Tag: demography

#Hashtag: “I AM one of the 1.4 Billion”

When I agreed to write this post in January, I could not have imagined that I would be doing so in quarantine. The state of the coronavirus continues to escalate. I do not yet feel ready to engage with this current event in this blog post, but its weight is present and felt in the writing. On January 17, 2020, the National Bureau of Statistics of China published 2019’s annual economy data (English here). Among the lists of numbers from the world’s second largest economic body — lists that included agricultural and industrial production, the growth of the service sector, and consumption and employment, among others — the section of data about population is what dominated the media’s attention. During the press conference, a Financial Times reporter asked about the lowest-recorded birth rate (10.48‰), its relation to the “two-child policy” and its impact on the (future) economy. This question led to an elaborate response from the bureau commissioner, in an attempt to veil the journalist’s critique (that the termination of the one-child policy failed to reverse structural aging) and place things under a more positive tone: although the rate is low, the actual number of newborns is still pretty high. (read more...)

Down to a Science with Michelle Murphy

Today, Platypus brings you the inaugural edition of our “Down to a Science” podcast. On the podcast, we’ll be serving up science studies in a format accessible to a wider audience than our regularly scheduled programming (even if that wider audience is your class of undergraduates). In this episode, we bring you an interview with historian Michelle Murphy on her new book, The Economization of Life. In conversation with Lily Ye, Murphy discusses how in the second half of the 20th century, economic logics were used to continue racist programs of population control when the biological evolutionary logic of eugenics fell out of favor. She argues that programs to “invest in a girl” come out of the same tradition of co-governing economy and population. We’d love to get feedback on this series, how we might make it better, and what subjects or scholars you’d like to see featured. Send us a note! (Listen Now...)