The Freedom of Constraint : A Multilevel Simulation Model of Politics , Fertility and Economic Development
leaders initially were intentionally disposed to view a large population as an asset , which had built a foundation for the large base , high growth demographic pattern . In 1972 and 1973 , the party mobilized its resources for a nationwide birth control campaign . In the graph , it is where the line starts to drop at a high rate . The implementation of those policies resulted in a significant decrease in fertility in the 1970s and the rate starts to be stable toward the end of that decade , where in the graph the simulated trend almost overlaps with the actual trend .
The bottom-right graph shows the dynamics of political capacity during the two decades . The simulated data does not capture enough details of the reality , but the level is not off by much . Overall there was no improvement in government ’ s capacity in terms of extracting physical capital resources and human resources . We see a small peak in the late 1960s , because the government mobilized a great number of populations at the middle stage of the Cultural Revolution . During the “ Down to the Countryside Movement ,” young intellectuals living in cities were ordered to go to the countryside . In other words , recently graduated middle school students , most of whom were Red Guards , were mobilized from the cities to the countryside , where they would cause less social disruption .
The growth path of China from different perspectives shows the story of a slowly growing society . The low level of political capacity together with instability hinders the development of human capital . Although at a slow pace , the development of education system brings human capital to a higher level , which greatly helps the reduction of the fertility rate . Improved human capital and lower fertility enhance economic development of the society , and has a feedback to the improvement of the education system and government capacity . Behind macrolevel indicators is microlevel behavior . At the beginning of the simulation , individual interactions were limited with little incentive for cooperation due to political instability and low level of technology that suffered from economic stagnation . As wealth is slowly created in the society , individuals are incentivized to interact more in the slowly growing society . At the same time , cooperation starts to emerge due to increasing and converging education level . More cooperative socio-economic transactions accelerate growth , paving the way for economic openness and faster development . In this case , the simulation result matches reality at a reasonable level , proving the validity of the agent-based model .
7 . Conclusion
Combining all system dynamics , agent-based modeling , and evolutionary game in a complex adaptive system , we formalize a multilevel simulation framework of POFED to understand the relationship between political , economic , and demographic change at both macro and micro levels . Results confirm the findings of the POFED model at the macro level that political , economic ,
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