partial_accumen

I just read an article stating that Ford lost 36k on every EV they sold in 2023…

Ford, and other American auto makers, were asleep at the wheel when EVs were starting to take off. Ford and GM doubled down on selling pickups and big SUVs which had good margins. Instead of investing in R&D to make a solid product they were caught unprepared and had to throw everything at the wall to see what stuck with their first EVs. Yes, they were able to bring them to market fairly quickly (good), but at the cost of efficient of the product and the production method.

This means for every EV they make, they do it expensively where they wouldn’t need to if they improved their designs and production methods.

Because Biden said you could? He’s the one that doubled tariffs on Chinese EVs from 50% to 100%. Biden also gave the EV tax credit which was essentially a subsidy to Tesla, which Trump ended.

I don’t fault Biden for adding a tariff on Chinese EVs to temporarily protect the American auto manufacturing envornment. We just have too many jobs tied to the domestic production of cars. The immediate loss of those jobs would plunge the USA into deep recession. It looked like this was working too with many American companies adapting and coming out with EVs.

However, most of those American EVs have been scaled back or canceled. Further, with the exception of the Chevy Bolt no domestic maker produced an affordable EV. Since American companies decided they don’t want to play in EVs anymore, I fully support removing the tariff and letting Chinese EVs into the USA. It looks like that will be the only thing that will force American car companies to compete. This situation closely mirrors the 1970s where Japan introduced small, reliable, fuel efficent cars, and affordable cars at a time when gasoline was crazy expensive.

It looks like this time around it will be the Chinese that teach the American auto market to adapt instead.

Yeah, well, there’s no Oil in Europe either,

C’mon. I’m a dumb American, but even I know without looking it up about Norway’s vast petroleum production as well as the North Sea petroleum platforms off the coast of Scotland.

What I’m saying is pointing to the old vs young imbalance is disingenuous because ANY system that attempts to limit population growth will experience the same “sudden change”.

You’re treating this as a binary situation “growth” or “decline” but its not nearly that simple. The important factors are the amount of growth or decline and at the rate that is the problem with China’s implementation.

We shouldn’t discount all systems that want to limit population growth like this because ones with better metrics could actually work.

No one is suggesting that.

And as we’ve seen, this program DID WORK. It lowered population. Just not in socially healthy ways.

…and…

It’s just not logical to complain that if you have less of a growing population that your elderly population outnumbers them. That’s LITERALLY THE PURPOSE OF POPULATION CONTROL.

That is empty logic, because it follows the letter of the goal* while entirely violating the spirit of it. Using that same logic we could fix global climate change just by murdering every human on the planet. See? It “DID WORK”. Climate change fixed, but like China’s situation, the cure is worse than the disease because in fixing climate change this way would mean there would be no humans around to benefit from the fix. But hey, it “DID WORK”, right?

Of course the elderly from before will outnumber them - you weren’t controlling their population!

Again, binary thinking. A complete stable system is okay if the elderly outnumber the young by a small consistent percentage over time. That isn’t what is happening in China. They are falling off a demographic cliff! Both match your statement of fewer young to elderly, but one is a sustainable controlled decline and the other is a crisis!

It should be obvious that if you suddenly cut population growth you’d end up with this elderly vs young imbalance eventually as the generations that reproduced freely age out.

The problem is they did it too quickly. There’s a huge number of aging people that won’t be producing anything, but they will be consuming in their old age. The amount they consume will be far greater than the younger, smaller, population can produce. Additional, the young must produce goods and services for themselves to live their own lives.

This additional preasure on the younger generation is already also reducing birth rates accelorating this demographic crisis to a worse degree. The young aren’t having kids in any significant numbers so there won’t be enough to support the current young when they get old.

This is part of the adjustment as things reach equilibrium.

That is a massive understatement for what will be the hell that the aging population will encounter when they go unfed or uncared for when they need it the most and have no option to do for themselves.

Ideally you’d have a 2 child policy to actually replace parents 1:1 with kids. But the point is, this imbalance was bound to happen regardless and you really won’t see equilibrium until every person alive was born under the restricted policy.

2 child policy would still result in population decline. Equal replacement rate is 2.1. Some kids will die before having kids of their own. Others will grow to adulthood and choose not to have kids. So you’ll need some sets of parents to have more than 2 kids themselves to make up for these shortfalls.

This is still too early to call it a failed experiment. It’s right at the most crucial part.

The “soft landing” point was a couple of decades ago probably back in the late 80s or mid 90s. Its going to be brutal in the future for China.