Officials misattributed a policy-caused problem to population decline

Evidence

Although the workforce problem arose partly from governmental retirement policies, the government attributed it to population decline, and the proposed remedy of population increase would only worsen China’s social and environmental problems down the line. Kotlikoff and Sachs (1998) advocate policies that provide incentives for workers to save more toward their retirement as another way of easing the pension problem, rather than using population growth as a remedy. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2636

Categorization

• XREF: Instantiation of the misattribution-of-blame mechanism Bandura dissects: a self-inflicted structural problem gets displaced onto a naturalized external cause (demographics), dovetailing with vault claims that blame rationalization targets the wrong object. — connects to: Policy-caused deaths must count as evidence against the policy — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1599
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2636