[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Isn't Thailand getting into problems, having not enough men?

Not yet. A good part of the question becomes "Why do they need men?"

Afaik, China is in problems not having enough girls... The birth rate seems to be something like M/F 51%/49%.

China is in the beginning stages of emerging from a state common to agrarian, pre-industrial societies. Historically, male children were favored over female children. Labor was manual, child mortality was high, large families were required to insure enough kids survived to adulthood to have enough hands to do the work, and males were better suited to doing the work that needed to be done.

Cultural patterns like that change very slowly.

Also, the limiting factor on population is the number of fertile females. One male can keep ten females continuously pregnant. Ten males can't make a single female produce babies faster and in greater quantity than one can.

China is also facing consequences of an effort to reduce population, and has been practicing a rather draconian "one child per family" policy for years.

One of the issues facing China is that it's no longer the lowest-cost producer for manufacturing. It boot-strapped itself into the 21st century the same way everyone else did it: move the peasants off the farm to the cities to be the basis on an industrial work force. But it's starting to run out of peasants to convert to workers, manufacturers are competing for labor, and wages and costs are rising in consequence. One large Chinese manufacturer announced a full-court press into robotics in consequence.

If you look at global population trends, you see that population growth in industrialized nations is stagnant or even negative. It's places that are not yet industrialized where population growth may be an issue.

In Japan, it seems that males are so dangerously disinterested in sex (and their country's women in general) that a shortage of children is threatening.

I wouldn't ascribe it to disinterest in sex on the part of the male. It's more likely a disinterest in having children on the part of the female.

In a technologically advanced industrialized nation, having kids is increasingly a matter of choice, not necessity. Many women are deciding they don't want to be mothers. And in such nations, having kids is increasingly expensive. The limit on family size tends to be what the family can afford, rather than what mom and dad may want.

But Japanese population growth is now negative. A former senior Japanese bureaucrat is making a push for Japan to attract as many as ten million high quality immigrants, as he foresees a time when there simply won't be enough Japanese to do everything that needs to be done.
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Dennis