LAUSR

I am honored to have this opportunity to reply to three comments on my article published in Demography (Goodkind 2017a), which I wrote as an independent researcher. My primary goal was to estimate the demographic impact of China’s birth planning program, the most determined attempt to control the size of the human species that the world has ever known. The central estimates were based on a 16-country comparative model of fertility decline proposed by two of the commenters themselves (Wang Feng and Yong Cai). In the absence of birth planning—which began around 1970, a decade before the one-child decree—their comparator implies that China’s population would be more than one-half billion larger as of 2015 and, given all the lost descendants of policy-averted births, nearly 1 billion larger by 2060. No rhetorical skills are required to “make” those numbers astonishing, as the title of Susan Greenhalgh’s comment suggests. The numbers simply are astonishing. A few days after its publication, Wang and Cai contacted the Co-Editors of Demography with a call to retract it. Their claim was that my conclusions were “scientifically highly flawed and morally irresponsible,” a claim that they and their colleagues “hope[d] to make abundantly clear” in their comments here (and via other media; e.g., Hvistendahl 2017). I will make it abundantly clear instead that this claim is false and that these comments reinforce all my conclusions. Demography (2018) 55:743–768 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0661-z