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Japan’s population fell by 800k last year as demographic crisis accelerates
- michaelcampbell 3y agoFor people interested in demographics and its consequences, Peter Zeihan (all over Youtube) has a lot of very interesting research into it.
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- enkid 3y agoZeihan says a lot of interesting stuff, but his track record is pretty spotty.
- nradov 3y agoAre the other analysts with more accurate track records? Which major issues has he gotten wrong? https://zeihan.com/demographics-part-7-the-northeast-asian-crash/ https://zeihan.com/demographics-part-7-the-northeast-asian-c...
- jmoak3 3y agoHe’s incredibly smart and on the whole on the right track. He gets too excited sometimes, like when I saw him give a lecture and seriously say we’d have 9-10% inflation YoY last year and just as much this year IIRC. I recommend his book to anyone who is interested, he’s not a pundit or anything and has lots to chew on!
- davely 3y agoI just finished his book, “ The End of the World Is Just the Beginning.” It was a pretty fascinating (though alarmist) thesis on how a number of countries are poised for “demographic collapse” due to aging and shrinking populations and what that will ultimately mean for globalization.
- fooker 3y agoI have seen people online accusing this guy of being a CIA stooge, and some other people saying he’s controlled opposition paid by the CCP. If he has managed to get both of these monikers, his analysis must be fairly legitimate.
- yxre 3y agoJapan is a fascinating case. It's GDP is stable despite a shrinking population. Is it only staying stable because of the population change? If western countries with a similar birth rate problem stopped immigration, would western countries have a similar economic outlook as Japan?
- answerisyes 3y agoGrowing gdp mostly involves fixing the bottlenecks on production. IT and technological efficiencies, integration between companies usually goes a longer way than importing the 354564th taxi driver
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago> IT and technological efficiencies, integration between companies usually goes a longer way than importing the 354564th taxi driver /confused Germany noises
- enkid 3y agoDo you have any evidence of this? The more people you have the bigger the gap usually is.
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- A_D_E_P_T 3y agoJapan has 126M people crammed into a nation 10% smaller than California. California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated. A managed population decline could be a good thing for Japan, its people, and its environment. They needn't fall for the "population growth at all costs" meme, and I hope they don't.
- fendy3002 3y agoProblem is, is it something that can be stabilized / reversed? Or will it be somehing that can spiraling into a continuous decline and dangerous? I read somewhere that a rather high ratio of fertile-age women there don't want children. Smartphone and abundance of cheap entertainment plus tight schedule and budget of modern world (and more other reasons) makes them prefer childless lifestyle.
- pjc50 3y agoWhen you can easily get a seat on the rush hour subway people's attitudes may start changing. Really, if _you_ want _other people_ to have children, you have to negotiate with and offer them something. That seems to be missing from so much of this demographic discourse.
- fendy3002 3y agoYes I believe adjustment on population density and benefits will change the birth rate somehow. When babies are starting to be investment than outright expenses will change people's mind. However will it happen when the situation is still good or when it is already in danger. Too many elderly that need to be supported by too few productive population is a dangerous situation.
- ethanbond 3y agoIs that missing? Lots of countries have all sorts of incentives. And of course it’s strictly not true that direct incentives have been required throughout history, so it’s worth asking why they’d be required now and whether those factors can/should be changed directly.
- dbg31415 3y agoI think it would be nice to have less people. Like going back in time when there wasn’t as much traffic.
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- solumunus 3y agoIt’s a romantic idea but unfortunately the global financial system is basically a Ponzi scheme that relies on growing populations.
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- INTPenis 3y agoIt's funny how headlines like this are instantly alarming, but they really shouldn't be. A natural population decline is the best thing we can have right now. It's not hard to make babies, it's in fact too easy. Imagine if a breed of deer living in a restricted space naturally controlled its population in relation to the resources of their living space. That would be amazing! More close to home, but a lot less popular, is the fact that the population of Croatia has also been steadily declining ever since the massive exodus of the last civil war. From 1990 to 2023 the population of Croatia has declined from 4.8m to 4m, that's an even greater decline than Japan viewed in percent of population. Very alarming if it's part of your culture and language disappearing.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoYou’re not wrong, but our entire economic system is built on the idea that the pensioners will be supported by a steady stream of tax paying younger workers. When that stream collapses, paying for the pensioners becomes much harder.
- INTPenis 3y agoSure, but 800k out of 120m people is nowhere near affecting the senior citizens of the future. Time will tell if it's a stabilizing change that will oscillate around some baseline, or if it will continue to drastically decline. And even if a drastic decline is the future we're looking at, there is no shortage of immigrants who are willing to take menial jobs for low pay. As far as I know Japan hasn't been an inviting immigration destination so far. There are policy changes to make that could easily inject some population to the country.
- pjc50 3y ago> Imagine if a breed of deer living in a restricted space naturally controlled its population in relation to the resources in their living space Indeed. People seem to forget that the alternative to "contraception-limited" is "death-limited". In Scotland, since killing all the natural predators, we have to keep culling the deer in order to maintain the ecosystem.
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- remote_phone 3y agoJapan needs to move to a 4 day work week. Their culture and lifestyle is sucking the will to live from their young people. Moving to a 4 day work week will help the kids loosen up and feeling confident that they’re not bringing kids into a dystopian matrix-like world where all you do is work and then die.
- xyzzy4747 3y agoThey should tax people who don't have kids, subsidize child care, enforce long maternity leave, etc. Maybe the people who have kids should rake in dividends from the people who don't have kids.
- willmadden 3y agoExactly, pragmatic and effective while preserving Japanese culture. I would add qualifications that the family must be a nuclear family that is otherwise not on public assistance. Just give them huge tax breaks for having 4+ kids. The trend would reverse in 9 months.
- xyzzy4747 3y agoI disagree about the public assistance part especially for a country like Japan. I'm not sure if anyone cares about this anymore, but ethnically Japanese people will become nearly extinct if they don't make some radical changes. They should massively incentivize people - even financially poor Japanese - to have kids. Just because someone has a career in e.g. a Japanese bank moving spreadsheets around doesn't mean they should be favored.
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago> Just give them huge tax breaks for having 4+ kids. The trend would reverse in 9 months. Hungary has already tried this and it doesn't work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary > "The Second Orbán Government made saving the nation from the demographic abyss a key aspect and therefore has introduced generous breaks for large families and greatly increased social benefits for all families. Those with three or more children pay virtually no taxes." S.Korea is trying regular cash payouts: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/12/south-korea-splashes-the-cash-in-scramble-to-fix-fertility-crisis https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/12/south-korea-splashe... Evidently much more is required. Or it could be that the problem isn't solely financial. In heavily urbanized countries, most people apparently prefer easy modern entertainments to the rigors and stresses of parenting.
- famouswaffles 3y agoEverytime this comes up, I always see the "this good, Overpopulation!" rhetoric and it's so wrong. Population decline resulting from decades of abysmal fertility rates is absolutely a horrible thing. When people stop working, they stop contributing to society but they don't stop taking from it. For as long as human society has formed, the solution was either the working population being productive enough for everyone else or the non working dying off soon after the fact. When fertility rates are in the shitter for a long time, you guarantee that at some point, the working population will be far far lower than what is necessary to support the rest. A demographic and societal collapse will ensue. Many benefits and safety nets for many people including the working will cease to exist simply because it can no longer be sustained. Once this hits in full force, it will last decades. It's that simple. And it has nothing absolutely nothing to do with capitalism or socialism or communism or whatever -ism you might want to scapegoat. For as long as humans need to work to survive this will be a problem. The problems Japan is having, South Korea is looking to speedrun. It's so bad that it's too late to forestall a collapse. Even if the country magically started having replenishing birth rates immediately, in at most a few decades, we'll be seeing a collapse that would last at least 20 years. This is the best case scenario. It's straight up apocalyptic. This is what a population table looks like for a country that had a fertility rate of 6 at year 0 and then an extinction level rate of 1 for decades (SK is actually decidedly worse at 0.78 now). (148) Year 0: 4 sixties, 11 forties, 33 twenties, 100 newborns, (194) Year 20: 11 sixties, 33 forties, 100 twenties, 50 newborns (208) Year 40: 33 sixties, 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns (187) Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns (93) Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns (46) Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns (23) Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn It's like climate change. You go decades with everything looking normal at first glance. By the time, everything doesn't look so normal it's to late to do anything other than save your population from extinction. (Assuming you can even do that. A lot of people seem to miss the fact that not one country that has suffered declining fertility rates has managed to reverse the trend despite trying for decades. Not one)
- iandanforth 3y agoYou're doing the 'exponential trends will continue to be exponential forever' thing.
- willmadden 3y agoIf this was a crisis, which is highly questionable, isn’t the simple answer to offer generous tax incentives for families that have 4+ children while staying off of public assistance?
- locallost 3y agoIt would be a simple answer if it was shown to work. But the results in other countries are at best iffy. I live in Germany and get both tax breaks and cold hard cash per child, but the results are not encouraging. As a parent it makes sense to me, I cannot imagine thinking about kids and having them for tax breaks.
- makeitdouble 3y ago＞ I cannot imagine thinking about kids and having them for tax breaks. The reverse is true though: many couples wanting kids will bail at the price to pay without serious aids, and feel it would be a disservice to their kids to raise them in too poor conditions. Many couples won't make long term plans (including marrying/having kids) if they don't see a stable financial path down the line. Now, the gov aids and labor laws provisions need to be significant to have a visible effect (e.g. a hundred or two bucks per child per months won't cut it). I don't know how far Germany went.
- locallost 3y agoGermany specifically gives a lot of incentives, not just money and tax breaks but also subsidized kindergartens, and the numbers are stil poor. Not terrible, but less than adequate. E.g. the typical monthly fee would be enough for two days of kindergarten in Switzerland. So I am not really convinced those incentives work. It's an emotional decision, you either want kids or not. The economical decision is IMHO mostly about how much time you have. E.g. if you work 60 hours a week it will be tough to make that decision.
- makeitdouble 3y agoYes, it really comes down to emotions and perception at the end of the day, and people's optimism really gets reflected in birth numbers in our societies. I was looking at the comments on the r/germany about wanting kids but not being sure to be able to "afford" it [0]. This is a pretty common refrain for the Japanese youth as well, even going to down to not being able to afford dating as they're expected to spend money on courting, wining and dining in general. https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/14jhwdn/after_10_years_in_germany_im_asking_myself_if_i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/14jhwdn/after_10_y...