Cultural herd immunity thresholds

From Study Measures Impact of China’s One-Child Policy by Sindya N. Bhanoo. I am always skeptical of social sciences research because way too often it is poorly conducted, or is designed to yield a predetermined answer. So I take this article with a large pinch of salt.

I am confident that a culture's level of productivity is a product of some mix of the values and behaviors that it cultivates. While some cultures succumb to exogenous shocks, I suspect more fall to a failure to comprehend the critical mix of those values and behaviors which foster productivity (and therefore survival and continuity).

So for example, while some far-sighted seers such as Daniel Patrick Moynihan were early to sound the warning of the deleterious consequences of single parent families, those Cassandra's were usually mocked and ignored. And yet the problem grows and ravages more and more. Perhaps duty, monogamy, commitment to the future, and all those other bourgeoisie values are more critical than bien pensants ever considered.

To the extent that we are willing to trust the data (the report focuses on China's one-child policy)

The researchers concluded that the “one-child-policy” players were less trusting, less trustworthy, less competitive and more risk-averse than the older ones.

And on the basis of a personality test, they were also “less conscientious, more neurotic and more pessimistic,” said an author of the study, Lisa Cameron, an economist at Monash University in Australia.

There is a whole range of speculations around values, family structure, demographics, etc. that one could indulge in from these findings.

My train of thought was more along the lines of the implications it might have with respect to cultural herd immunity.

China has been a spectacularly successful culture, among the richest cultures over long periods of time and always bouncing back from pretty daunting failures. Culturally both productive and long lived. That success is likely predicated on some critical, but unidentified, mix of Confucian values and the behaviors, diligently cultivated and transmitted over time.

The noted effects of the one-child-policy seem to be particularly undermining of the traditional Confucian value system. What happens if the one-child-policy not only disrupts but begins to undermine the cultivation and transmission of those values and behaviors? Is there a cultural herd immunity level as there is biologically with regard to diseases?

Just how many people can fall away from some set of cultural norms and behaviors and there still be cultural cohesion? And how much variance from the norm can you tolerate before it begins to affect both productivity and continuity?