China Pop-ped

It seemed like just a few years ago that China was worried about having too many babies and now they are getting desperate for families to have more children! This was a relatively straightforward article, China Told Women to Have Babies, but the Population Shrank Again, for my students, so a good one to use early in the semester. In particular , the graphic below has an interesting statistic: “more births than deaths per 1,000 people” that provides a great example of proportional reasoning.

The article gives the needed stats for 2023: 9.02 million births with 11.1 million deaths and a population of 1,409,670,000 people. Rather than asking students to simply interpret a value from the chart, I asked them to compute the relevant statistic for 2023. As you can expect, this was challenging for many students! It is one thing to quickly scan a graphic and believe you understand what is being portrayed but another thing to actually compute something.

The article also does a nice job of introducing various societal norms in China that are making many young women choose not to have children. In Joel Best’s book, Damned Lies and Statistics, he talks about statistics being “social products” and this article provides lots of good information to discuss with the class about how birth rates are social products. Students were also surprised to learn that a shrinking population was considered such bad news for a country in terms of having enough workers to pay for old people. And a final positive takeaway, was that a shrinking population should be good news for the environment. A rare positive spin on the increasingly dire environmental news we typically see!

Q3 China Pop[1]

1. The article, China Told Women to Have Babies but Population Shrank Again, has an interesting graphic (shown above) for us to interpret: 
   • Using the numbers given in the article compute the exact value of the rate shown in the graph for 2023.
   • Five years ago in 2018 this statistic is roughly 5, compute the percent change from 2018 to 2023.
   • Joel Best talks about statistics being “social products”.  How has the rate shown in the graphic above been affected by social policies in China?  Please list two specific policies that impact this statistic and specify if it increases or decreases the rate.
     
     
2. Joel Best discusses how big numbers confuse people.
   • Compute how long 1 thousand seconds is in minutes.
   • Compute how long 1 million seconds is in days.
   • Compute how long 1 billion seconds is in years.
   • Compute how long 1 trillion seconds is in years.
   • Complete the following analogy: A penny is to $10,000 as _________ is to $1 trillion.  The value you just put in the blank is like a penny to the U.S. government’s budget.
     
     

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/16/business/china-birth-rate-2023.html