
Japan's population declines for first time since 1920s - eplanit
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/26/japan-population-declines-first-time-since-1920s-official-census
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JBReefer
"The country lost 947,345 people – more than the population of San Francisco –
between 2010 and 2015."

For a country with a ton of Government debt and a society dominated by small
number of big companies that's a _bad_ thing.

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gozur88
I agree the debt is going to be a problem (though not an insurmountable
problem - Japan is a wealthy country), but I don't understand why you think
the size of the companies is an issue.

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threeseed
Because if one of those companies struggles or goes under then you have a
serious problem on your hands. It's also indicative of the lack of a thriving
startup culture.

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gozur88
What serious problem is that? In a shrinking labor market maybe you don't need
the jobs. If Japan's shrinking population is such a terrible thing, why is
Japan's per-capita GDP rising and why is Japan's unemployment rate 3.1%?

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threeseed
Is it really that difficult a concept to grasp ?

If a single big company fails then you have an instant drop in tax receipts
and a rise in benefits. The communities in which the business is located
instantly suffers which then flows through to supporting businesses also going
under. All of which puts immediate pressure on the job market as you have lots
of skilled people looking for work.

And nobody is saying that problems associated Japan's shrinking population of
working adults are going to manifest immediately. It's a long term
macroeconomic trend which when you combine with an ageing population means
significant structural risks. Every Western country e.g. UK, US, Australia,
Europe all have quite sizeable immigration rates purely to cater for these
risks.

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gozur88
>Is it really that difficult a concept to grasp?

Yes. Because you're making the assumption that fewer jobs is a bad thing even
though the number of people who actually need jobs is going down.

Is _that_ such a difficult concept to grasp?

>If a single big company fails then you have an instant drop in tax receipts
and a rise in benefits.

Not true. Again, Japan has a _3.1% unemployment rate_. It's a lot easier to
find a job in Japan than it is to find a job in the US, where we've seen
between a million and two million immigrants a year for decades.

In terms of tax receipts, again, tax receipts go down but you have less to
spend money on. Fewer schools, less road work, fewer prisons. Particularly in
a culture where the family takes care of aging relatives, I don't see this as
a big budgetary calamity.

>And nobody is saying that problems associated Japan's shrinking population of
working adults are going to manifest immediately.

Why not? Why wouldn't we see at least some trending along these lines?

>Every Western country e.g. UK, US, Australia, Europe all have quite sizeable
immigration rates purely to cater for these risks.

The risks they're trying to mitigate aren't the ones you think they're trying
to mitigate. If you're running a large corporation a shrinking population
scares you because it means rising labor costs and a smaller market for your
goods. So you use your influence to make sure the government allows a lot of
immigration.

Since I'm not running a multinational corporation the national GDP doesn't
matter that much to me. What matters is how much I get paid, how high my taxes
are, and how much things cost. I'd rather have fewer neighbors who share my
culture than a higher GDP.

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redthrowaway
Surely its population declined during WWII, no? Japan lost 2.3M people; I
doubt they could make babies _that_ quickly.

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Havoc
I bet a ton of hipsters would love to hang out in Japan. Doesn't seem that
hard to sell...

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slavik81
The Japanese are rather entrenched in their way of life, and they don't want
foreigners coming in and changing their society. It's not hard to sell
immigrants on Japan. It's hard to sell Japan on immigrants.

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pessimizer
That's great. Maybe a 20 year period of secular stagnation will do that for
the US.

You can't simultaneously be concerned about the robots taking our jobs and a
high ratio of retirees to workers.

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zanny
Just because your population is shrinking does not mean automation cannot take
jobs faster than the rate that the workforce shrinks.

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cassieramen
This feels like the beginning of global population flat lining in the coming
years. We eventually want the population of the world to level out and decline
for environmental reasons. Are there ways to combat the adverse economic
effects of a declining population besides trying to raise the birth rate?

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Gibbon1
I think that if you ignore classic post war economic orthodoxy[1] there are
offsetting economic benefits to a declining population. Such as every year you
don't need as much infrastructure. The number of children that need to be
educated goes down. The ratio of the countries carrying capacity vs actual
population improves pushing you farther away from the Malthusian limit.

Maybe not so good if you're in the drywall business.

[1] The kind that focuses on aggregate money flows and spending to the
exclusion of everything actually important.

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a3n
> Such as every year you don't need as much infrastructure.

Yeah, but every year you _have_ as much infrastructure as you had last year,
except some of it degrades or is abandoned and becomes dangerous.

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JBReefer
So then you do what many cities around the world have done, and tear out
highways to lower opex and create a more pleasant place to live.

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dragonwriter
> So then you do what many cities around the world have done, and tear out
> highways to lower opex and create a more pleasant place to live.

Yes, you can do that: that's a _capital cost_ of maintaining quality of life
under declining population. I'm not sure how a choice between continued
declining quality of life _or_ incurring a significant capital cost is a
"benefit", however.

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michaelbuddy
News organizations do NOT like these impenetrable homogenous conservative
cultures. To them, there must be something wrong. The answers are that Japan
will correct itself just fine. They are, equal to if not THE most persistent,
hardest working, most innovative society alive. They'll figure it out.

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coldtea
Where does this idea that things always correct themselves comes from, I ask
cause I see it a lot.

Sometimes civilizations, countries and even whole empires just wither and die.

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jessaustin
Japan is an old nation, and this is hardly the first challenge it has faced.
The fact that it exists now, indicates it "corrected" several times in the
past. I'd be more suspicious of younger nations' ability to react to
challenges.

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cthalupa
>Japan is an old nation

Japan as a unified nation in the modern sense is newer than the United States
of America. Prior to the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s Japan was a feudal
society lead by warlords. The rule under the Tokugawa shogunate was relatively
stable, but it was still a feudal society.

I don't think anyone is claiming Japan will cease to exist as a country and
that the Japanese people would die out, but something with as radical a change
as the Restoration (Which included multiple civil wars...) would probably not
count as the nation just correcting itself. It is the effective death of one
form of the nation and the birth of the other.

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jessaustin
Haha I guess it isn't a surprise when some Americans make true-Scotsman claims
like this. They shouldn't be jealous of other nations' extensive histories,
rather they should enjoy those histories.

When the shogunate emerged in Japan to govern in place of the abdicating,
distracted Heian imperial court, USA was populated by various neolithic
tribes. Akihito is a direct descendant of the emperors who ruled then, and
speaks the same language in his court that they did. I haven't heard much pre-
Columbian Algonquin spoken in the White House.

Civil wars don't switch to a different "civilization". (The one in USA didn't,
did it?) Japan's remarkable post-WWII recovery from the devastation of war and
poor governance in the 1940s to economic success in the 1960s-80s (which IMHO
is more impressive than the Meiji restoration to which you refer) is compared
by Japanese themselves to earlier recoveries such as that during the early Edo
period. The culture, language, and society that exists in Japan today descends
directly from those that accomplished previous impressive transitions.

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cthalupa
Is there a fallacy related to crying fallacious argument when there isn't one?
If so, I suppose I should pull that card right now...

It's hardly jealousy. And you're arguing against claims I didn't make - I
never said a civil war changes civilization in and of itself. But we're
talking about a period where the way the country had been ruled for hundred of
years completely changed, with huge amounts of turmoil, lots of bloodshed, and
came out on the other site vastly changed. To try to compare it to the US
Civil War, where in comparison things were static (As far as the governance of
any nation remains static) when it comes government reform, is silly. The US
punished the South, but the federal government behaved much as it had before.

In comparison, the Meiji restoration ended centuries of feudal society.

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brbsix
Young people already in the West might like to have kids as well, if not for
the massive looming burdens already upon them in part because of these
subsidized social costs, not to mention growing college education debts and
home ownership further out of reach. Intelligent people see the looming clouds
of everything from a growing national debt to the difficulty of integrating
foreigners and recognize that these have costs to be inevitably paid in the
form of taxes or bonds/inflation. Unfortunately it's the stupid people who
don't see it or don't give a shit and have kids they won't be able to take
care of, only increasing the burden on the rest of us. I'd like to be able to
put away an additional 20% into savings for my own children, not someone
else's.

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yardie
Ah yes. It's the stupid people that have caused massive housing costs
increases, massive healthcare increases and stagnant wages. Yup despite your
taxes not increasing a cent since that islamofascist Kenyan took over the
office of POTUS it is you that has to bear the burden of stupid people having
kids.

Give me a break.

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brbsix
Low IQ immigrants have not caused most of these issues, they simply compound
them and add to the overwhelming burden that already exists. It takes a
special kind of stupid to not realize that these increased costs _eventually_
have to be paid in one form or another.

