4 ms·

Japan 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 popula

Japan 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 ago
Problem 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 ago
  When 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 ago
    Yes 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 ago
    Is 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.
    - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
      There's an argument that I think is basically correct that governments are largely free-riding on people's inherent desire for children. This is to say that the value to a government of an additional child is substantially above the incentive they offer the parents of that child. And I think this is because we sort of have this assumption that society having more kids is a thing we don't have to incentivize, and so we haven't really thought about what is the actual cost/value of that incentivization.
      - ethbr0 3y ago
        I'd point to the biggest change being the destruction of extended family living in developed countries, and consequently shifting child care costs directly onto working age parents. Historically, countries got it both ways: - Working age parents contributed the bulk of their time to the economy (historically: male, more recently: both) - Older family members, especially grandparents, contributed free child care Now, geographic mobility and preference have decreased the rate at which grandparents are co-located and available. And, critically, having children later in life has decreased the number of years grandparents are able to help. If governments provided a net-zero cost, high-quality option for childcare, I feel like it'd substantially change potential family decisions. But that's one of the substantially-more-expensive-than-current-benefits options you're talking about.
        AbrahamParangi 3y ago
        Yeah. When my son was born I realized the geographic separation of the extended family in space is clearly unnatural. I don’t mean that in a moralizing way, just that it’s like walking on your hands rather than on your feet. Doable! You could get used to it! But it’s a hell of a lot harder than the alternative.
    - em500 3y ago
      Throughout history childless people faced high risk of destitution in old age. That’s no longer true in most developed countries, and I don’t think anybody would want that to be changed.
- nradov 3y ago
  A misogynistic culture is probably a bigger issue than smartphones in causing some women to decide against having children.
  - lp4vn 3y ago
    You go to the countries with the highest birth rate in the world and they are no feminist paradise. Japan for sure ranks pretty high on women freedom and rights and chances are that the track for these issues has been improving in the country over the years, not declining.
  - MandieD 3y ago
    Thank you! “Why on Earth wouldn’t an educated adult want to be pressured out of her interesting job and back into complete dependence as soon as she has a child? Must be the mobile apps, not that taste of freedom they’ve had…” A year of (mostly) maternal leave is silver, but a legal framework that normalizes working high-skill jobs part-time for several years is absolute gold to prudent young to middle aged women with aging parents but some desire to still have kids. Aging parents: delighted to have them still with us, but on a practical level, not much lightening the child-rearing load. All the capacity for nurture, none of the capacity of chasing down a three year old who saw a dump truck drive by. My small child’s grandparents and dear great-aunts are mid-70s to mid-80s. Two generations of having kids late will do that. My working part-time and flexibly has enabled us to promote my child’s relationships with them and makes it easier for me to help them, which they need a bit more every year. I didn’t have to make the stark choice I see my friends back in the States making: go back to work before the baby is mobile and full time, or give up any serious job for the next several years and get to start over a decade later.
  - RestlessMind 3y ago
    But facts speak otherwise - TFR is very high in traditional conservative societies (see Nigeria).
gizmo 3y ago
Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch. Japan is also not having any kind of managed population decline, unless they choose counterbalance old people dying with immigration. But so far it doesn't look like Japan is eager to embrace immigration. And that will result in a country with many old people and few working-age people. Hard to thrive with such an unbalanced population. That's why the article calls it a crisis.
- jfim 3y ago
  Japan is also 73% mountains, so the populated areas are much denser than a simple population divided by area calculation would give.
- NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
  >Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch. But relatively little of Japan is actually livable: if you look at Honshu, most of the population is in plains on the coast, and most of the inland area mountainous and hardly inhabited. For example, about a third of the population of Japan lives on the Kanto plain which represents just 4.5% of the land area.
- marcusverus 3y ago
  > Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch. This is good rhetoric but poor logic. The mere existence of denser-populated places has no bearing on whether a particular place is too densely populated, any more than the mere existence of more polluted places has any bearing on whether a particular place is too polluted. > Japan is also not having any kind of managed population decline, unless they choose counterbalance old people dying with immigration. The idea that mass immigration is the only way to manage population decline is absurd and unserious.
michaelcampbell 3y ago
> California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated. Get out of the cities. California is _big_.
danjc 3y ago
Physical space has little to do with economic output.
famouswaffles 3y ago
>They needn't fall for the "population growth at all costs" meme, and I hope they don't. It's so tiring reading this nonsense rhetoric over and over again. Population decline resulting from decades of abysmal fertility rates is absolutely a horrible thing. There's no "meme" here to be had. 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. Japan's national pension scheme is "pay as you go", meaning that benefits for retirees today are paid out of the contributions going into the scheme today. Japan has already reached the point of having less than two workers per retiree. By 2050, that number is projected to be more like 1.5. Paying some taxes to social security / medicare / etc works out OK when those go to cover 0.5 to 1 dependent per worker. When that 1 workers income needs to support 1.5 .. 2+ things will get ugly fast. 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)
twobitshifter 3y ago
California is full of public lands https://4printablemap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/national-parks-california-map-and-travel-information-download-free-california-national-parks-map.jpg https://4printablemap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/nationa... Non-public lands you will see on there are the coastline, the desert, and the Central Valley. If you drive the northern parts of highway 1, you’ll see many parts do seem very empty in between SF and LA. Compared to the development along the US east coast it is night and day. If you drive through the Central Valley, you’ll be enveloped in farmland. And the desert is the desert, nearly uninhabited. All of these places feel very sparsely populated.
lumost 3y ago
California is mostly desert, national forest, and fire country. LA, and SD exist in their current state due to large scale water works that bring water from outside of California. For an American comparison, the northeastern US is home to 43% more People than California and is only 17% larger. In both California and the US, the population is concentrated on the coasts. Would it be so surprising that a nation with a large coast, mild weather, and plenty of water would have a large population?
simonebrunozzi 3y ago
Japan: 377,973 km² [0] California: 423,970 km² [1] You are off by roughly 9 times. Not a small mistake. [0]: https://www.worlddata.info/asia/japan/index.php https://www.worlddata.info/asia/japan/index.php [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California
- A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
  Japan: 145,937 sq.m. California: 163,696 sq.m. 163,696 - 10% = 147326.4 I said "10 percent" not "10 times." And it does so happen that Japan is roughly 10% smaller than California. (In fact it's closer to 11% smaller, but I rounded it out.)
  - simonebrunozzi 3y ago
    Oh, my bad. You are right. Somehow when I read your comment I thought you meant 10 times. Not sure why that happened.
yellowapple 3y ago
> California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated. California also has some rather terrible housing density issues (exacerbated by pro-land-speculator policies like Prop 13), which is a big part of why it feels crowded despite having a fraction of the population per square mile.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
RestlessMind 3y ago
> California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated. Tell me you have never been to California, or never ventured out of SF/LA, without telling me so. > A managed population decline could be a good thing for Japan, its people, and its environment. Is the current decline managed? Doesn't look like it. But would be great to see any sources about their government planning this.

fendy3002 3y ago

Problem 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 ago
When 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 ago
  Yes 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 ago
  Is 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.
  - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
    There's an argument that I think is basically correct that governments are largely free-riding on people's inherent desire for children. This is to say that the value to a government of an additional child is substantially above the incentive they offer the parents of that child. And I think this is because we sort of have this assumption that society having more kids is a thing we don't have to incentivize, and so we haven't really thought about what is the actual cost/value of that incentivization.
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      I'd point to the biggest change being the destruction of extended family living in developed countries, and consequently shifting child care costs directly onto working age parents. Historically, countries got it both ways: - Working age parents contributed the bulk of their time to the economy (historically: male, more recently: both) - Older family members, especially grandparents, contributed free child care Now, geographic mobility and preference have decreased the rate at which grandparents are co-located and available. And, critically, having children later in life has decreased the number of years grandparents are able to help. If governments provided a net-zero cost, high-quality option for childcare, I feel like it'd substantially change potential family decisions. But that's one of the substantially-more-expensive-than-current-benefits options you're talking about.
      - AbrahamParangi 3y ago
        Yeah. When my son was born I realized the geographic separation of the extended family in space is clearly unnatural. I don’t mean that in a moralizing way, just that it’s like walking on your hands rather than on your feet. Doable! You could get used to it! But it’s a hell of a lot harder than the alternative.
  - em500 3y ago
    Throughout history childless people faced high risk of destitution in old age. That’s no longer true in most developed countries, and I don’t think anybody would want that to be changed.
nradov 3y ago
A misogynistic culture is probably a bigger issue than smartphones in causing some women to decide against having children.
- lp4vn 3y ago
  You go to the countries with the highest birth rate in the world and they are no feminist paradise. Japan for sure ranks pretty high on women freedom and rights and chances are that the track for these issues has been improving in the country over the years, not declining.
- MandieD 3y ago
  Thank you! “Why on Earth wouldn’t an educated adult want to be pressured out of her interesting job and back into complete dependence as soon as she has a child? Must be the mobile apps, not that taste of freedom they’ve had…” A year of (mostly) maternal leave is silver, but a legal framework that normalizes working high-skill jobs part-time for several years is absolute gold to prudent young to middle aged women with aging parents but some desire to still have kids. Aging parents: delighted to have them still with us, but on a practical level, not much lightening the child-rearing load. All the capacity for nurture, none of the capacity of chasing down a three year old who saw a dump truck drive by. My small child’s grandparents and dear great-aunts are mid-70s to mid-80s. Two generations of having kids late will do that. My working part-time and flexibly has enabled us to promote my child’s relationships with them and makes it easier for me to help them, which they need a bit more every year. I didn’t have to make the stark choice I see my friends back in the States making: go back to work before the baby is mobile and full time, or give up any serious job for the next several years and get to start over a decade later.
- RestlessMind 3y ago
  But facts speak otherwise - TFR is very high in traditional conservative societies (see Nigeria).

gizmo 3y ago

Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch. Japan is also not having any kind of managed population decline, unless they choose counterbalance old people dying with immigration. But so far it doesn't look like Japan is eager to embrace immigration. And that will result in a country with many old people and few working-age people. Hard to thrive with such an unbalanced population. That's why the article calls it a crisis.

jfim 3y ago
Japan is also 73% mountains, so the populated areas are much denser than a simple population divided by area calculation would give.
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
>Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch. But relatively little of Japan is actually livable: if you look at Honshu, most of the population is in plains on the coast, and most of the inland area mountainous and hardly inhabited. For example, about a third of the population of Japan lives on the Kanto plain which represents just 4.5% of the land area.
marcusverus 3y ago
> Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch. This is good rhetoric but poor logic. The mere existence of denser-populated places has no bearing on whether a particular place is too densely populated, any more than the mere existence of more polluted places has any bearing on whether a particular place is too polluted. > Japan is also not having any kind of managed population decline, unless they choose counterbalance old people dying with immigration. The idea that mass immigration is the only way to manage population decline is absurd and unserious.

michaelcampbell 3y ago

> California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated. Get out of the cities. California is _big_.

danjc 3y ago

Physical space has little to do with economic output.

famouswaffles 3y ago

>They needn't fall for the "population growth at all costs" meme, and I hope they don't. It's so tiring reading this nonsense rhetoric over and over again. Population decline resulting from decades of abysmal fertility rates is absolutely a horrible thing. There's no "meme" here to be had. 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. Japan's national pension scheme is "pay as you go", meaning that benefits for retirees today are paid out of the contributions going into the scheme today. Japan has already reached the point of having less than two workers per retiree. By 2050, that number is projected to be more like 1.5. Paying some taxes to social security / medicare / etc works out OK when those go to cover 0.5 to 1 dependent per worker. When that 1 workers income needs to support 1.5 .. 2+ things will get ugly fast. 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)

twobitshifter 3y ago

California is full of public lands https://4printablemap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/national-parks-california-map-and-travel-information-download-free-california-national-parks-map.jpg https://4printablemap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/nationa... Non-public lands you will see on there are the coastline, the desert, and the Central Valley. If you drive the northern parts of highway 1, you’ll see many parts do seem very empty in between SF and LA. Compared to the development along the US east coast it is night and day. If you drive through the Central Valley, you’ll be enveloped in farmland. And the desert is the desert, nearly uninhabited. All of these places feel very sparsely populated.

lumost 3y ago

California is mostly desert, national forest, and fire country. LA, and SD exist in their current state due to large scale water works that bring water from outside of California. For an American comparison, the northeastern US is home to 43% more People than California and is only 17% larger. In both California and the US, the population is concentrated on the coasts. Would it be so surprising that a nation with a large coast, mild weather, and plenty of water would have a large population?

simonebrunozzi 3y ago

Japan: 377,973 km² [0] California: 423,970 km² [1] You are off by roughly 9 times. Not a small mistake. [0]: https://www.worlddata.info/asia/japan/index.php https://www.worlddata.info/asia/japan/index.php [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California

A_D_E_P_T 3y ago
Japan: 145,937 sq.m. California: 163,696 sq.m. 163,696 - 10% = 147326.4 I said "10 percent" not "10 times." And it does so happen that Japan is roughly 10% smaller than California. (In fact it's closer to 11% smaller, but I rounded it out.)
- simonebrunozzi 3y ago
  Oh, my bad. You are right. Somehow when I read your comment I thought you meant 10 times. Not sure why that happened.

yellowapple 3y ago

> California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated. California also has some rather terrible housing density issues (exacerbated by pro-land-speculator policies like Prop 13), which is a big part of why it feels crowded despite having a fraction of the population per square mile.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

RestlessMind 3y ago

> California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated. Tell me you have never been to California, or never ventured out of SF/LA, without telling me so. > A managed population decline could be a good thing for Japan, its people, and its environment. Is the current decline managed? Doesn't look like it. But would be great to see any sources about their government planning this.