One thing that stood out a lot to me was the idea of arranged marriages. Dodson explains that work units would assign "a mate to an employee" (pg. 186). The word "assign" is what stands out to me here. It feels very artificial and manufactured, neither of which are things that one would generally like to associate with marriage. I also found it odd that children are required, by law, to financially support their elders. The way I have always thought about adulthood is, not necessarily a complete sever of ties with family, but a dependence that can be compared to an umbilical cord that has fallen off on its own. The responsibility of having to financially support your elders, let alone the family you have created for yourself (or, not), seems an awful lot of weight for a person to carry.
Concerning the population, Dodson mentions that "Even 2,000 years ago, China had the world's largest population", which actually really surprised me (pg. 183). I'm not sure why this in particular caught my attention, but 2,000 years is a very long time. China's current policy on population is referred to as the "8-4-3-2 challenge" (pg. 190). This goes back to the issue I mentioned before in that, one married couple must support "themselves and their child... each of their parents... and all related grandparents" (pg. 190). Another issue that stems from this is that, since men are viewed as more "valuable" than women, the mother will often have an abortion if the gender of the baby is known to be female. This reduces the ratio of men to women, and so on and so forth. In relation to the United States, I don't know of any population policies that are actually in effect, but I do know that there have been proposals for policies like these.
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