One Girl for Every 1.23 Boys...China's Time Bomb

Nicholas Eberstadt writes an op-ed piece in today's WSJ that highlights a striking problem with man messing around with nature. He weighs in the China's One Child Policy, that since 1979 has created a juggernaut of population make-up problems and caused something that has never happened before. Now there are 123 males for every 100 baby girls, so there will be a class of men who'll have to fight over the few available women partners of the same age.

It was intended, of course to ease food shortages and lower the population. But since fertility has been declining world wide since about the time this program began, now China faces a less than replacement reproduction rate of 1.7 per every two people....so by 2030, the country's population will go down. That will leave a hole and make the country full of old people and not-so-full of able bodied younger men and women to do the work.

What will China do, Eberstadt asked, with tens of millions of unmarriageable young men? He concludes by saying that if people were just left to their own devices, they would have fixed the problem and not created this sexual imbalance that throws such a monkey wrench into society.