China and Demographics: Lessons for the Washington Post

The end of China's one child policy is producing an outpouring of nonsense about demographics. Nowhere is the confusion greater than in the opinion pages of the Washington Post, which gets the gold medal for confusion on this issue. In honor of this occasion, BTP will explain the issue in a way that even a Washington Post editorial page editor could understand.

The key point here is that the ability to support a given population of retirees depends not only the ratio of workers to retirees, b...