>> It’s a natural process for people from areas experiencing population growth to move to other places experiencing decline
This strategy works as long as there are more places (by volume) experiencing growth than decline. Since the trend is slower growth overall, there will be a point where global growth stops, and clearly then the strategy will start to fail.
Frankly, from a planet point of view I'd hope that point comes sooner than later.
This will play out in obvious ways (lifting retirement age etc) but ultimately the quality of life will increase overall until some sort of stable population number emerges.
There will be a period of massive upheaval when the fundamental tenet of all economic models and assumptions (perpetual growth) is completely chronically invalidated and we run out of resources as the models reset to something that’s absolutely zero sum (as it should be). Great suffering and fighting can be expected during this period.
while the question is open if economic growth will continue forever neither resources or population are an issue. The German economy say, has grown by 400% since the 1970s in real terms while the population has stayed stable. Energy use has slightly fallen over the last few decades.
Economic growth is technologically driven and developed economies are at or already past peak resources consumption.
i'm no economist... but didn't externalizing a lot of production offset the missing population growth? So germany just externalized raw material extraction and production but still kept the profits?
Germany has also "climbed the value ladder" focusing on production of high-value goods whilst counting on imports to provide for low-value ones.
Some of that is of course classic Ricardian "comparative advantage" of trade. Much is, though, outsourcing high-impact / high-resource / high-effluent production to elsewhere.
Entropy is inherently a zero sum game. We have a given level of energy reserves and all we do is transform what we have into a different form.
Economists confuse an increase in the extraction rate as some kind of "creating something from nothing" but actually a better analogy is "traveling to previously unreachable places".
He's a fictional conversation [1] between an economist and physicist where they discuss this very premise:
Economist: Hi Tom, I’m [ahem..cough]. I’m an economist.
Physicist: Hey, that’s great. I’ve been thinking a bit about growth and want to run an idea by you. I claim that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely.
Economist: [chokes on bread crumb] Did I hear you right? Did you say that growth can not continue forever?
Physicist: That’s right. I think physical limits assert themselves.
That article ties growth to consumption, and consumption to energy use. This does not have to be true.
We could all decide to multiply every currency with 10x and nothing would change except the number and we would have 10x economic growth as measured in the currency.
That is an obviously simplified example, but it is not that contrived. Modern money is not tied to energy use. Money is created out of thin air every day and that is ok.
It will still be anchored in reality, it just won’t have the guaranteed bump from population increase. Growth will be slower, but will still happen due to technology and efficiency improvements.
Once we set our expectations to 1% growth, there’s no reason that has to be a problem.
Economics is fundamentally about the allocation of scarce resources. So if we are talking about how human civilization allocates scarce resources (and not about some virtual economy e.g. inside a computer game), then economic growth is very much anchored in reality.
If it is not anchored in reality then you don't need growth how long until people understand that? You don't need to wait for economic growth in the opensource space. You just go ahead and download the software, use it and be happy today.
At art history museums you can see paintings of hundreds of cavalry men protecting a star shaped fort, nervously watching a mob of yesteryear patrons go about their day. Protecting capital meant hiring hundreds of flesh and blood soldiers back then.
In 2010 the same job could be done with 10 men holding machine guns. In 2030, we have drones. Humans need not apply.
Could be done with 10 men? In 2023 Russia had significantly more than 10 men protecting Moscow from a rebellion. Thing is, you need more if the enemy also has the same weapons.
And yet if resources are running out, what are your other options? Either you definitely die, or you fight and maybe die or maybe get more resources and don't die.
I come from a place that has experienced a population drop of ~30% over the last ~30 years. During the same time period inflation adjusted GDP has ~doubled, quality of life has increased immensely.
Granted, all of this is due to historically extraordinary events playing out. But still, less population doesn’t necessarily imply no or negative growth. There’s an interplay of factors affecting if growth is possible, and population is just one parameter of those.
This is because your still able to access all the benefits of globalization. You probably have things like cheaper property prices and access to all the latest tech.
You're basically leaching off goods and services provided by those in high growth areas.
I think the idea is we might reach a point where globalization itself is hard to maintain and then things start to unwind, dramatically fast.
> You're basically leaching off goods and services provided by those in high growth areas.
Exactly. Extolling the virtues of low population growth because it enables a higher quality of life is misguided. Your life is higher quality because billions in China are toiling away in inhuman conditions, making goods for you, and unable to move to your location.
People in China are also experiencing immense economical growth.
Eventually they will indeed run out of people willing to do lower level jobs in the factories, then economic growth can move somewhere else. Bangladesh, Africa, Philippines perhaps?
Then we observe these countries whose population subset is actually able to move to a different, richer location (such as Maghreb countries) and we see apparent lack of serious economic growth, industry development and general instability.
Isn't it great? Nixon was a goddamn genius. Too bad that free ride is winding down, I hope some other mass of people assume that role so I can continue to enjoy myself.
Before you yell at me consider that China lifted an unprecedented amount of people out of even more inhumane conditions as a result of this process.
Lifting retirement age will happen at the same time as increasing the quality of life? Wouldn't the retirement age only need to be increased if there's a problem? And wouldn't there being a problem mean quality of life has a problem?
Also, look at cities that have had a decreasing population, such as Detroit. They don't look so good.
In Detroit I think unemployment rose (and quality of life declined) before the population started to shrink - the order of the cause and effect are important!
OTOH in countries with decreasing overall populations due to birth rate and not lack of economic opportunity (emmigration), it might be possible to sustain high employment rates, low crime, and good quality of life. (There might be more need to fund social services, however, if the population is also aging).
It's not clear to me that fertility will ever rebound. Is there a scenario, where some little Japanese girl who has been the only child from only children for 4 or 5 or 10 generations wakes up one morning and says to herself "I want to grow up to be a mommy and have 2.1 children"?
And, if she doesn't do that, then some other little girl in Japan has to say that same thing but with a number higher than 2.1.
Why would they buck the trends of their own ancestors, their own family?
Surely, it looks similar to the ancient past where some lineage looks as if the same happened. But that was because only one offspring survived to adulthood, and then of his or her children only one survived. But they were having many more with tragic results. Those children, for as long as they lived, existed in a world where people were trying to have many.
This is the part where people reply to me as if I were crazy. But children who grow up seeing those adults around them having few children internalize that as normal, and don't seek to have more than that number.
> "I want to grow up to be a mommy and have 2.1 children"
I live in Japan and have Japanese friends. Lots of Japanese I know want to have kids, and wouldn't mind having 3 or more kids. They love kids! And it's still the dream of many women here to get married, have kids, and be a housewife since they know how terrible the careers are in this country.
But 1 or 2 is the limit due to work/time, finances, practicality (housing, vehicles/public transit). The families I know with more kids are the ones who can afford having a housewife or who have multi-generational homes (live-in grandparents).
What I'm trying to say is that I think one major reason people aren't having more kids isn't because they don't want them, but because society isn't built to enable them to.
There's an interesting thing I noticed here (in Vietnam). I live in a small alley and the economics of family growth are interesting.
First, real estate is almost always inherited, not purchased over the course of your life (it's far too expensive relative to anything but the top few % of incomes, and mortgages are somewhat hard to get). Also, overall economics are family-level not individual-level. Often only one or two people in the extended family has a job, and the money goes to the entire family.
Second, families growing at more than replacement result in the ancestral land being divided into smaller and smaller lots. The deed ('red book') tends to be inherited by the eldest son (but not as often as you'd think), but the actual space allocated (by a contract separate to the deed) tends to depend on direct-family size.
So there's this weird dynamic right now, where having kids early, and relying on extended family to support them lets you seize more of the family real estate. Inheriting more of that is worth more than any accumulated salary you could earn due to skyrocketing prices. So from what I gather from the rumor mill, there's some scheming to have more kids earlier than your siblings, and pressure older family members to allocate you more property -- instead of working or building a career. So the motivation to have children is very different here than in Japan!
In part because of these things, I think 3 or 4 people on my street have what you would typically call a full-time job. Most live 4 to a small room rent-free, and stay home all day. I estimate within 10 or 15 years many will be priced out of their homes, which will be demolished to make room for large complexes of tiny rental rooms that the infrastructure will really struggle to support. A few big units are already being built in the area ever year.
So if countries like Japan want to attract immigration from here, we've got a generation just being born that would probably be willing to consider long-term opportunities in Japan. It is already quite popular to go to Japan or Korea to work menial jobs under the guise of 'studying' for a couple of years. Some education is often provided, but it's mainly paid job placement at varying levels of shadiness. If that can be cleaned up, then hey, maybe the problems of both of our countries can cancel each other out a little!
> Second, families growing at more than replacement result in the ancestral land being divided into smaller and smaller lots.
See this alot among the Amish/Anabaptists here in the United States. There's no more farmland to be bought in the places they live, so each generation has the farm split between 4 and 6 sons, and they keep getting tinier. Until, at some point, it can no longer be divided. Moving and setting up a new colony elsewhere is difficult in the extreme, so it usually happens far past the point that it would make sense to split them (down to just a couple of hectares in many cases).
Sometimes when it's at its most extreme, they'll all take their pooled savings and go buy a square kilometer or two out west, but there aren't so many places like that left to buy, especially that are worth farming.
> So if countries like Japan want to attract immigration from here,
Here's another funny one about Japan. There is a not-well-known but peculiar class of potential immigrants. After (before?) a bunch of Japanese emigrated to Brazil. But, being Japanese, they didn't give up speaking Japanese. So they're more or less fully ethnically Japanese, speak the language as their first language, etc. And, as it turns out, many of them would be willing to move back to the land of their grandparents and great grandparents, if there were jobs.
Also, there are jobs!
So, the government initially sets up a program welcoming them back. But it turns out that they aren't welcome, either by elements in their own government, or society at large. They're simply too alien. Eventually, someone gets voted out, or retires out of government, the program is shut down, and those returnees are forced to go back to Brazil.
If Japanese society thinks those people are too alien, too foreign, to fit in... what chance do the Vietnamese have?
> But children who grow up seeing those adults around them having few children internalize that as normal, and don't seek to have more than that number.
Now apply your logic the other way (parents having many children) and see how meaningless your conclusion is.
> Now apply your logic the other way (parents having many children) and see how meaningless your conclusion is.
That the unicorns known as children in large families still see all the other families around them who have just one kid, and internalize that as the norm too, or maybe their own family does influence them slightly and they bump their ceiling up to 2 or 3, and within a few generations that's right back to the mean again?
After age 5, what percentage of waking hours do children spend away from their family anyway? What percentage of adults that they are familiar with (at least to the degree that they know how many children those adults have) are their own parents? Are the people (in the US, they'd be mostly women) that teach them also parents to some high number of children?
Even the Duggars must have grown up internalizing a number far lower than the 20+ their own parents had.
This is a question that statistics can answer. I don’t have the data myself but I’ve seen one analysis that pins most of the drop in birthrates to childlessness rather than fewer children per mother. That is, among women who become mothers, the average number of children is relatively stable over time. But the proportion of women who never have a child is rising rapidly.
I’ll add that the drop in birthrates is not something that has persisted for generations—as recently as 1950 Japan had a fertility rate over 3.
> It's not clear to me that fertility will ever rebound.
It might. But it won't be pretty. Either the land will be taken over by new arrivals that will assimilate and their increased fertility will lift fertility.
Another scenario is that things go pear shaped and fertility rises because of uncertainty.
I was always hoping that given the fact that japanese population is dropping, they will want more foreigners in this Country. Yesterday marks my first anniversary in Japan. I love this Country and very keen to stay for naturalization based on my past experience with another non-free Country. People who has longer experience please correct me if I'm saying something stupid, what Japan stands out to me are:
* Overall it's a very affordable place and people are friendly by default.
* It is a free world Country if you care about freedom
* People take privacy seriously as parts of their daily matters, minimal data share. (unsure about the lucrative advertising business, please enligh)
* Comfortable level of tech, you can say it's low tech, but they got all the details right, and experience is great. (No aggresive behavior analysis, rare ily seen QR code for menu/ordering)
And some realities to offset the love:
(Ordered low to high on impact, by personal feelings)
* Unfair compensations, a large majority of companies pays their employees in a Nenko System, basically your salary increments by the x years of service inside the company
* HIGH welfare tax, Nenkin will take away around 10% of your PRETAX income.
* Language, I love this Country and I would like to learn their culture and their language
* Etiquette, the Japanese way of daily routinal interactions are very much formulated, you can take vantage of that when you are fresh off boat and trying to do basic things like shopping and lodging. But say if your goal is to integrate into their society, it's going to be a long painful journey for the talented. I got a few friends spent better half of their lives in Japan who just gave up on becoming Japanese. One of which quitted so well that he occasionally violates social norms.
Bottom line: you will need a strong incentive to stay in Japan and start/move your family here, and your first experiences won't be good. So why would foreigners stay if it's next to impossible to become local. If you are doing well enough in the Country you are already within, then you definitely would miss it and go back.
For any country, there are still going to be both positives and negatives. The more money you have and make, often the easier things will be for you. If you are rich, a lot of surprising places can be attractive (not just Japan), for various different reasons. Also beware, there is also a difference between official propaganda for tourist dollars and reality, so various parties can seek to drown out any dispelling of myths or hide facets of how things are.
* People are friendly by default
This can be a common mistake made by tourists (or short time visitors). There is a difference between polite for money, cultural fake politeness, and actually more friendly and welcoming than average. Hotel staff can be very polite (as trained to be for money), but that doesn't mean random people on the street, clubs, housing agents, or business owners actually like every or any foreigners. And the extent of politeness or friendliness shown can depend on skin color, known country of origin, or language spoken.
* Very affordable place
This is quite laughable. It depends on your salary and where you are from, but clearly there are cheaper countries in the world than Japan. If you are rich or nearly so, many countries are "affordable".
* Non-free Country versus free world Country
Freedom is relative. For instance, in Japan, police can arrest, question/interrogate (some have claimed torture) you, and hold you for weeks without a lawyer (nor allow you to call one). Compared to other countries, this is quite draconian and backwards. Where for others, that there is any process where you aren't killed at whim or have no to little means to seek true justice, means greater "freedom".
* Comfortable level of tech
While this is quite true, Japan is not the only country that possesses significant technology. The level of street cleanliness, sewer system (like open sewers), garbage collection (dropped on street or in cans), design and width of city streets, safe train systems (protecting passengers from falling/jumping onto tracks), etc... These points all add up and how "comfortable", can be a matter of where you are from and what you were used to.
> This is quite laughable. It depends on your salary and where you are from, but clearly there are cheaper countries in the world than Japan. If you are rich or nearly so, many countries are "affordable".
I lived in Japan for a year until June 2023 and I agree with OP. It obviously depends on your salary -- Japanese people's is pretty low compared to expats -- but Tokyo is still pretty cheap compared to even Geneva or Paris. Restaurants are cheap (compared to anywhere in Europe), groceries is not that expensive and cinemas are nothing compared to where I live. What offset this are accommodation and fruits (yeah, they're very expensive).
Outside of big cities? Don't even get me started, you get all this plus cheap rent and could even have local-grown fruits and vegetables. I actually plan to retire to Japan if I ever live this long.
> Freedom is relative [...]
I agree with your on that point. Police is at worst corrupt and at best useless in this country. I'm actually of the firm belief that if they were better trained, crime in Japan would "rise" (as in "statistically there would be more crime") because more of it would be discovered or reported.
Perhaps the etiquette and formulaic interactions are important for the friendliness and perceived orderliness of the country? So I wonder how much of the good stuff that people like about Japan you can have without the (from a western perspective) restrictive society. Not to say that there's not always room for improvement along many dimensions.
Japan is a totalitarian state, with the enforcement run by individuals. If you violate social norms, including not looking or sounding Japanese enough, you will be excluded.
You could become naturalized there, but you will never be Japanese, and you will never be treated as an equal.
>I happen to prefer dynamic, multicultural societies over static, xenophobic ones.
Can people in other societies have a say about what they want in the matter in their own society, or your also prefer the norms of you and your society imposed upon everybody?
("I like multiculturalism, as long as every country has the same cultural mindset as mine").
>From that I’m sure you can guess my own nationality.
Is it one where foreigners massacred and replaced the native population, took their land, relegated them to specific areas, and even took their children and closed them in camps? I guess those natives were xenophobic too.
>("I like multiculturalism, as long as every country has the same cultural mindset as mine").
To some degree, this isn't a bad idea. For example, I abhor female genital mulitaliton (FGM) and I don't think it's particularly wrong to say that regardless of it being the "culture" of some people, it shouldn't be done.
If I weren't a moral nihilist, I certainly wouldn't be a moral relativist.
People who generally oppose multiculturalism often assume their ideological opponent is an ardent adherent to cultural relativism, with their definition of cultural relativism being a very uncharitable one: i.e., “no culture is better than another, and it’s not okay to say something another culture does is bad.”
Cultural relativism is more useful in understanding why some people from different cultures behave the way they do, and examining if wither rejection of that behavior is based on a logical, beneficial value, or whether it’s based on the natural impulse to reject something foreign. Mistaken beliefs prevent cultural progress. Beliefs should be open to challenge.
>Can people in other societies have a say about what they want in the matter in their own society, or your also prefer the norms of you and your society imposed upon everybody?
Of course people in other societies should have a say in what they want in the matter of their own society. I just prefer they come to the same conclusion mine has, since it’s the superior one in many respects. (Not all aspects, of course — there is no “perfect culture” or “perfect system”; all of them have downsides in some aspect)
>From that I’m sure you can guess my own nationality.
Is it one where foreigners massacred and replaced the native population, took their land, relegated them to specific areas, and even took their children and closed them in camps? I guess those natives were xenophobic too.
The genocide of the peoples indigenous to North America is a black mark in the history of the United States, as is slavery. Neither has been adequately remedied, and I’m unsure it ever will be. The US has a lot of work to do on both of these fronts.
If I compare the US (assuming it's your country) and Japan, in anything from crime and safety, to cleanliness, community cohesion, politiness, cuisine, nature, and art, I found it deeply inferior, when contrasting results.
Doesn’t Japan have rampant sexual assault to the point where their public transport needs women-only trains due to the prevalence of non-police-investigated public molestation of young girls? Additionally doesn’t japans criminal system notoriously doesn’t investigate heinous sex crimes and rapes, leading to artificially low crime rates (I.e. the police don’t take on cases unless they know they can solve them, so crime is underreported).
Superior is very relative. I'm sure the Japanese are quite happy with their extremely low crime rates and overall safe society. But yes, there are tradeoffs.
Absolutely. Superior is a term that only makes sense in the context of an individual’s or group’s values, and how strongly those values are held in relation to the downsides of the individual culture in that culture’s context. Added to that, some of the “downsides” from the perspective of one group’s values might be “upsides” to another! I happen to value “safety” in absolute terms (as demonstrated by Japan) less than individual freedom. That is, I prefer to live in a society with more “rough edges” because I see the trade-off (more room for new ideas and more latitude for people who don’t fit in) as being worth it.
Now, you could totally question the link between these two. And you’d be right to! There’s no absolute link between “restrictive personal expression” and “low crime and high safety.” Japan, for one, has pretty punitive laws, including the death penalty. That probably plays a role. It’s all super complex, which is what makes it interesting… and why sharing ideas is critical to improving conditions for individuals, especially marginalized ones.
It's their country. You don't get to feel "bullied" for them not wanting foreigners there.
Would you feel "bullied" if an Amazon native population wants to keep their ways, and doesn't welcome you or anybody else coming over and wanting to join them?
Are people you don't know demanding to stay at your house "bullied" and "excluded" when you don't just let them in?
What if they're "good people"? Should they just get a room then? What if you have a couple of extra rooms you don't use?
You don’t need to accept the premise. It’s not (generally) the case that Japanese people don’t want foreigners there. A more correct statement would be that some Japanese people don’t want some foreigners there. Which is true of any country. If one person has felt bullied and excluded when trying to integrate in Japan that sucks, but I also know of plenty of people who have felt bullied and excluded trying to integrate in America, too.
>It's their country. You don't get to feel "bullied" for them not wanting foreigners there.
Why shouldn't I? You don't get to dictate how I "get" to feel. The very idea of racism and xenophobia is fundamentally offensive to me. As with the Amazon native population, I would not approve if they didn't let me in by virtue of some immutable attribute of mine such as my appearance.
So long as you make an effort to learn someone's culture, I don't think there's any justifictaion to exclude someone on the basis of the brute facts of their body or upbringing. Actions ought to matter far more.
I'm not aware of any moral theory that has been justified in academia or elsewhere which prescribes that such discrimination is permissible. This also is evidenced by the fact that many Japanese people claim to abhor racism while simultaneously practicing it against sections of their own population and other populations.
>Why shouldn't I? You don't get to dictate how I "get" to feel.
No, but logic and society and experiences gets to dictate (even if in a slightly fuzzy what) what makes sense to feel.
Otherwise, feelings are like a*holes. Everybody has one.
>So long as you make an effort to learn someone's culture, I don't think there's any justifictaion to exclude someone on the basis of the brute facts of their body or upbringing. Actions ought to matter far more.
They don't want people merely having "made an effort to learn their culture" to immigrate in their country in any great numbers. They prefer people having grown into their culture - that is, their own people.
It's through this organic process (as opposed to some bro watching anime and watching documentaries about sushi and samurai swords who feels they've "made an effort to learn the culture") that they preserve their culture, their social cohesion, their customs, their safety, and other such aspects.
>as opposed to some bro watching anime and watching documentaries about sushi and samurai swords who feels they've "made an effort to learn the culture"
You've used this strawman previously in this thread; perhaps it would be better if you elucidated what elements of culture you're actually referring to.
>They don't want people merely having "made an effort to learn their culture" to immigrate in their country in any great numbers.
Who is "they"? I feel like you're ascribing very specific opinions to people who I suspect would be perfectly happy with law-abiding immigrants who don't hold parties at 3 a.m.
>They prefer people having grown into their culture - that is, their own people.
Is this even true? And to what degree? For example, there are cases of non-ethnically Japanese people who were born and raised in Japan, but still face challenges with discrimination, whereas immigrants of Japanese ancestry from America only seem to face issues with language. There's even a politician who immigrated to Japan and was elected by Japanese people: https://www.japan-zone.com/modern/tsurunen_marutei.shtml - in what way was someone who grew up in Japan preferred?
You may argue that these are minor examples and exceptions, but even one example is enough to show that these feelings are not based on logic or probability, but on mere gut feeling when one encounters someone different.
Cultural assimilation can happen to varying degrees and varying time frames with mixed results; the degree to which it is successful is also dependent on how accomodating or welcoming that particular culture is.
Maybe you should ask the Native American tribes who died of smallpox what “scientific” basis there is for being afraid of foreigners?
I know you are going to say that’s not the case in the modern world, but you need to at least understand there are very concrete reasons why xenophobia evolved, and why it’s a natural reaction. Some might not be relevant in the modern world, but I’d argue there’s a lot of complexity that we might not understand.
For example, there are some extremely intolerant immigrants to Europe right now, 100% of whom in London polled as wanting homosexuality criminalised.
Should everyone be 100% accepting of this because they are foreigners? Is xenophobia justified in this case in your opinion?
Xenophobia is a fear or distrust of foreigners. You can accept, and work to integrate, foreigners into your society while rejecting bad ideas. That’s the basis of modern multicultural democracies.
Xenophobia is a content-less word, made to be sounding like a medical condition, to justify bossing people around based on what they want or do not want in their country.
It is, of course, a white invention, as we feel morally superior enough to do all the bossing around. Let's call it the "white man's burden" to show those people how it should be done.
This seems like a very disconnected way to view things. There are unpleasant aspects of Japanese society, but it's not obvious you can just remove those while keeping the positive aspects.
The US is indeed more dynamic, but as has often been pointed out, that's partly due to coming into existence with a continent's worth of very lightly defended resources only a few hundred years ago. If you win a huge lottery jackpot you will probably enjoy a very comfortable life afterwards, but it doesn't mean you became brilliant at economics.
When I say bullying and exclusion, I’m speaking specifically about the practice as it exists in Japanese society.
This practice has produced an entire lost generation called “Hikkikomori,” Japanese people who were excluded from Japanese society so completely that they don’t even leave their homes. Some of them are entirely dependent on their aging parents for their subsistence, including shelter and food.
That says nothing of gay people, whose presence is tolerated at best.
When it comes to foreigners, they are welcomed as tourists and guest workers, but there will always be places and aspects of society that they will never be welcome in.
This is exclusion for no other reason than xenophobia. Even a person who learns the language, practices the customs, pays taxes and follows the laws will not be accepted in Japan.
What you’re hitting at in your response is “The paradox of tolerance.” To arrive at the paradox of tolerance, a society has to have a sufficient level of tolerance. Japan simply doesn’t.
When I say this is “bad,” I mean this is in two ways. First, it violates my principles of tolerance for good faith actors — a set of values shared broadly in the west, to varying degrees and with a lot of asterisks. Secondly, it’s bad for Japan. In a situation where your demographics are decades into terminal decline, the ability to integrate foreigners is the only option to continue to being a going concern. The breakdown of their society without foreign integration will be catastrophic.
UNICEF has initiatives in Angola, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Sudan and Tanzania to end open defecation. High levels of open defecation are linked to high child mortality, poor nutrition, poverty, and large disparities between rich and poor.
Is this colonialism? It’s certainly a cultural change.
The mixing of people and ideas through trade and migration has resulted in the fastest decline in mortality and poverty in human history. Cultures open to new ideas have benefitted the most.
Foreign/multinational organizations coming to dictate to the "natives" even how to deficate, for "their own good"? Sounds like it.
Colonialism is not just about "bad intentions". There were colonialists with "good intentions" too. They also thought they were doing "god's work", building railroads, teaching the brute natives how to live, and so on. The "white man's burden" they called it.
In the case of Japan, Americans threatened and even bombed them (in the 19th century) to teach them how they should live: to force them open their borders to western trade. The same entitlement apparently never stopped.
I think it's only while there are few foreigners there. They will have to open up and because country is good, just lacking young population, Japanese will quickly become the minority and those issues will be solved.
Yes, it's not like a country is it's people and their culture and achievements stemming from those, and that if the "country is good" it's because of that.
No, a country is just a landmass, and when "Japanese become the minority" that would be a problem solved (the problem being entitled people from outside the country wanting in).
Also i believe that the country is first and foremost, a landmass - with geological, hydrological etc features defining their resource base and transportation abilities and thus what they can do and what they can't, and what's optimal for them, plus a political system that is built to make the optimal use for the former. Gradual replacement of people with another can still keep all of it in place and maintain qualities of a nation from the standpoint of average consumer as more or less the same.
Plus, if you invite immigrants, you get to pick the best of them, so probably you won't harm your overall population quality.
Well, in any case, there are only 3 ways out of it:
- Japan becomes an almost empty and stateless or only having a nominal state, landmass with very little population and no functioning economy (no transport network, no electricity grid etc). Unlikely - it's climate is too good.
- It gets militarily taken over as soon it's too weak to defend itself. Likely but undesirable because you don't get to pick who takes you over and that will be by definition someone hostile.
- Immigration and replacement. This is the most beneficial of the realistic options. Because you get to pick the people who replaces you.
It’s not defeatist, it’s demography. The replacement rate for a country is 2.1. Japan’s birth rate is 1.3. Japan fell below replacement rate in 1975. Their economy faltered in the 90s and has never recovered. Add in massive urbanization and a work culture that literally has a word for “death from overwork”… yeah, a country doesn’t bounce back from that.
Oh, but buckle up my friend, because Japan isn’t an outlier. It’s ahead of the curve for a majority of the world’s societies.
This is a difficult question to answer, really. Very few pension systems are orthogonal to others and so it's hard to equate. The US Social Security system (what I assume they are comparing to) is 6.2% (or 12.4% for self-employed, as they are their own employer and contribute both shares) for 420mos; at max contribution, this comes out to 2572usd/mo at age 62 up to 4555usd/mo if you wait til age 70. Meanwhile, to max out an Irish state pension, you would need to contribute 13keur/yr for atleast 240mos (longer at a lower contribution), which comes out to ~1076eur/mo starting at age 67.
I don't know what the Japanese system is like, but the point is that there are multiple variables to take into account. Length of contribution, type (tax rate and pre or post, or flat) + amount of contribution, when you qualify to receive it, recipient stipulations (can you work or not, does the rate change, does the age change, etc).
Based on some back of envelop comparisons from my little research of the Japanese system (what wikipedia provides, since I can't read Japanese); it would seem that the US system is a little fairer (or, at least, generally equivalent) for W2 employees: a lower rate and contribution requirement [6.2% vs 10%], with a shorter term requirement [35 vs 40 years] but a slightly lower payout at a later age [4.5kusd@70 vs 5.5kusd@65] with a lower overall tax burden [nominal 17% vs flat 25%]. But both are a fair bit better than the Irish system. Please feel free to correct me if those are off, however.
Even those are just assumptions based on you making no private retirement contributions and you working a white collar job and then going full state pensioner at the full retirement age. If any variables change, it can drastically effect the payout/taxrate. So it's almost impossible to fully compare.
Reminds me of some (Dutch) people who made a chart of % taxation (including every kind) vs income by using real world data... It came out like white noise. Apparently if you make as many rules as possible to make it all as fair as possible you end up with the lamest possible system - even worse than a lottery.
> Unfair compensations, a large majority of companies pays their employees in a Nenko System, basically your salary increments by the x years of service inside the company
That sounds like an exceptionally fair compensation system to be honest.
Probably feels less fair if you’re just in the door.
It’s also going to be another disincentive to migration. A specialist with 20 years in a field isn’t going to move there with their whole family and take a new job for graduate money.
Ideally you would figure out the exact cost or price of things. Putting a widget in a box should cost x. Perhaps a an enlightening hypothetical would be to charge you for your hamburger based on the number of years the employee worked there. Everyone would be like: But last time I paid half that? Also, why did it take so long? If there is actual experience one should bother to measure it as well as productivity. Those who do gain experience are probably missing out if it is measured in years.
I guess one has to see enough really hard working highly educated intelligent young people in a place that also houses slacking geezers who managed to learn nothing over decades. They are basically sitting there waiting for others to earn their living. If it is a national thing you wont have the endless flow of new hires who cant wait to get the f out of there.
It's clearly your first anniversary, given the things you have highlighted. As times goes by, you will surely change your mind if the goal is to be intellectually honest.
Japan will never want more foreigners in the country. Even if the population shrinks substantially. And it's a right thing to do - a lot of cogs in japanese society rotate well only when all links use same predicaments. It will never work with foreginers en masse.
They rather lock the country again like Tokugawa did long time ago. As I am getting older, I support the decision to protect society from destructive traits that come with western societies more and more.
Countries are just landmasses and real estate, didn't you know?
Local population can be relegated to a minority and what makes Japan alluring today will still exist just fine. There's nothing about a particular people, with a particular culture, and a particular approach, having built a country of a particular outlook.
Besides, we can improve the norms we don't like. And of course, we totally deserve to live there, after all we've watched all these anime and ate so much sushi...
Singapore is a very interesting case because its multiculturalism is less organic and more top down. The upside? There are no slums. The downside? There is very little individual freedom, and punishment for crimes can be brutal. Like caning for vandalism or the death penalty for drug trafficking.
And yet! Singapore is consistently ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world. This contradicts the common western association of personal liberty correlating with happiness.
I'm not really sure about this, Japan loves meaningless highly manual process intensive jobs and high employment rates, so I understand what you mean, but replacing people with machines isn't really in their DNA even though Japan seems to like robot movies.
Maybe in the face of some type of economical crisis they will change their tune but I wouldn't bank on it. In my opinion, they've been burned once, they were the top dogs for a while, economically poised to even surpass America, and now, a lot of people are without money. So I think it will take a bit of convincing to want to go back to those days.
Japan has an interesting sort of apathy (??), kind of like, they're happy to not be the center of attention and just go on minding their business. We had some business development people visit Japan recently and they were stunned at the lack of competitiveness and interest in growing their businesses.
I guess this is a culture which was happy isolate itself from the world for centuries and I guess if it could, there's nothing saying it wouldn't do it again...I have to say, I can't always blame them :)
Besides what ehnto has said, I also believe you're only partly correct about the manual process intensive jobs. What you're correct about are the jobs linked to culture and tradition. For example manga, soba noodles, bonsai trees, ink making or woodworking. But they are absolutely replacing whole sectors of manual jobs with machines, ones they don't seem to value to protect. Like retail, they're the absolute leaders in vending machines and attendless brick&mortar shops. Or automaking and electronics.
I live in Japan and have never seen a attendless brick&mortar shop?
Vending machines are everywhere, but usually only for drinks and there is plenty, and I mean plenty of retail shops.
So I don't know what you mean really. Automaking electronics, again not sure, there is a fujitsu factory nearby where I live, there's hundreds maybe thousands of people going in and out of there each day.
Do you have a romantic view of Japan that doesn't exist maybe?
There is likely a "correct" size for any given business in regards to it's function in society. If you chase eternal growth you are somewhat at odds with the society you're part of. Eventually you either need to exploit it to grow past the size it needs you to be, or move out into other markets.
I think the difference is that for the most part, small and medium businesses in Japan are just trying to fit the size of their role in their communities, growth for the sake of growth isn't the goal.
Just observations and idle thoughts from me though, both views on growth clearly have merit and I can't actually speak for Japanese business owners.
There is likely a "correct" size for any given business in regards to it's function in society.
Quite - the organic size, if you will. In biological bodies, organs that become overdeveloped or overused relative to the rest of the body lead to disease. MY loose analogy for economics is that your body can only store so much excess sugar before you acquire crippling diabetes.
I wonder if in coming years we will start to see growth for sake of growth model to fail. At least if interest rates stay high and there is need to refinance.
Debt used for unsustainable growth could be extremely destructive. It is needed, for example new machinery and so on, but investment has to return more than you pay on it.
“Lack of manpower” is an understatement. The bubonic plague killed 75-200m people, vastly increasing the cost of labor and spurring technology revolutions in agriculture.
On the big scale yes. But declining population can have a lot of negative effects in the shorter term on smaller geographical scales. Consider what happens to a small rural community if young people start moving away and the people who do stay have fewer kids.
It depends on where, how fast, and how much. It can be anticipated and managed, but it needs to be anticipated and managed, otherwise the natural consequence is poverty. Unfortunately it also seems necessary to sustain modern human society in the long term.
I don't know if would happen in practice but the one Silvio Gesell proposed would probably handle as much growth, stagnation or even degrowth as the people collectively decide to want.
The reason for that is that the concept of 'Freigeld' forces people to think about production and consumption schedules. With regular money you can pretend that labor can be stored like any commodity, which is actually not possible.
If you know you are in the Ponzi scheme, the first thing you do is stop throwing any more money at it, because it does become more risky as time goes on.
"Capitalism and not participating in Ponzi schemes don't go hand in hand with each other" becomes nonsense. The last one to jump off that track before it collapses becomes capitalistic winner. But the ones who jumped before that moment are still better on than ones who ended up paying to them.
Since declining populations are here to stay and are increasingly more widespread, sounds like capitalism will need to learn to adjust or risk being replaced.
You can offer benefits but it’s harder to make people take the benefits. Japan has great paternity leave but no one takes it, because no one else takes it. You can double the length of the leave and it would make no difference.
It’s like the “unlimited” vacation days that some scummy companies offer. They do so confident that people will be shamed by the behaviour of their peers into taking very little vacation.
You are also fighting what has become a tradition and cultural norms. There is a huge struggle to stop companies from committing wage theft (through unpaid extra work hours) or straight out overworking their employees (sometimes to the point of suicide).
Some of my colleagues were already complaining that the government is forcing them to take leave. I can't imagine how much grumpier they will get if the government forces them to take even more.
Japan is way too densely populated in comparison to Nordic countries. It is difficult to alter a country's socioeconomic status by mimicking some foreign policies originated from a country of desired template.
In fact, it should be the opposite. You get way more economy of scales in providing a social safety net in dense areas than in sparse areas. Hospitals can cover more people, social workers can handle more cases, public transportation becomes cheaper, etc.
Scale economy is too simplistic, that it is ignoring loads of social aspects of a realistic economy. Also population cannot be stacked together costlessly(scale economy within a limited landscape), just imagine this place, can you live there?
In fact, no single one highly and densely populated developed region can have a significant positive growth in population. There is much more than just scale of economy.
Japan's economy has been long replying on the "integrity" of a more connected society as to the Nordic ones, due to a large population (and high density). Integrity suppresses characteristics of people, so they are more collectivist(more exploited by the heirachy:() and the competition is intense due to this population density. Asia vs West basically.
S Korea is very similar to Japan, also facing the same problem of population decline, you can view S Korea(or even Taiwan) as a lately developed and peninsula version of Japan. Each of them with limited resources and a dense population, in which made J and K what they are today (You can look up how these two countries developed, I am not an expert historian). Even China, has a significant decrease in newborn population, despite its vast landmass and less developed population.
So basically, the achievement of development is brought by whatever suppresses the population at the same time, they are sort of at the local maximum of their country at current time point. The Nordic countries meanwhile are much loosely populated, higher average resources and so on, although not as capitalist as US. Again I am not a Nordic expert, but the distinction is significant enough that I can say applying their policies in Asian countries will not work.
Each country has its own "ecology", that are of course constantly interacting with each other so to speak, but still inertial wrt some policies that are do not cope with it well.
There’s a Pros/Cons table where the first row almost seems like a paradox. A “pro” of a high population density is that you have access to resources. A “con” is that the resources are still limited.
This page is completely wrong in so many levels. It says it's talking about population density, but many of the cons are about population numbers. If you have the same number of people of a city, but spread out more, it is harder to provide services for them. Pollution? Yeah, a city looks bad, until you realize how suburban sprawl absolutely decimates entire ecosystems in huge areas. It is way better for the planet if human beings concentrate in a few places, and try to leave the biggest amount of area possible to nature. Also, the pollution per capita of less dense areas is way bigger, since the lack of public transit means everybody needs to drive everywhere.
I think the one row about resources still makes sense though. You didn’t even answer OP’s original question regarding it in your reply. All you did was state an opinion as a fact without providing any proof. At least, I attempted to do so. A simple counterexample to your “common sense” claim that it’s easier to provide resources when people aren’t spread apart is housing.
I didn’t even read the pollution part. That’s a whole different topic that wasn’t being discussed.
But thanks for the downvote! Next time, please make sure your reply is up to par if you feel the need to downvote.
While it might be true that everyone has a price, if we plucked someone off the street and they told us they never wanted children (at all, or more than they have now), how much money do you think it would take to persuade them to have a kid?
Do you think it would be $1000? How about $4500? Maybe it costs a whole $12,000 right? These are the sorts of incentives that are offered in Europe, in South Korea, etc. They don't seem to influence much extra in the way of births. And it's not difficult to see why... those people are told (whether true or not) that children are far more costly than those sums. So we're still talking about it being net negative.
In some publications, people in the western world are told that it's some large fraction of a million dollars to raise a child to adulthood. How many babies could Japan afford, if it had to pay parents $500k for each?
It's even worse than that though. Many Japanese women of child-bearing age aren't even in circumstances where it is plausible for them to consider having a child. No husband, or a husband whose career doesn't make being the sole provider possible. Little chance of those circumstances changing before motherhood is out of the question. Etc.
Maybe do things that take the pressure off fathers to be sole providers?
What the Nordics in general do well, and Germany does ok, is preserve the ability of mothers to have careers, thus making motherhood a bit less of a drastic decision (it’s still a drastic decision. You’re committing to unconditionally love someone who will, say, bite you hard on the shoulder because you had the temerity to suggest it was time to go potty instead of play with trains, and to take the physical damage of pregnancy that has so far led to my first broken bone and back pain that never quite goes away)
But I’m still working in my pre-maternity department, in a scaled-back version of my old job, and more critically, keeping up with our industry about as well as my not-mother colleagues, so once the little nipper can escort himself home from school, I can more easily go back to full time.
And in case my husband loses his job that currently is our main source of income, we have the backstop of my job and the potential to go back to my full time IT income.
This would be far more difficult in a country where my large employer was not obliged to let me work part time for several years, and Elterngeld didn’t make taking a year off after the birth of a child fully expected and planned for by employers. My husband was also able (and expected) to take a month off after the birth, and then another when I went back to work. A lot of men in relatively conservative Bavaria were initially hesitant to take those two months, but it’s now normal. We’re not at the point that it’s normal for most fathers to also exercise their right to switching to a part time schedule for their children’s first few years - no idea if this happens more often in Berlin or Hamburg.
Germany has its own demographic problems, but not as severe as Japan’s.
In other places, where culturally the pressure is already off of the men to be sole providers (central Europe, Scandinavia), incentives don't seem to help there.
But, even if that could help, the cultural changes Japan requires to make that possible, just aren't feasible in fewer than half a dozen generations. Which is sort of what they're running out of anyway.
Germany will get to where Japan is, and it will be within our own lifetimes.
Your last point is the one that really matters. No woman wants to have a child out of marriage, and marriage rates continue to fall while the mean age of first marriage is almost 30.
Not a lot of evidence that economic incentives change birthrates, unless they are completely over the top like Hungary’s lifetime income tax exemption for women who become mothers before 30. But that’s only been in effect for a few years so the verdict is still out.
I think it will still be challenging to make the economics work, policies that assumed growth will need to change (such as assumptions around affording welfate programs). Otherwise I agree, there probably should be an equilibrium point to float around that they can aim for.
Right, it's the first point brought up every time in rebuttal. But, when have we not had to make adjustments to policy when circumstances change?
The argument against a sustainable population basically boils down to, "but, then we'd have to make adjustments to policy!" Which is not the slam-dunk some seem to think it is.
Wow I read this posted headline as general population falling, (and kind of assumed that was what many have predicted for the very elderly Japanese population etc, which partly it is) -- but the headline includes "as foreign population surges".
Should have figured out how to incorporate that into the post as it's an important additional angle in the story
HN only allocates 80 characters for the headline. I thought the decline across all prefectures of greater weight than the increase in immigration (which is mentioned at the outset of the story anyway).
The fertility rates of: Wang (1.2), Kim (0.8), and Nguyen (1.9) are all under replacement rate (2.1) and two of them are worse than Japan's (1.4). According to the UN Population Fund 2023.
I’d love to go over and have a few kids but I hear it’s in poor taste.
Learning Japanese and emigrating is particularly tough because of their culture and on top of that it seems most Japanese women would be uninterested in having a family with an American she couldn’t speak too
This strategy works as long as there are more places (by volume) experiencing growth than decline. Since the trend is slower growth overall, there will be a point where global growth stops, and clearly then the strategy will start to fail.
Frankly, from a planet point of view I'd hope that point comes sooner than later.
This will play out in obvious ways (lifting retirement age etc) but ultimately the quality of life will increase overall until some sort of stable population number emerges.