8 ms·

Number of babies born in Japan is the lowest since records began

79 points by tshannon 8y ago

dang 8y ago
Url changed from https://www.npr.org/2018/12/21/679103541/japans-population-is-in-rapid-decline https://www.npr.org/2018/12/21/679103541/japans-population-i..., which points to this.
jmpman 8y ago
Do the Japanese do anything to making having children easier? Free daycare?
- SenHeng 8y ago
  They try very hard to ensure that mothers can’t get good jobs, thus obligating them to stay home and make more babies. Surprisingly, it hasn’t worked very well. Source: lives here. Most of the 30 and above working mothers I’ve encountered in my time are part time workers without benefits.
  - farnerup 8y ago
    Perhaps women choose not to start a family at all if it means the end of their careers?
- marak830 8y ago
  Not free as far as I know, there is a points system though (have a 10 month old, loving in Japan with Japanese wife), that worries my wife a lot. I don't know all the details but she is concerned we won't be able to get our son into a close enough child care to be able to return to work. It's not a massive problem for us, as we can survive on one pay, but it's still a big worry. As for support for young children, well the cost to have our son was quite high(compared to Australia - and this is purely subjective mind you, didn't really research it, just asked family members). If anyone has any specific questions I can ask my wife and reply tomorrow (10pm here).
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  I don't believe monetary incentives are a good way to raise birth rates. In the end a child is massively expensive, and no government can afford to compensate parents completely. Child care is partly such a monetary incentive (being subsidize and/or enabling parents to earn more), but women will still lose out greatly by giving birth. From what I know of Japanese culture, all these factors must be even worse than in the West...
  - AnthonyMouse 8y ago
    > I don't believe monetary incentives are a good way to raise birth rates. In the end a child is massively expensive, and no government can afford to compensate parents completely. Transfer payments don't consume resources, they only reallocate them. If you enact a larger child tax deduction, people with children will pay lower taxes and people without children will pay correspondingly more. The result will be more consumption of childcare and childhood education and less consumption of tourism and luxury cars, but that doesn't harm the local economy -- if anything it helps it, because the things children need tend to be locally produced, rather than your citizens spending money they earned locally to vacation in the Caribbean. The argument you would have to make is on the other side, that the economy can't afford people to spend time rearing children that they could have spent working. But at a world average level that can't possibly have been true or humans would already be extinct, and economies have much more surplus now than they had in the past. And the cost is inherently short-term, because the net work done by the average human is more than the cost of raising them, so in the long term you get much more from having a working adult than it costs to raise the child. You also don't have to provide enough in tax incentives to cover the entire cost of the child, only enough to push enough potential parents at the margin over the threshold to raise the fertility rate to the population replacement rate. This may still be a significant amount, but nowhere near the entire cost -- and you only have to offer it during the years when the child is in the care of the parents, not for the parents' entire working life, much less the child's, by which point you're already making dividends -- the now-adult child is working and paying taxes that more than pay for the next generation.
erpaa 8y ago
Recent social experiment (East/West Germany) proves one thing: people make babies, when their life is poor and dull. And on the global scale we can state that people make babies when they have no pension nor elderly care. And from nordic countries we can learn that free daycare is the baby killer number one. This is because you can make safely make babies "any time" and then you postpone it until too late. In Americas you need careful financial planning beforehand, considering there is no daycare or schooling or healthcare or much anything, but most succeed and execute their plan.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- hrktb 8y ago
  A whole slice of Japanese workers’ have life that squarely fall in “poor and dull”. The overworking cliche is only true to an extent, but still working poor people are plenty and their number rising could arguably be the main factor in the population demographic change. “I don’t make enough money to build a family” is a very prevalent sentiment looking around IRL and on social media, and seems to be corroborated by the stats.
  - InGodsName 8y ago
    I don't think it works like that. My overworked friends don't feel that helpless. They can eat out anytime, go to any concert they desire, buy any gadget. They feel secure and safe, they work hard only due to expectation and societal pressure but a few many are self driven And they don't think like ohhh we don't have capacity to have kids. They infact say they can have kids anytime they wish and they aren't missing out on something. It's kinda network effect. You go on social media, you see indepdent guy bunjee jumping and some couples posting photos of their kids, which one gets more likes? Obviously bunjee jumping one. So, we are conditioned to seek inviduality/freedom/lack of family responsibilies. I would say, increasing workplace responsibilities are also to blame. If you are CEO of a company, i think you've same profile of busy time as a normal guy with a baby who has to take of it. But which one gets more praises? obviously the one who takes corporate responsibilites. I don't know if someone gets praises for having kids. Infact, if you are trying to adjust your babys carrier while walking on footpath, people are like wtf? Why can't these guys keep their baby at home. Baby cries, same, wtf....why can't these guys keep their baby at home? You feel embarrassed and feel like you did something wrong.
sgjohnson 8y ago
It wouldn’t be too much of an issue of their welfare system (like any other welfare system) wouldn’t be a ponzi scheme. Their tax rates are already crippling.
- wycs 8y ago
  Moral hazard. Their welfare system removes the incentive to have children. Could be fixed by giving parents a cut of the tax revenue of their future children.
- anticensor 8y ago
  UBI-based money would resolve that issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635547
erpaa 8y ago
Good Idea actually. In Norway this issue was studied when it still was still politically possible. The probability of a baby becoming "marginaliserad" ie social fuck-up was 40% for single mothers, 20% for working mothers and "incredibly low" for full-time mothers. Babies have no absolute intrinsic value perse, this is why replacing natives with imported IQ-72 people does not work.
- jvln 8y ago
  Funny. If imported ppl were IQ=72 they would not hijack Norway wellfear system :D
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    And the immigrants are indispensable in Norway, especially on the lower end of the pay scale. Wages have risen in Norway so much that Norwegians reduce their working hours on a big scale.
  - madengr 8y ago
    Most immigrant households in the USA are on welfare. https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Households https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Hous...
    - kaibee 8y ago
      > A September 2015 report by CIS asserted that "immigrant households receive 41 percent more federal welfare than households headed by native-born citizens."[78] The report was criticized on the basis of poor methodology by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute. Nowrasteh said that the report opted not to examine how much welfare immigrants use, but to examine households led by an immigrant so that the report could count the welfare usage of the immigrant's US-born children, which leads to a misleading estimate of immigrant welfare use.[78] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studies "Center of Immigration Studies" seems like a very dubious source of information when even Cato is criticizing them. https://www.cato.org/blog/center-immigration-studies-overstates-immigrant-non-citizen-native-welfare-use https://www.cato.org/blog/center-immigration-studies-oversta...
bunnycorn 8y ago
My country is even worse, 1.31. Japan looks like a kindergarten compared to Portugal.
- polotics 8y ago
  Not the same thing: Portugal has a very healthy immigrant diaspora, some will go back.
  - fortes 8y ago
    Also lots of immigration from former colonies
  - smackay 8y ago
    It's pretty standard for people to work abroad for a couple of decades then retire back home to their birthplace and open a pastelaria (cafe). Sadly, the market is pretty saturated and the net contribution to the economy is not that high. From personal experience there are a number of professionals at early stages in their careers that return but quickly they realise that the opportunities are still rather limited and reverse their decision within a few years. The situation is changing, but slowly.
    - bunnycorn 8y ago
      > From personal experience there are a number of professionals at early stages in their careers that return but quickly they realise that the opportunities are still rather limited and reverse their decision within a few years. I don't see any of that. The only people that came back, were those that went to Angola before the oil crash that halted the country.
  - bunnycorn 8y ago
    > some will go back If they get back. And will most probably leave their descendants back.
zzz6519003 8y ago
any jap girl wanna get Preg. here? XD
matte_black 8y ago
Ultimately this is a good thing for the planet and our dwindling resources, but too bad for those whose retirement depends on fresh new taxpayers being created in increasingly larger numbers.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
In a world with 7.7 billion people, why are declining birth rates almost always described as problem?
- sannee 8y ago
  Because children in Africa are not going to finance retirement of japanese elderly.
  - david-gpu 8y ago
    Or at least, not without very substantial immigration.
    - chappi42 8y ago
      Of the former children from Africa, Syria, Afghanistan etc. which came to Germany (Europe) in the last three years a too high percentage does not seem to have the ability (or willingness) to replace a worker in Germany. Immigration alone doesn't help. It may even make matters worse if the 'wrong' people come. (I wrote 'seems' because it is difficult to get objective hard numbers for this emotional subject). Regarding birthrates/immigration: Help without conditions is wrong, I now think. NGO's should not be allowed to 'help in Africa' (and Afghanistan, ...) without making sure that the birthrates drop significantly. Providing modern medicine without enforcing the 'recipients' to adapt the culture/custom will lead to a desaster in those countries (and if 'everybody' migrates - in Europe also (will happen after my lifetime probably)).
      - david-gpu 8y ago
        When immigration is discussed, it is important to separate refugees, illegal immigration, and legal immigration. Being an island nation, Japan is in a good position to control their borders tightly compared with other countries like Germany. It then becomes a question of having a well-designed immigration process that selects young, healthy, highly-educated folks who, most importantly, must speak the local language fluently. Canada has a pretty good system in place for this.
andrewclunn 8y ago
Educated women = population decline. So the future looks African and Muslim. Feminism really is cancer.
bayesian_horse 8y ago
Maybe this will make Japan warm up to the idea of more immigration. Just kidding, of course...
- nonamechicken 8y ago
  Actually, they seem to be warming up. There was a report a few months back that they want to bring 200k IT professionals from India. Not sure if they actually mean that though. >Japan will open up its doors to about two lakh IT professionals from India, and issue green cards to settle down in Japan and support the country's rapidly expanding IT infrastructure, said Shigeki Maeda, Executive Vice President at Japan External Trade Organisation (JETRO), a government body, here on Thursday. https://m.indiatimes.com/news/india/forget-america-japan-has-2-lakh-jobs-for-indian-techies-will-issue-green-cards-to-settle-down-341149.html https://m.indiatimes.com/news/india/forget-america-japan-has...
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    Having had experience in both cultures, I can’t imagine two more opposite cultures. One is extremely deferential to others, the other you have to think about yourself first otherwise you won’t get anywhere. At least in public interactions.
    - bayesian_horse 8y ago
      My maybe slightly pessimistic view of Japanese attitudes toward immigration is that they will try to keep the Indians in a state of limbo, ready to deport them at the drop of a hat. Which of course won't work at these kind of numbers, anyway.
      - DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
        Cynically, I note they’ll be easy to spot in a crowd in Tokyo...
      - 05 8y ago
        > will try to keep the Indians in a state of limbo, ready to deport them at the drop of a hat. Which of course won't work at these kind of numbers, anyway Well, worked for the US with H1B/20 year wait time for EB2
marsrover 8y ago
Maybe I’m missing something or not thinking it through but why not pay people to have babies based on their status? It would cause more divide between classes but I feel like the ends might justify the means. Great education and job? You get paid more to have a baby. Homeless? You get paid nothing to have a baby. Put the payment on a sliding scale. The lower the birth rate the higher the pay until you cross your desired threshold (1.8 in this case) at which point it starts going down again. Edit: or just go the other way and tax people if they’re not having babies. Same principle as above but with taking money away.
- reustle 8y ago
  A tax for _not_ having babies? I don't think that will go over so well...
  - MichaelApproved 8y ago
    People in the US are taxed for _not_ having babies and no one is taking to the streets over it. If you have a child, you get a tax deduction (or credit? I forget). That is effectively the same as a tax for not having a baby. Someone with a child pays less taxes than someone without.
    - imustbeevil 8y ago
      That's like saying getting paid is a tax on unemployed people.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - 300bps 8y ago
      If you have a child, you get a tax deduction (or credit? I forget). It’s both actually! I get a deduction for each of my kids. Many people also get a tax credit of $1,000 for each of their children. I don’t qualify because of having too high of an income. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/ten-facts-about-the-child-tax-credit https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/ten-facts-about-the-child-tax-c...
peter303 8y ago
Half of the population cannot have natural children, i.e. the median age of 47 is past menopause. http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-age/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-age/ (Prefrozen or surrogate embryos can make it into their 50s)
sprash 8y ago
If the Japanese government wants to do the right thing, all it has to do is to let the population contract even further until Asset prices begin to freefall. Then everything will be affordable again for young Japanese citizens and a good longterm economic outlook for the future is the best thing you can do to stimulate birthrates. If Japan wants to screw it up, it should allow mass immigration. This way asset prices can stay high and the native Japanese will eventually cease to exist. We will speak of them in the future as great ancient civilization. Similarly we speak of ancient Greeks today.
- parrot_11 8y ago
  I get what you're trying to say and I find it strange that the democrats in the US have hitched their strategy from improving quality of life of people to importing as many low income immigrants as possible who will vote for them. Makes you think how power hungry they've become.
  - parrot_11 8y ago
    Looks like my comment got flagged, would anyone care to point out where I was wrong or how my comment is any different from what is being discussed of the current situation in Japan?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - zozbot123 8y ago
      Suggesting that one political party "have become power hungry" is just not good optics. It's definitely the case though that R policies generally lead to more affordable child-rearing and household formation - and I just can't tell why some people here are bringing up "religiosity" as if it had any relevance to this basic fact. The affordances there are what's very different, regardless of any additional difference in inclination.
      - 8y ago
cauldron 8y ago
Life in Japan seems the most depressing type, harsh weather and earthquake don't help either.
diablolicoo 8y ago
Maybe they should adopt Islam, as it seems very successful in encouraging people to produce the most amount of babies humanly possible. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth
- magic_beans 8y ago
  Nah, all Japan would need to do is teach abstinence-only education.
  - berbec 8y ago
    Works for all those conservative states! My wife's from Louisiana and she can count on one hand the number of female schoolmates who made it out of high school, let alone to 21, without a child.
- dang 8y ago
  We've banned this account for trolling. Creating accounts to do that will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- the_rosentotter 8y ago
  Since this is a very politicized topic, as a Muslim I feel it is worth pointing out that there is nothing in Islam that promotes having many children per se (this topic is even omitted in the linked Wikipedia article). On the contrary, Islam does not forbid contraception or even abortion, up until four months of gestation. The trend described is highly socioeconomic.
archagon 8y ago
Everybody is posting suggestions on how to improve Japan’s birthrate. It seems to me, however, that this is a problem every country will have to deal with in the medium-term. We can’t keep growing indefinitely, and any system developed with perpetual growth in mind will have to change.
- iamnothere 8y ago
  In every discussion about birthrates, this point is raised. And every time, it is ignored, glossed over, or deflected. Overpopulation was briefly a concern in the 1970s, but since then we seem to have forgotten about the problem, at least in the mainstream, media-driven consciousness. I think there may be something fundamental in the human psyche that refuses to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, reducing global population growth (or at least freezing it in place) is essential to prevent an eventual catastrophe. Of course, this is the definition of a self-correcting problem. It's just a shame that it is going to result in so much suffering. "When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death." -Thomas Hobbes

79 points by tshannon 8y ago

dang 8y ago

Url changed from https://www.npr.org/2018/12/21/679103541/japans-population-is-in-rapid-decline https://www.npr.org/2018/12/21/679103541/japans-population-i..., which points to this.

jmpman 8y ago

Do the Japanese do anything to making having children easier? Free daycare?

SenHeng 8y ago
They try very hard to ensure that mothers can’t get good jobs, thus obligating them to stay home and make more babies. Surprisingly, it hasn’t worked very well. Source: lives here. Most of the 30 and above working mothers I’ve encountered in my time are part time workers without benefits.
- farnerup 8y ago
  Perhaps women choose not to start a family at all if it means the end of their careers?
marak830 8y ago
Not free as far as I know, there is a points system though (have a 10 month old, loving in Japan with Japanese wife), that worries my wife a lot. I don't know all the details but she is concerned we won't be able to get our son into a close enough child care to be able to return to work. It's not a massive problem for us, as we can survive on one pay, but it's still a big worry. As for support for young children, well the cost to have our son was quite high(compared to Australia - and this is purely subjective mind you, didn't really research it, just asked family members). If anyone has any specific questions I can ask my wife and reply tomorrow (10pm here).
bayesian_horse 8y ago
I don't believe monetary incentives are a good way to raise birth rates. In the end a child is massively expensive, and no government can afford to compensate parents completely. Child care is partly such a monetary incentive (being subsidize and/or enabling parents to earn more), but women will still lose out greatly by giving birth. From what I know of Japanese culture, all these factors must be even worse than in the West...
- AnthonyMouse 8y ago
  > I don't believe monetary incentives are a good way to raise birth rates. In the end a child is massively expensive, and no government can afford to compensate parents completely. Transfer payments don't consume resources, they only reallocate them. If you enact a larger child tax deduction, people with children will pay lower taxes and people without children will pay correspondingly more. The result will be more consumption of childcare and childhood education and less consumption of tourism and luxury cars, but that doesn't harm the local economy -- if anything it helps it, because the things children need tend to be locally produced, rather than your citizens spending money they earned locally to vacation in the Caribbean. The argument you would have to make is on the other side, that the economy can't afford people to spend time rearing children that they could have spent working. But at a world average level that can't possibly have been true or humans would already be extinct, and economies have much more surplus now than they had in the past. And the cost is inherently short-term, because the net work done by the average human is more than the cost of raising them, so in the long term you get much more from having a working adult than it costs to raise the child. You also don't have to provide enough in tax incentives to cover the entire cost of the child, only enough to push enough potential parents at the margin over the threshold to raise the fertility rate to the population replacement rate. This may still be a significant amount, but nowhere near the entire cost -- and you only have to offer it during the years when the child is in the care of the parents, not for the parents' entire working life, much less the child's, by which point you're already making dividends -- the now-adult child is working and paying taxes that more than pay for the next generation.

erpaa 8y ago

Recent social experiment (East/West Germany) proves one thing: people make babies, when their life is poor and dull. And on the global scale we can state that people make babies when they have no pension nor elderly care. And from nordic countries we can learn that free daycare is the baby killer number one. This is because you can make safely make babies "any time" and then you postpone it until too late. In Americas you need careful financial planning beforehand, considering there is no daycare or schooling or healthcare or much anything, but most succeed and execute their plan.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
hrktb 8y ago
A whole slice of Japanese workers’ have life that squarely fall in “poor and dull”. The overworking cliche is only true to an extent, but still working poor people are plenty and their number rising could arguably be the main factor in the population demographic change. “I don’t make enough money to build a family” is a very prevalent sentiment looking around IRL and on social media, and seems to be corroborated by the stats.
- InGodsName 8y ago
  I don't think it works like that. My overworked friends don't feel that helpless. They can eat out anytime, go to any concert they desire, buy any gadget. They feel secure and safe, they work hard only due to expectation and societal pressure but a few many are self driven And they don't think like ohhh we don't have capacity to have kids. They infact say they can have kids anytime they wish and they aren't missing out on something. It's kinda network effect. You go on social media, you see indepdent guy bunjee jumping and some couples posting photos of their kids, which one gets more likes? Obviously bunjee jumping one. So, we are conditioned to seek inviduality/freedom/lack of family responsibilies. I would say, increasing workplace responsibilities are also to blame. If you are CEO of a company, i think you've same profile of busy time as a normal guy with a baby who has to take of it. But which one gets more praises? obviously the one who takes corporate responsibilites. I don't know if someone gets praises for having kids. Infact, if you are trying to adjust your babys carrier while walking on footpath, people are like wtf? Why can't these guys keep their baby at home. Baby cries, same, wtf....why can't these guys keep their baby at home? You feel embarrassed and feel like you did something wrong.

sgjohnson 8y ago

It wouldn’t be too much of an issue of their welfare system (like any other welfare system) wouldn’t be a ponzi scheme. Their tax rates are already crippling.

wycs 8y ago
Moral hazard. Their welfare system removes the incentive to have children. Could be fixed by giving parents a cut of the tax revenue of their future children.
anticensor 8y ago
UBI-based money would resolve that issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635547

erpaa 8y ago

Good Idea actually. In Norway this issue was studied when it still was still politically possible. The probability of a baby becoming "marginaliserad" ie social fuck-up was 40% for single mothers, 20% for working mothers and "incredibly low" for full-time mothers. Babies have no absolute intrinsic value perse, this is why replacing natives with imported IQ-72 people does not work.

jvln 8y ago
Funny. If imported ppl were IQ=72 they would not hijack Norway wellfear system :D
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  And the immigrants are indispensable in Norway, especially on the lower end of the pay scale. Wages have risen in Norway so much that Norwegians reduce their working hours on a big scale.
- madengr 8y ago
  Most immigrant households in the USA are on welfare. https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Households https://cis.org/Report/Welfare-Use-Immigrant-and-Native-Hous...
  - kaibee 8y ago
    > A September 2015 report by CIS asserted that "immigrant households receive 41 percent more federal welfare than households headed by native-born citizens."[78] The report was criticized on the basis of poor methodology by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute. Nowrasteh said that the report opted not to examine how much welfare immigrants use, but to examine households led by an immigrant so that the report could count the welfare usage of the immigrant's US-born children, which leads to a misleading estimate of immigrant welfare use.[78] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Immigration_Studies "Center of Immigration Studies" seems like a very dubious source of information when even Cato is criticizing them. https://www.cato.org/blog/center-immigration-studies-overstates-immigrant-non-citizen-native-welfare-use https://www.cato.org/blog/center-immigration-studies-oversta...

bunnycorn 8y ago

My country is even worse, 1.31. Japan looks like a kindergarten compared to Portugal.

polotics 8y ago
Not the same thing: Portugal has a very healthy immigrant diaspora, some will go back.
- fortes 8y ago
  Also lots of immigration from former colonies
- smackay 8y ago
  It's pretty standard for people to work abroad for a couple of decades then retire back home to their birthplace and open a pastelaria (cafe). Sadly, the market is pretty saturated and the net contribution to the economy is not that high. From personal experience there are a number of professionals at early stages in their careers that return but quickly they realise that the opportunities are still rather limited and reverse their decision within a few years. The situation is changing, but slowly.
  - bunnycorn 8y ago
    > From personal experience there are a number of professionals at early stages in their careers that return but quickly they realise that the opportunities are still rather limited and reverse their decision within a few years. I don't see any of that. The only people that came back, were those that went to Angola before the oil crash that halted the country.
- bunnycorn 8y ago
  > some will go back If they get back. And will most probably leave their descendants back.

zzz6519003 8y ago

any jap girl wanna get Preg. here? XD

matte_black 8y ago

Ultimately this is a good thing for the planet and our dwindling resources, but too bad for those whose retirement depends on fresh new taxpayers being created in increasingly larger numbers.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago

In a world with 7.7 billion people, why are declining birth rates almost always described as problem?

sannee 8y ago
Because children in Africa are not going to finance retirement of japanese elderly.
- david-gpu 8y ago
  Or at least, not without very substantial immigration.
  - chappi42 8y ago
    Of the former children from Africa, Syria, Afghanistan etc. which came to Germany (Europe) in the last three years a too high percentage does not seem to have the ability (or willingness) to replace a worker in Germany. Immigration alone doesn't help. It may even make matters worse if the 'wrong' people come. (I wrote 'seems' because it is difficult to get objective hard numbers for this emotional subject). Regarding birthrates/immigration: Help without conditions is wrong, I now think. NGO's should not be allowed to 'help in Africa' (and Afghanistan, ...) without making sure that the birthrates drop significantly. Providing modern medicine without enforcing the 'recipients' to adapt the culture/custom will lead to a desaster in those countries (and if 'everybody' migrates - in Europe also (will happen after my lifetime probably)).
    - david-gpu 8y ago
      When immigration is discussed, it is important to separate refugees, illegal immigration, and legal immigration. Being an island nation, Japan is in a good position to control their borders tightly compared with other countries like Germany. It then becomes a question of having a well-designed immigration process that selects young, healthy, highly-educated folks who, most importantly, must speak the local language fluently. Canada has a pretty good system in place for this.

andrewclunn 8y ago

Educated women = population decline. So the future looks African and Muslim. Feminism really is cancer.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

Maybe this will make Japan warm up to the idea of more immigration. Just kidding, of course...

nonamechicken 8y ago
Actually, they seem to be warming up. There was a report a few months back that they want to bring 200k IT professionals from India. Not sure if they actually mean that though. >Japan will open up its doors to about two lakh IT professionals from India, and issue green cards to settle down in Japan and support the country's rapidly expanding IT infrastructure, said Shigeki Maeda, Executive Vice President at Japan External Trade Organisation (JETRO), a government body, here on Thursday. https://m.indiatimes.com/news/india/forget-america-japan-has-2-lakh-jobs-for-indian-techies-will-issue-green-cards-to-settle-down-341149.html https://m.indiatimes.com/news/india/forget-america-japan-has...
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  Having had experience in both cultures, I can’t imagine two more opposite cultures. One is extremely deferential to others, the other you have to think about yourself first otherwise you won’t get anywhere. At least in public interactions.
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    My maybe slightly pessimistic view of Japanese attitudes toward immigration is that they will try to keep the Indians in a state of limbo, ready to deport them at the drop of a hat. Which of course won't work at these kind of numbers, anyway.
    - DaiPlusPlus 8y ago
      Cynically, I note they’ll be easy to spot in a crowd in Tokyo...
    - 05 8y ago
      > will try to keep the Indians in a state of limbo, ready to deport them at the drop of a hat. Which of course won't work at these kind of numbers, anyway Well, worked for the US with H1B/20 year wait time for EB2

marsrover 8y ago

Maybe I’m missing something or not thinking it through but why not pay people to have babies based on their status? It would cause more divide between classes but I feel like the ends might justify the means. Great education and job? You get paid more to have a baby. Homeless? You get paid nothing to have a baby. Put the payment on a sliding scale. The lower the birth rate the higher the pay until you cross your desired threshold (1.8 in this case) at which point it starts going down again. Edit: or just go the other way and tax people if they’re not having babies. Same principle as above but with taking money away.

reustle 8y ago
A tax for _not_ having babies? I don't think that will go over so well...
- MichaelApproved 8y ago
  People in the US are taxed for _not_ having babies and no one is taking to the streets over it. If you have a child, you get a tax deduction (or credit? I forget). That is effectively the same as a tax for not having a baby. Someone with a child pays less taxes than someone without.
  - imustbeevil 8y ago
    That's like saying getting paid is a tax on unemployed people.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - 300bps 8y ago
    If you have a child, you get a tax deduction (or credit? I forget). It’s both actually! I get a deduction for each of my kids. Many people also get a tax credit of $1,000 for each of their children. I don’t qualify because of having too high of an income. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/ten-facts-about-the-child-tax-credit https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/ten-facts-about-the-child-tax-c...

peter303 8y ago

Half of the population cannot have natural children, i.e. the median age of 47 is past menopause. http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-age/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/median-age/ (Prefrozen or surrogate embryos can make it into their 50s)

sprash 8y ago

If the Japanese government wants to do the right thing, all it has to do is to let the population contract even further until Asset prices begin to freefall. Then everything will be affordable again for young Japanese citizens and a good longterm economic outlook for the future is the best thing you can do to stimulate birthrates. If Japan wants to screw it up, it should allow mass immigration. This way asset prices can stay high and the native Japanese will eventually cease to exist. We will speak of them in the future as great ancient civilization. Similarly we speak of ancient Greeks today.

parrot_11 8y ago
I get what you're trying to say and I find it strange that the democrats in the US have hitched their strategy from improving quality of life of people to importing as many low income immigrants as possible who will vote for them. Makes you think how power hungry they've become.
- parrot_11 8y ago
  Looks like my comment got flagged, would anyone care to point out where I was wrong or how my comment is any different from what is being discussed of the current situation in Japan?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    Suggesting that one political party "have become power hungry" is just not good optics. It's definitely the case though that R policies generally lead to more affordable child-rearing and household formation - and I just can't tell why some people here are bringing up "religiosity" as if it had any relevance to this basic fact. The affordances there are what's very different, regardless of any additional difference in inclination.
    - 8y ago

cauldron 8y ago

Life in Japan seems the most depressing type, harsh weather and earthquake don't help either.

diablolicoo 8y ago

Maybe they should adopt Islam, as it seems very successful in encouraging people to produce the most amount of babies humanly possible. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth

magic_beans 8y ago
Nah, all Japan would need to do is teach abstinence-only education.
- berbec 8y ago
  Works for all those conservative states! My wife's from Louisiana and she can count on one hand the number of female schoolmates who made it out of high school, let alone to 21, without a child.
dang 8y ago
We've banned this account for trolling. Creating accounts to do that will eventually get your main account banned as well, so please don't. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
the_rosentotter 8y ago
Since this is a very politicized topic, as a Muslim I feel it is worth pointing out that there is nothing in Islam that promotes having many children per se (this topic is even omitted in the linked Wikipedia article). On the contrary, Islam does not forbid contraception or even abortion, up until four months of gestation. The trend described is highly socioeconomic.

archagon 8y ago

Everybody is posting suggestions on how to improve Japan’s birthrate. It seems to me, however, that this is a problem every country will have to deal with in the medium-term. We can’t keep growing indefinitely, and any system developed with perpetual growth in mind will have to change.

iamnothere 8y ago
In every discussion about birthrates, this point is raised. And every time, it is ignored, glossed over, or deflected. Overpopulation was briefly a concern in the 1970s, but since then we seem to have forgotten about the problem, at least in the mainstream, media-driven consciousness. I think there may be something fundamental in the human psyche that refuses to acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, reducing global population growth (or at least freezing it in place) is essential to prevent an eventual catastrophe. Of course, this is the definition of a self-correcting problem. It's just a shame that it is going to result in so much suffering. "When all the world is overcharged with inhabitants, then the last remedy of all is war, which provideth for every man, by victory or death." -Thomas Hobbes