectation at "work" and their kids are guaranteed to be bankrolled by tax money so these people love having kids while the Isrealis who are on the clock to produce useful technology do not have the same fertility-conducive lifestyle. In other words, this is precisely the religious inefficiency that I mentioned before. They are breeding more and more people who are absolutely useless. They are actually more than useless as they are given government money every year to to produce absolutely nothing. This table shows that Orthodox Jews have a much much higher TRF than non-orthodox in the US. I did not spend more time looking for the specific data in Israel but I don't see why it should be much different and I saw a documentary on Israel that stated they had this issue.
Well China will have to find a way.
