Comments by "Chaos Corner" (@chaos.corner) on "Lei's Real Talk" channel.

@exegetor China has also been seeing massive industrial advancement over the past several decades. If you can replace 40 workers with one piece of heavy machinery, you could absorb some of that loss.
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R.A. Heinlein wrote about how he sat on the bank of the river overlooking Moscow (with his wife IIRC) and from watching and counting the goods being transported, came up with a population estimate way under what the soviets were claiming at the time.
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"Robert A. Heinlein visited Moscow in 1960 and made an observation about the city's population that was quite different from the official figures. In his essay, he estimated the population of Moscow to be around 750,000, which was significantly lower than the CIA's estimate of 6 million at the time. Heinlein's estimate was considered absurd by many, as it was almost an order of magnitude lower than the official figures. However, Heinlein believed that the official population numbers were inflated and that Moscow's actual population was closer to the size of cities like Copenhagen, Pittsburgh, New Orleans, or San Francisco, rather than the much larger cities it was claimed to be comparable to."
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