China's One Child Policy

Not wanting to be redundant, I spent my internet time last night searching my news app for something different to write about, finding nothing that I thought would be of interest to my esteemed colleagues.  Today I remembered that we were going to look up China's one child policy, so I just did.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

Like a lot of subjects these days, this one is way more complicated than I thought.  I don't know if that's because life is getting more complicated these days, or I am not complicated enough to keep up with it.  Then again, maybe life has always been more complicated than I am, it's just that I have easy access to more information now than ever had.  I suppose that's a good thing, but I am reminded of the time when my then young daughter asked me if I knew anything about photosynthesis.  I told her that photosynthesis is the way that green plants manufacture their own food from atmospheric carbon dioxide, water, sunlight, and trace minerals in the soil.  I added that nobody knows exactly how it works, which is why it's called "the miracle of photosynthesis".  She then showed me a chapter in her textbook that explained exactly how photosynthesis works, down to the sub-atomic level.  "This is impressive", I said, "But I think I liked it better when it was the miracle of photosynthesis."

Be that as it may, it seems that the one child policy was revoked in 2015, I think because they were running out of cheap labor.  It was replaced by a two child policy, similar to the one that was in effect for a decade before the one child policy was enacted in 1979.  I don't think the Chinese population has declined at all, but the rate of increase has slowed considerably, but not more considerably than in other countries that never employed such draconian measures.  Numerous studies have been done on this, some of which contradicted each other.  So what else is new?