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Interesting article. The line of argumentation goes like this: 1) The birth rate in Japan has been below-replacement since 1974. 2) As a result, the populatio

Interesting article. The line of argumentation goes like this: 1) The birth rate in Japan has been below-replacement since 1974. 2) As a result, the population is shrinking. 3) Because the population is shrinking, there isn't enough workers. Alright, I'm with you so far. 4) Therefore, more women need to get full-time jobs. Uh... ? I feel like I'm going nuts. Everywhere in the prestige media the solution presented is "women should just have a full-time job and raise 2.1 children at the same time". But does that actually exist anywhere? I hear about paid child leave in the Nordic countries as a solution. But Sweden has a birth rate of 1.76, Denmark 1.73, Norway 1.56... and the curve isn't even trending up! Paid child leave and government childcare is great and cool, but as a solution to below-replacement fertility it clearly and obviously doesn't work, and for some reason nobody wants to say this. The other answer is immigration, but the problem then is then you're competing with every other country in the world, and Japanese firms pay way, way, way below FAANG.

gremloni 5y ago
Seriously, women getting full time jobs just means further population decreases.
nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago
> The other answer is immigration... Transplanting a brain to save the body?
- fomine3 5y ago
  Broken analogy.
  - MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
    Broken but interesting. We might learn something about the brain by observing what happens when you put it in another body. I'd like to think that the body would affect the brain in dramatic and transformative ways, but on the other hand the body might just establish a class system that eventually starves both systems.
kgc 5y ago
Maybe everyone can go part time and focus more on raising children.
tonfreed 5y ago
Not too loudly, we want the people with comms degrees to feel useful when they write this kind of article
FooBarBizBazz 5y ago
"General! Our marines are outnumbered! Zerglings are eating them alive!" "Send in the SCVs!" "But where will we get our minerals from? How will we train more marines?" "Send in the SCVs!" ... I mean, it made sense as a short-term measure during WW2 to boost arms production. But you can't run a society this way long term. It's insane. "Help us, we're starving!" "Just eat more of your seed corn; trust me!" ... It's like a society that never figured out crop rotation. Yeah, you can grow corn for a while, but you also need to rotate in some cover-crops and nitrogen-fixers. You need to let the soil rest and restore fertility. You can't have it pumping out economic output season after season.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  But isn't that the problem with modern capitalism? that is, the assumption of unlimited growth.
  - sbierwagen 5y ago
    (The USSR had an above-replacement fertility rate under Stalin. Population and GDP growth is not exactly a capitalist thing.) Barring anything better, we're stuck with the null hypothesis: getting out a ruler and extending the trend line into the future. If the population is growing, then eventually Japan would have billions of people where there are currently hundreds of millions. There was much speculation in the 50s on how you could deal with that scenario if it happened, but it's not looking very likely now. If the population is exactly static, one person born for every death: not too bad. You could call it "stagnation" if you wanted to be negative. If the population is declining: it will eventually hit zero, and the country will cease to exist. Japan's population declined by 1.8 million people between 2010 and 2019. If the decline is linear, (which it won't be, considering their age distribution) then that has them hitting zero in 2089! If you think that scenario won't happen, then please provide your reason. "That would be terrible, so it won't" isn't a reason. The UN population projections show European and North American fertility rates leveling off and even increasing. That would be very good news, if true! Fortunately, they explain their reasoning: https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Highlights.pdf https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Hig... >The fact that fertility preferences remain close to two children per woman, even as realized fertility has fallen well below that level, suggests that the fertility rate in low-fertility countries may increase as populations learn to manage and mitigate some or all impeding factors. The trend in many countries towards gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as expanded access to sexual and reproductive health care and services, also indicates that it may become possible for more women and couples in current low-fertility countries to achieve their desired family size, eventually raising the average fertility levels. Given that a growing number of countries is expressing a desire to increase the fertility rate and that some have achieved this outcome, supported by government policies and programmes, a rebound in the fertility trend in current low-fertility countries seems the most plausible future trajectory over the long run. I am not seeing where this optimism is coming from. A graph of fertility rates for a basket of European countries shows a pronounced sub-replacement horizontal trend, with no sustained growth or decay. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=ES-SE-DE-GB https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location... This foretells a gentle decline, rather than the sharp crash that's apparently in the cards for China, Japan and South Korea; but provides absolutely no evidence that more "reproductive health services" will rescue us.
lm28469 5y ago
Meh, the replacement rate issue is a temporary problem. We can't just make more and more kids to sustain the unsustainable... better hit the wall early on and rebuild something smarter than continue in the direction we're heading

gremloni 5y ago

Seriously, women getting full time jobs just means further population decreases.

nodejs_rulez_1 5y ago

> The other answer is immigration... Transplanting a brain to save the body?

fomine3 5y ago
Broken analogy.
- MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
  Broken but interesting. We might learn something about the brain by observing what happens when you put it in another body. I'd like to think that the body would affect the brain in dramatic and transformative ways, but on the other hand the body might just establish a class system that eventually starves both systems.

kgc 5y ago

Maybe everyone can go part time and focus more on raising children.

tonfreed 5y ago

Not too loudly, we want the people with comms degrees to feel useful when they write this kind of article

FooBarBizBazz 5y ago

"General! Our marines are outnumbered! Zerglings are eating them alive!" "Send in the SCVs!" "But where will we get our minerals from? How will we train more marines?" "Send in the SCVs!" ... I mean, it made sense as a short-term measure during WW2 to boost arms production. But you can't run a society this way long term. It's insane. "Help us, we're starving!" "Just eat more of your seed corn; trust me!" ... It's like a society that never figured out crop rotation. Yeah, you can grow corn for a while, but you also need to rotate in some cover-crops and nitrogen-fixers. You need to let the soil rest and restore fertility. You can't have it pumping out economic output season after season.

arvinsim 5y ago
But isn't that the problem with modern capitalism? that is, the assumption of unlimited growth.
- sbierwagen 5y ago
  (The USSR had an above-replacement fertility rate under Stalin. Population and GDP growth is not exactly a capitalist thing.) Barring anything better, we're stuck with the null hypothesis: getting out a ruler and extending the trend line into the future. If the population is growing, then eventually Japan would have billions of people where there are currently hundreds of millions. There was much speculation in the 50s on how you could deal with that scenario if it happened, but it's not looking very likely now. If the population is exactly static, one person born for every death: not too bad. You could call it "stagnation" if you wanted to be negative. If the population is declining: it will eventually hit zero, and the country will cease to exist. Japan's population declined by 1.8 million people between 2010 and 2019. If the decline is linear, (which it won't be, considering their age distribution) then that has them hitting zero in 2089! If you think that scenario won't happen, then please provide your reason. "That would be terrible, so it won't" isn't a reason. The UN population projections show European and North American fertility rates leveling off and even increasing. That would be very good news, if true! Fortunately, they explain their reasoning: https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Highlights.pdf https://population.un.org/wpp/Publications/Files/WPP2019_Hig... >The fact that fertility preferences remain close to two children per woman, even as realized fertility has fallen well below that level, suggests that the fertility rate in low-fertility countries may increase as populations learn to manage and mitigate some or all impeding factors. The trend in many countries towards gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as expanded access to sexual and reproductive health care and services, also indicates that it may become possible for more women and couples in current low-fertility countries to achieve their desired family size, eventually raising the average fertility levels. Given that a growing number of countries is expressing a desire to increase the fertility rate and that some have achieved this outcome, supported by government policies and programmes, a rebound in the fertility trend in current low-fertility countries seems the most plausible future trajectory over the long run. I am not seeing where this optimism is coming from. A graph of fertility rates for a basket of European countries shows a pronounced sub-replacement horizontal trend, with no sustained growth or decay. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=ES-SE-DE-GB https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location... This foretells a gentle decline, rather than the sharp crash that's apparently in the cards for China, Japan and South Korea; but provides absolutely no evidence that more "reproductive health services" will rescue us.

lm28469 5y ago

Meh, the replacement rate issue is a temporary problem. We can't just make more and more kids to sustain the unsustainable... better hit the wall early on and rebuild something smarter than continue in the direction we're heading