Here’s a comparison of percentages of population aged under 15. It’s the latest data, for 2011, that’s just been sent to me:
Philippines 36%
India 33%
US 20%
N. Zealand 20%
Australia 19%
France 18%
UK 17%
Singapore 17%
Canada 16%
S. Korea 16%
Taiwan 15%
Italy 14%
Japan 13%
Hong Kong 12%
So Taiwan’s isn’t the lowest, but with its very low birthrate, it probably soon will be.
HH2: You continue to misrepresent me. The government should not be involved in picking winners or losers, giving handouts or not giving handouts, making laws for or against one group. I’m just intrigued at how people think governments can/should get involved in these matters though, but then complain when they do pick winners or losers. By taxing one group to give to another, you are picking winners, you are playing favourites, you are engaging in social engineering. Anything other than a free market free-for-all is all the same nonsense you’re accusing me of. It’s just that liberals typically try to claim some moral superiority and that they’re the good guys. I don’t know what’s particularly good about taking people’s money away from them to give to someone else. I don’t know what’s particularly good about being a teacher and having kids in your face, swearing at you, or throwing blocks of wood at you, as has happened to me. Why not engage in social engineering in a logical way, if you absolutely insist upon doing it, which again, for the four billionth time, is not my position?
Here’s an experiment you and every other liberal should engage in. Go and find the worst neighbourhood you can. Go and live there. Send your kids to schools with the kids in that neighbourhood. Go and get a job as a teacher, social worker, policeman, doctor, bus driver or even postman in that neighbourhood. Then get back to me about your social engineering. Don’t want to engage in that experiment? Didn’t think so. It’s easy for you to talk about this stuff hypothetically from the comfort of middle class, liberal suburbia, where the overwhelming majority of people you engage with on a daily basis are fairly civilised and reasonable. Want to know why I have such an issue with the underclass? Because I’ve been on the front lines of this social experiment almost every day for the past decade, be it here, Australia, or Britain. It – the culture of low academic, disciplinary and professional standards, along with all the attendant excuses for both kids and colleagues – is slowly creeping into Taiwan too. Maybe wherever you live, the schools are nice and the parents care. Maybe your colleagues are professional and not a bunch of jobsworths who scored lowest on the teacher exam and got stuck out here in Taidong County and who don’t give a shit and turn up to class five to ten minutes late every single lesson, thus perpetuating the culture of low standards for the kids. Come out and work where I work, with the people I work with, for a year and see if you have the same attitude going out as you had coming in. Yet despite my self-confessed misanthropy, here I am still in this system actually working (and largely failing) to arrest the decline. There will come a point, however, when I will walk away from it because the well does eventually run dry. My one truly excellent colleague (someone who was recently selected as one of supposedly only four people in Taiwan to oversee the reading component of the PISA exam) has transferred to another school next year. I understand why she’s made the move, but I feel utterly demoralised by this because it’s back to feral kids, feral parents, and feral colleagues, all by myself.
Giving handouts to people is not going to solve the population issue in this country. It hasn’t in any country yet. Europe has been running a massive socialist experiment for the past half century, and it hasn’t changed anything there. Their birthrates are marginally better than here, but only marginally. We’re splitting hairs as to whether the demographic time bomb will explode one decade from now or three decades from now or whenever. Maybe people simply don’t want to have kids, or want to have them much later, because there are lots of things they want to do with their lives. This is a cultural issue, but I just don’t see how you’re going to change it. A young person who wants to go and get an education, or travel, or just go out and have a good time, is not going to be persuaded to give that up to have a kid for the country’s future. They don’t want the life their grandparents, or even parents, had. This is as true of an Italian 20-something as it is of a Taiwanese 20-something. I’m not really sure how the government could sensibly make having kids more attractive than a working holiday to Australia or a new iPad. This is a cultural issue, not exclusive to Taiwan, and not solved elsewhere either. It also doesn’t help that many Taiwanese parents have ridiculous attitudes towards their kids dating, but what’s your big government solution to that one?
So maybe we should be looking at other things then. Why aren’t people having kids? Primarily because of the money, I’d say. Maybe if the government enforced labour laws people would have some breathing space for having kids. Maybe if the government actually sorted out the housing bubble (or just let the damned thing pop) or offered incentives to companies to set up in other parts of Taiwan, people would have some breathing space for having kids. Maybe if the government sorted out the crap education system here whereby people are forced to engage in an absurd (and expensive) educational arms race via the buxiban system, people would have some breathing space for having kids, and both they and their kids would have decent skills and knowledge so as to be able to engage in high end work which would give them prosperity and allow them to breed. There must be a billion things the government could do that would involve either staying the hell out of everyone’s way, or actually doing what it’s supposed to be doing properly (i.e. labour laws and education system) that do not involve any kind of handout. Just in case you missed it, I don’t believe the government should be giving anyone a handout.
If the state gives huge handouts to unproductive people/industries (e.g., welfare for poor/addicts, medicare for poor, subsidizing money-losing industries, all of which I disagree with, why shouldn’t it offer some benefits to people that are hugely productive/assist the state, especially states with a declining birth rate?
The state already punishes success on so many levels by redistributive taxation. Why not take some parts of the Singapore model and encourage really smart people to mate and give them back some of the money they are paying into the system. If people with combined income of over $150,000 have more than one kid, they should be rewarded as they are ensuring the nation’s future by populating it with people that will likely succeed and not be a drain on the system.
Actually, in the South, 25K will be the highest she could get. There would be limited access to babysitters/less baumu/less anxin ban. So they would be limited to the family -that is why down South you have so many towns populated by old people and babies. However, the greatest clash is the mentality, the couples may or may not agree with their families and if they have already been absorbed by the Taipei system, they may not be that willing to let their kids “go back to the old ways”.
ChewDawg: You fascist! You just want to re-open Auschwitz, don’t you?!
Icon: I don’t entirely agree that 25,000NTD/month would be all she could get. Also, I think my friend and his wife are in a special situation due to him being a foreigner. He is talking about working for himself anyway. I think he and his wife could set up shop in a large town and have little to no foreign competition, which would not be the case in Taipei. Frankly, if I were ever to set up an English teaching business, it wouldn’t be in a major city, including Taipei. She could do some of the meet and greet work, but largely have time to look after their kid, which is what she would like to do. Maybe she wouldn’t want to give up her job. That’s the sticking point, as I see it. Yet I don’t think their current (high) cost of living, hiring a babysitter, and not seeing their kid enough really makes any sense, or not enough to really justify the grind for a very average job. It’s not like she’s out giving TED talks or anything.
Here’s another relevant set of statistics:
The number of schools in Taiwan, including schools of higher education, secondary education, primary education, pre-school education, and “others”, peaked at 8,287 in school year 2005-6. In 2010-2011, it was 8,196, and in 2011-2012 it fell to 8,100.
This latest year’s total consisted of 165 schools of higher education (the all-time high, but unchanged from the previous year), 1,233 secondary schools (the all-time high, up 2 from the previous year), 2,659 primary schools (down 2 from the previous year’s all-time high), 3,195 pre-schools (down 88 year-on-year, with the number having peaked at 3,351 in 2005-6), and 848 others (whose number has fallen year by year from the peak of 1,015 in 1999-2000).
What surprises me is that the number of primary schools has actually been growing quite steadily over the past decade, up from 2,600 in 2001-01 to 2,659 today. So for every school that has been closed down or merged with another, more than one new one has opened elsewhere, while the number of students in each school must have fallen quite substantially.
Meanwhile, the number of teachers at all these levels has risen from 305,681 in 1999-2000 to 321,658 in 2004-05, to 331,349 in 2010-11, and to 332,583 in 2011-12. During the past ten years, teachers in higher education have increased from 44,769 to 50,353, and in secondary education from 98,609 to 104,571, while the number of primary school teachers has fallen from 103,501 to 98,528.
Omni: Thanks for the stats.
[quote=“timmyjames”][quote=“ChewDawg”]If the state gives huge handouts to unproductive people/industries (e.g., welfare for poor/addicts, medicare for poor, subsidizing money-losing industries, all of which I disagree with, why shouldn’t it offer some benefits to people that are hugely productive/assist the state, especially states with a declining birth rate?
The state already punishes success on so many levels by redistributive taxation. Why not take some parts of the Singapore model and encourage really smart people to mate and give them back some of the money they are paying into the system. If people with combined income of over $150,000 have more than one kid, they should be rewarded as they are ensuring the nation’s future by populating it with people that will likely succeed and not be a drain on the system.[/quote]
sounds like eugenics[/quote]
The funny thing is it’s all complete hogwash.
I can point so many holes in this it’s not even funny.
-What is the definition of smart used? Do you mean book smart or language smart or people smart or IQ smart? How are you going to measure that? Are you going to have Buxibans to get ‘smarter’?
How do you know having smarter people is going to result in a better outcome? A lot of bankers and financiers are smart people by definitions of education and passing exams. But sometimes that results in a fatal over confidence in one’s own abilities. Smart enough to mess up, but not smart enough to realise their own limitations.
What about integrity? Is being smart without integrity or humanity any use to the rest of society? Many African kleptocracies are run by smart people. China is run by smart cadres. Smart enough to stash most of their money overseas and pollute the hell out of the air they breath
-While intelligence does have a genetic component, it is not neccessarily true that the offspring will inherit it in a predictable manner. And it is very difficult to tease out which part of intelligence is inherited and which part is developed under interaction with the environment.
-The idea of limiting population to a subset of rich people is also completely ridiculous and utterly unworkable. Even the Singaporeans would quickly turf out their own government. What you propose is similar to the situation in China, but it’s causing massive imbalances and resentment in the population.
Choosing Singapore, a closeted citystate populated by children who never grew up, is hardly a great example to work off.
