The No-Child Policy

The Pay Check

Bloomberg

Society & Culture, Business, Investing

4.4 • 630 Ratings

🗓️ 8 May 2019

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about how having kids makes it hard for women to work for pay. But there’s a flip side to that: Because it’s so hard for women to work for pay when they have kids, more and more just aren’t having them. This is a problem all over the developed world, and since population growth is a big part of economic growth, these countries are desperately trying to boost fertility rates. China in particular is in deep trouble: after almost 40 years of the One-Child Policy, the population could start shrinking within a few years. We head to China to see how the country is attempting to get women to have kids — and why it’s not working.

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0:00.0	This is an IHeart podcast.
0:04.1	In our new podcast, Everybody's Business, we talk about the business news that concerns everybody.
0:10.2	From Bloomberg Business Week, I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith.
0:12.9	And I'm Max Chaffkin.
0:14.2	Each week, we unpack what is happening on Main Street and Wall Street, all the streets.
0:19.9	WrestleMania has taken over the U.S. economy.
0:22.8	A poetry that executives write on LinkedIn.
0:25.2	A little actual magic in our underrated story of the week.
0:28.7	The single grades marketing campaign the music business has ever seen.
0:31.4	I decided to ask people how they felt about the penny going away.
0:35.5	Listen to everybody's business wherever you get your podcasts.
0:39.0	Every year, the Center for Disease Control comes out with a report on the fertility rate in the United States.
0:44.6	And to hear the reporting about it, the situation in the U.S. is dire.
0:51.3	More than 3.8 million babies were born in the U.S. last year.
0:55.5	That's the lowest number since 1987.
0:58.8	The next generation of Americans is getting smaller, not in size, but in number.
1:05.3	So a mystery to researchers is why birth rates haven't increased along with the growing economy.
1:13.4	So why all the panic?
1:16.4	Ask Gina Smilich, the economics reporter who you might remember from episode one.
1:21.4	And she says, it's because we really need more babies for the economy to grow.
1:30.9	So basically, economic growth comes from just a couple of sources. One of them is population growth. The other is productivity improvements.
1:36.9	It's kind of just simple math, and I think that makes it nice to think about. And at the end of
	...

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