5 ms·
A fertility rate of 1.3 is still a demographic crisis. Just because the neighbors degraded to the same level also isn't supposed to be a point of pride. Japan
by Fordec 4y ago
A fertility rate of 1.3 is still a demographic crisis. Just because the neighbors degraded to the same level also isn't supposed to be a point of pride.
Japan at 1.3 and China at 1.2 are both far below replacement rate of 2.1 and both are heavily detrimental to a nations economic and demographic outlook and on par with only the European with the worst outlooks like Spain, Italy and Ukraine.
- tstrimple 4y agoI wonder how long it will take our societies to stop asking questions like how can we make people have more babies, and start asking questions like is it smart to plan our entire economy around continuous exponential population growth.
- jmole 4y agoreplacement rate is steady-state, not exponential growth. when you have a country with 80 million homes, and 50 years later you only need 30 million of them, you're basically inviting decay to set in.
- samtp 4y agoWhy can you not repurpose the land used for those 20 million houses back into green space or better uses for the remaining 30 million? Not to mention that there is much less competition for resources when the population is 60% of what it used to be. You're acting like this is a major problem, but it seems like a great opportunity.
- bobthepanda 4y agoThe depopulation is not even. You can’t really abandon a few people in a neighborhood without services ethically or legally, and the last holdouts may not move for anything. Similar issues occurred in Detroit and other Rust Belt areas, and those had extreme population declines but could not abandon services and infrastructure.
- samtp 4y ago> the last holdouts may not move for anything I mean eminent domain has been used for centuries (even pretty regularly today) for this exact purpose.
- bobthepanda 4y agoWhich requires compensation at fair market values. If your entity needs to save money by closing up shop they probably can’t pay for eminent domain (which is what we saw in the Rust Belt)
- jahewson 4y agoWho’s going to pay to repurpose the land? There’s zero economic value for anyone involved. Plus the workforce is half what it was, they have other things to do. That’s assuming they’re not already broke from spending 20 years supporting retirees that outnumber them 2:1 while watching their own businesses halve in size.
- samtp 4y agoSaying there is 0 economic value in repurposing land is just silly. And just because a business has half the customers does not mean that the standard of living gets cut in half. You're only looking at one side of the economic equation.
- Fordec 4y ago2.1 is steady state of just one for one replace those dying with new people. What numbers around 1.0 are are logarithmic decline as the population functionally keeps halving which is also hard to plan an economy around paying for two old people and child on the taxes per single worker.
- csdvrx 4y agoThen maybe the welfare state is no longer suited to the country population profile, and each person show be saving for their own retirement and children?
- Fordec 4y agoThat's what people do, but to do so they need to work in growth industries and geographies. Otherwise you don't make enough to do just that. Thus they go somewhere that does, in this case Tokyo mostly. Which makes the situation worse for the prefectures that they leave causing brain drain, and now those that stayed need to have the taxation to cover for the two they were already on the hook for, and now the two that the person gone to individualistically "save for their own retirement". This generally leads to services and infrastructure getting shut down. Not more stuff spread out to less people because certain modern lifestyle features, things like hospitals, need a minimum level of patients and experts to function well above zero.
- Tiktaalik 4y agoa very good plan right up until you fall off a ladder
- klipt 4y ago> each person show be saving for their own retirement Saving where, the stock market? I wouldn't be surprised if a shrinking population means a shrinking stock market too.
- Thorrez 4y agoYou can save money but what are you going to do with it? If there aren't enough young people providing the goods and services the retired people need in retirement, the prices of those goods and services will skyrocket and many who saved won't be able to afford the goods and services.
- midoridensha 4y agoSocieties are asking questions about how to maintain a stable population, not achieve exponential growth. As it is, they're facing exponential shrinkage.
- Xixi 4y agoReading "The Limits to Growth" and having a passing understanding of the consequences of global warming will have you start to ask these kind of questions fairly quickly. The Shift Project [1] did exactly that for France: they elaborated a plan to completely transform the French economy with the explicit goal of not wrecking climate further, aptly called "Le Plan de transformation de l'économie française" (I assume the name is understandable to an English speaker). An interesting take of this plan is that instead of thinking in USD (or EUR, being in France), they reason strictly in terms of physical resources available, like land, water, oil, wind, sun, crops, wood, various ores, etc. Resources available within the next few decades, not in many centuries with future techs... [1] http://theshiftproject.org/en/home/ http://theshiftproject.org/en/home/
- astrange 4y agoDegrowth is completely false and is basically cope invented by the British to explain why it's actually good that their economy is so bad. Economic growth does not mean using more resources (because that's expensive), it means more productive use of the same resources. The US emits less carbon and uses less water than it did in the 60s with a much larger economy. (70s US degrowth environmentalism, like Limits to Growth, Cities as Growth Engines, The Population Bomb is the main cause of the US housing crisis due to NIMBYism, but also caused China to doom itself via the one-child policy, so the US wins yet again.)
- jakobnissen 4y agoDoes that also factor into account that manufacturing has largely been moved to other countries? That is, does the average US consumer spend fewer resources than in 1960, taking imports into account? I'd guess resource usage has grown a LOT
- astrange 4y agoYes. Oh, and forests are growing back some places too, though I don't know about the US on that one. (That's why technological advances are good - it's harder to get clean energy than is it to burn wood for warmth, but it's worth it once you have it.)
- monus21 4y agoThis has little to do with economics. Age 0-18: You are under the care of society. Age 18-60: You are a productive member of society. Age 60+: You are under the care of society again. This is always how humans have lived.
- astrange 4y agoPeople 60+ are productive for society because they can be grandparents. Otherwise we wouldn't have evolved living that long.
- kerpotgh 4y ago[dead]
- lmm 4y agoSure, but the people saying Japan needs to become more like western Europe, or like non-Japan countries generally, to solve its demographic crisis, are barking up the wrong tree.
- Bayart 4y ago"Non-Japan countries", also known as the rest of the world. Despite the beliefs of Japanese nationalists and Japan fetichists, it's not a special country and there's no special solution for it.