When Scientific Models Are Wrong…
Government policies driven by flawed models and frightening narratives have caused more harm than good.
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Have you ever wondered whom within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) first came up with the idea of the “one-child” policy? I finally found the answer in a recent piece in the Wall Street Journal.
When Mao ruled China from 1949 to 1976, he wanted to grow China’s population for entirely self-reason: he wanted more foot soldiers, and he believed a large population would be his most potent weapon should China and the U.S. engage in a nuclear war. In 1957, he told a dignitary from Yugoslavia: “We [China] have a vast territory and a big population. Atomic bombs could not kill all of us. What if they killed 300 million of us? We would still have many people left.” What a cold-blooded baster!
At the time of Mao’s death in 1976, the fertility rate in China was about 3. Mao left behind an impoverished nation in turmoil.
Song Jian, a Chinese missile scientist trained in the Soviet Union, was one of the few lucky Chinese who survived Mao’s political persecutions unscratched, probably because he was in the deserts working on building satellites and rockets. But Song’s scientific interests were more than missiles and rockets. In 1975, Song was part of a Chinese academic delegation visiting the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He talked to some Western mathematicians who were inspired by Paul Ehrlich’s infamous book, “The Population Bomb,” which issued a dire warning that the earth’s finite resources couldn’t support a growing population. Unless governments institute population control, Ehrlich warned that “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”
Upon returning to China, Song used the mathematical model that was employed to project missile trajectories to predict China’s population growth, and the result was alarming. Based on his calculation, “at a constant fertility rate of three babies for every woman, China’s population would hit 4.26 billion by 2080.” Song refined his model with the assistance of other scientists, and together, they presented it to China’s supreme leader, Deng Xiaoping.
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