7 ms·

Japan's population declines for first time since 1920s

35 points by eplanit 11y ago

JBReefer 11y ago
"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.
- gozur88 11y ago
  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.
  - threeseed 11y ago
    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.
    - hkmurakami 11y ago
      Imo the bigger issue isn't the bigco itself going down: it's the hundreds of suppliers (and there are many levels of suppliers supplying to higher tier suppliers) that may also go down in a domino effect.
      - jessaustin 11y ago
        Well sure, that makes it worse, but it isn't really a separate thing. What's even worse than the big firm and its suppliers failing, is all of those firms not failing. When enterprise is not so centralized, little firms fail all the time, and are quickly replaced by other little firms. OTOH in the Japan/Korea situation (and with TPP etc., probably USA in the near future), ineffective organizations hide within bigco's indefinitely, consuming resources in inefficient, anticonsumer fashion.
    - gozur88 11y ago
      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%?
      - threeseed 11y ago
        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.
        gozur88 11y ago
        >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.
michaelbuddy 11y ago
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.
- coldtea 11y ago
  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.
  - chii 11y ago
    Not before they struggled and struggled until death. And that struggle sometimes turn into innovation. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.
  - jessaustin 11y ago
    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.
    - cthalupa 11y ago
      >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.
cassieramen 11y ago
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?
- threeseed 11y ago
  You do what most countries do. You allow skilled immigrants to enter the country and take the hit on the social costs. They also have the side effect of, in most case, raising the birth rate for you.
  - actionwords 11y ago
    'skilled immigrants'. That's what they're calling mass population replacement now?
  - dba7dba 11y ago
    I do't see any nation that has successfully had good luck with skilled immigrants.
    - praxulus 11y ago
      The United States?
      - EC1 11y ago
        You consider the US a success?
    - ern 11y ago
      The US? Australia? Canada? New Zealand? The line between "skilled migrants" and "colonists" is blurred in the earlier part of their histories, but all those countries seem to be doing well in the grand scheme of things.
brbsix 11y ago
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.
- yardie 11y ago
  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.
  - brbsix 11y ago
    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.
- dang 11y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184896 and marked it off-topic.
Havoc 11y ago
I bet a ton of hipsters would love to hang out in Japan. Doesn't seem that hard to sell...
- slavik81 11y ago
  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.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  They're called weeaboos.
- threeseed 11y ago
  Japan is one of the worst countries for immigrating to. If you don't look Japanese you aren't Japanese no matter how good your language, cultural or social skills are. And if you aren't Japanese then you will be treated as a seperate class and often discriminated against e.g. housing. The institutional xenophobia/racism in Japan is simply unlike what most countries have.
pessimizer 11y ago
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.
- zanny 11y ago
  Just because your population is shrinking does not mean automation cannot take jobs faster than the rate that the workforce shrinks.
redthrowaway 11y ago
Surely its population declined during WWII, no? Japan lost 2.3M people; I doubt they could make babies that quickly.

35 points by eplanit 11y ago

"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.

gozur88 11y ago
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.
- threeseed 11y ago
  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.
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    Imo the bigger issue isn't the bigco itself going down: it's the hundreds of suppliers (and there are many levels of suppliers supplying to higher tier suppliers) that may also go down in a domino effect.
    - jessaustin 11y ago
      Well sure, that makes it worse, but it isn't really a separate thing. What's even worse than the big firm and its suppliers failing, is all of those firms not failing. When enterprise is not so centralized, little firms fail all the time, and are quickly replaced by other little firms. OTOH in the Japan/Korea situation (and with TPP etc., probably USA in the near future), ineffective organizations hide within bigco's indefinitely, consuming resources in inefficient, anticonsumer fashion.
  - gozur88 11y ago
    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%?
    - threeseed 11y ago
      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.
      - gozur88 11y ago
        >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.

michaelbuddy 11y ago

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.

coldtea 11y ago
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.
- chii 11y ago
  Not before they struggled and struggled until death. And that struggle sometimes turn into innovation. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.
- jessaustin 11y ago
  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.
  - cthalupa 11y ago
    >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.

cassieramen 11y ago

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?

threeseed 11y ago
You do what most countries do. You allow skilled immigrants to enter the country and take the hit on the social costs. They also have the side effect of, in most case, raising the birth rate for you.
- actionwords 11y ago
  'skilled immigrants'. That's what they're calling mass population replacement now?
- dba7dba 11y ago
  I do't see any nation that has successfully had good luck with skilled immigrants.
  - praxulus 11y ago
    The United States?
    - EC1 11y ago
      You consider the US a success?
  - ern 11y ago
    The US? Australia? Canada? New Zealand? The line between "skilled migrants" and "colonists" is blurred in the earlier part of their histories, but all those countries seem to be doing well in the grand scheme of things.

brbsix 11y ago

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.

yardie 11y ago
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.
- brbsix 11y ago
  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.
dang 11y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184896 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11184896 and marked it off-topic.

Havoc 11y ago

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

slavik81 11y ago
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.
TD-Linux 11y ago
They're called weeaboos.
threeseed 11y ago
Japan is one of the worst countries for immigrating to. If you don't look Japanese you aren't Japanese no matter how good your language, cultural or social skills are. And if you aren't Japanese then you will be treated as a seperate class and often discriminated against e.g. housing. The institutional xenophobia/racism in Japan is simply unlike what most countries have.

pessimizer 11y ago

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.

zanny 11y ago
Just because your population is shrinking does not mean automation cannot take jobs faster than the rate that the workforce shrinks.

redthrowaway 11y ago

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