10 ms·

Japan's birth rate falls to a record low as the number of marriages also drops

54 points by jnord 2y ago

Talkative32 2y ago
[dead]
decremental 2y ago
[dead]
gauravphoenix 2y ago
A highly insightful book on Japanese culture on what makes people reluctant to be part of society (getting married, having children etc) is "Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation" https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1400077796/ https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1400077796/
reducesuffering 2y ago
In 80 years, societies are going from 2 children supporting each adult, to each child supporting 2 adults. That's a 4x elderly burden that I don't think is significantly ameliorated by lack of kids. Socialized medical care for the elderly around the developed world is already barely able to manage. Elderly countries like Japan, Greece, Italy, and Portgual are already at debt-to-GDP burdens of 261%, 177%, 145%, and 116%, respectively. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe every 100% debt-to-GDP at current 5% rates is like an extra indefinite 5%/year tax taken from everyone, with no benefit (you already got the benefit in the past).
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe every 100% debt-to-GDP at current 5% rates is like an extra indefinite 5%/year tax taken from everyone You're wrong. You need to consider the real returns on that debt, its real burden, and interagency holdings (e.g. the Treasury paying the Fed interest). Also, that debt is serviced with taxes. Adding it to the tax burden is double counting. The debt is analogous to taxation. But not so much that you can numerically equate them.
  - reducesuffering 2y ago
    > real returns on that debt, its real burden It's real GDP, and it's not being inflated away. It theoretically attempts to, (2% inflation), but because more real debt is taken out, GDP still goes from 100% -> 105% the next year. The real returns on this debt is hardly investments and infrastructure that will make more things in the future, it's mostly social spending like healthcare. > that debt is serviced with taxes. Adding it to the tax burden is double counting. If I would normally pay 35% taxes for the country's defense and social spending, but there's also servicing interest, I now have to pay 40% taxes. So it's an extra indefinite 5%/yr tax like I said, but I only got 35% of defense and social benefits.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > If I would normally pay 35% taxes for the country's defense and social spending, but there's also servicing interest, I now have to pay 40% taxes This is where interagency holdings and real debt burdens kick in. (Also, again, that 35% already includes interest payments already.) Let's assume a rule that says no new borrowing and no spending cuts. There would need to be tax raises. But if we know one thing, we know it would be less than 5%. Even if we remove the 20% held by agencies [1], which is absolutely not a clean procedure, we know the number would still be less than 4%. Because that debt is nominally denominated, and you're making interest payments in the future with less-valuable money, and, of course, the double counting. This is before we even touch monetising the debt. Taxation is a bad mental model for thinking about our federal debt. It's in some ways more benign, and other ways much nastier, than a simple tax increase. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...
      - reducesuffering 2y ago
        > (Also, again, that 35% already includes interest payments already.) Again, no, because if the 35% included interest payments, then if hypothetically there were no interest payments, my tax burden would be 30% now (no 5% taxes to interest). I understand that if nominal debt remained the same, then 2% inflation would eventually whittle it away (or whichever inflation/monetizing rate), but effectively whether by monetary inflation or taxes, taxpayers still pays the same amount, just a matter of when and in what way.
- thefz 2y ago
  Our bad, we should not have built a society based on debt and now we are going to take the brunt of it, there needs to be an inflection point to turn things around, though.
inflationq 2y ago
I wonder when people will make the connection between monetary inflation and birth rates. You can also see the crash in birth rates even in rural provinces of Turkey.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > wonder when people will make the connection between monetary inflation and birth rates It's been studied. The connections are as non-obvious as they are fascinating. In the Pacific Islands, a "1% increase in CPI (inflation) will decrease total fertility rate by 0.41%" [1]. (This effect was much stronger than female education and real GDP changes.) This supports your hypothesis. When we look at rich countries, however, we find that "an increase in annual inflation of 1 percentage point would bring an increase of 0.06 percentage point in the annual growth of the total population" [2]. Inflation increases fertility! A clue as to why might be found in the U.K., where among "home owners" they found "evidence of positive but temporary effects of house prices on fertility," with "a 10% increase in the average house price in a given month increases the fertility of home owners by 2.4% in the following year" [3]. Among renters, on the other hand, "fertility rates are lower by the order of 2 to 4%. Fertility rates for this group remain lower three years later, suggesting house price increases affect completed fertility as well as the timing of births." [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8457485/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8457485/ Table 8 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1059056018300078 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10590... [3] https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/research/housing/publications/do-high-prices-deter-fertility.html3 https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/research/housing/publications/...
- SSJPython 2y ago
  Japanese inflation is only a recent phenomenon. Prior to the pandemic, they were experiencing deflation and the BoJ was doing everything in its power to get some inflation. The falling birth rate, on the other hand, has been going on for far longer than monetary inflation. Falling birth rates are often correlated with discretionary income levels and women's education.
pylua 2y ago
Only six years to turn that around? That is a mammoth task. I’m not sure that will be possible.
rainsford 2y ago
What's most interesting to me about this trend around the developed world is that nobody has put together a truly compelling theory as to the root cause. There's lots of obviously politically motivated theories, like liberals saying it's because of soul crushing capitalism run amok or conservatives saying it's because women aren't kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, but for as consequential as the whole thing is it seems very light on legitimate analysis (at least that I've seen).
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  For everyone else who heard this for the first time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_and_pregnant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_and_pregnant
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  There have been scientific studies done by anthropologists, but they're a different clique to economists and they basically "don't talk to each other". Essentially, there's a sort-of phase diagram for the optimal human reproduction strategy where the axes are things like "income inequality" and "environmental stress". You can then color in patches of the diagram with what strategy members of a society will settle on. For example, high-stress, high-inequality societies practice polygamy. The game-theoretic logic is that women need a partner that can provide consistent excess calories. If you can't feed your kids in just one year out of twenty, they die. It doesn't matter what the average income is, just how steady the income is. In societies like that, only the richest 10% of men can provide this, so they all have 10 wives. The other 90% of men remain bachelors and often participate in tribal warfare, exacerbating the problem. Saudi Arabia used to be like this, and parts of Africa still is. Similarly, in "one corner" of this graph is super rich men in stable societies, where their optimal reproduction strategy is serial monogamy to young wives. Look at Hollywood A-listers or billionaries to see this play out in real life. Japan got stuck in a part of the phase diagram where the optimal reproduction strategy is "don't."
  - dalyons 2y ago
    im always kinda skeptical of these evolutionary game theory type theories when applying them to modern developed societies. Maybe they were true in the past, but we have largely removed ourselves from natural selection in any of the traditional ways. It doesn't mean there arent other game selection mechanisms, but they're likely very different to 1000s of years ago. Like, for example broadly no-one is having their kids all starve to death in modern japan.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ldehaan 2y ago
[dead]
Barrin92 2y ago
Genuine question, why instead of going down this evidently ineffective route of trying to dial back family structures and social relations we don't just go in the opposite direction? Fire up a Manhattan project for longevity and age related disease. Not even talking about reversing aging, but if we could give the average person 100 healthy and productive years and minimize the cost of aging we've at the very least gotten rid of the single biggest pressing issue of the demographic changes.
- __warlord__ 2y ago
  I think this will backfire sooner than later, Imagine a dictator living "100 healthy and productive years" or a billionaire amazing more and more wealth for longer whereas poor people are kept working for longer with poorer and poorer conditions.
xeornet 2y ago
At least they won’t open up to mass immigration to replace the native population - something being looked at as a solution in the West. https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/unpd-egm_200010_un_2001_replacementmigration.pdf https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
- pupppet 2y ago
  That’s not replacing the native population, it’s replacing the births that never took place.
  - marcusverus 2y ago
    The Mexicans who lived in Texas in the early 19th century saw a relentless stream of Anglo settlers from the USA and beyond. Within a couple of decades, Texas demographics changed radically, and society changed along with it. The previous (Mexican) inhabitants' children went on to grow up in a society with a radically different culture with a different language. Imagine a Mexican child coming home from a visit to a white-majority, English-language town. Imagine them complaining about the feeling of otherness in their own country, and asking their parents why they allowed themselves to be replaced by the Anglos. Imagine their parent bending over, looking that child in the eye, and saying: "ackshually, they didn't "replace" us, chico. They merely replaced births that never took place."
    - pupppet 2y ago
      The need to preserve culture goes out the window when there's no young person to change your bed pan.
      - ffsm8 2y ago
        Considering that Japan and Korea do just fine is proof that youre arguing with a straw man. Same with European nations that didn't just invite everyone and their grandma to immigrate such as Switzerland. The technological advances / robots will outpace the need for immigration, and has for the last decades too. Its just profitable for the capital as immigrants are a source of cheap labor which can be used to surpress wages.
PeterHolzwarth 2y ago
It's good that we all prepare for this trend which has been ongoing all over the place for decades: wealth drops birthrates. Recall that in the 1970s, it was assumed that growth rates would continue unabated - this is why the 70s had so much apocalypse pop media about overpop like Soylent Green etc. The green revolution that was going on at the time hadn't yet registered with demographers. This apparently inexorable process of growth leading to lower birthrate means that mankind's impact on the planet has at least a partial limit (number of humans screwing the pooch will peak and recede, even if the impact per human may keep growing), so we can take some degree of consolation in that. But that leaves the remaining question of how we deal with the fact that the number of economic participants peaks and then recedes (negative growth ain't a pretty process). We can look at recessions as a starting guide to this process, but it does still give one a shiver to envision what we'll have to master to navigate this process down to the projected population equilibrium. It's all the above that explains the nods that countries like the U.S. get from economists: when there is a global trend of dropping birthrates which can impact econ growth, countries that specialize in immigration can buck that trend for a bit.
- RestlessMind 2y ago
  > but it does still give one a shiver to envision what we'll have to master to navigate this process down to the projected population equilibrium. Easier said than done. This is where I see the most of hand waving. Robots haven't materialized yet, neither any political will to shrink the safety net.
  - alx_the_new_guy 2y ago
    >Robots haven't materialized yet, neither any political will to shrink the safety net. Human-like general-purpose robots - yes. Except, by definition, a robot, essentially a programmable mechanism, not something human-like. Stuff like warehouses is getting increasingly automated, planes basically can fly and land themselves without human in the loop, autonomous cars are not here, but are coming in the next decade probably. Personally, I haven't bought a cup of coffe a human made in at least a decade. That's some poor barista's salary not getting paid. Not that I would know the difference between a 5/10 coffe from a machine and a theoretically 10/10 coffe a professional would make. And a machine makes one for a whole lot cheaper.
sam_goody 2y ago
I read on HN a pretty convincing essay that if a car-seat was only required while under a year, and a booster while under 2, there would be something like 10% more births in the U.S. every year. There are always those families (especially among the religious) that would have larger families, with not obvious things that limit them. Knowing nothing about Japan, but living in the U.S. where birthrates are also falling, I would think state effort should be put into this.
- speff 2y ago
  Was interested in the stat you mentioned. Here[1] it is for anyone else who wants to read up on it [1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c4daDbQD398BmW5k5/on-car-seats-as-contraception https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c4daDbQD398BmW5k5/on-car-sea...
akasakahakada 2y ago
But guess what, the Nation Population Institution said birth rate is going to rise and keep steady afterwards in 2023 without explanation. And everyone inside the gov believe this bs. https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/j/zenkoku2023/pp_zenkoku2023.asp https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/j/zenkoku2023/pp_zenkoku20...
incomingpain 2y ago
>The next six years, until the 2030s, will be “the last chance for us to possibly reverse the trend,” he said. I feel like this is set in stone at this point. Virtually no chance these will change in the next 6 years. >“Simple economic measures such as increase of subsidies are not going to resolve the serious problem of declining births,” This is going to be shockingly bad for Japan. They are about 15 years too late to do anything about this anymore. Though at the same time they have no choice but to do something regardless. Else become much worse off later. >adding that a conservative mindset espousing traditional gender roles at home and at the workplace also needs to change. That's a very bad decision on their part that will exacerbate their crisis. >Surveys show that younger Japanese are increasingly reluctant to marry or have children, discouraged by bleak job prospects, the high cost of living Easy enough to understand the root cause here. Extreme taxation for their growing 260% public debt to gdp. You might say, "default on the debt" but that isn't going to fix anything neither, probably make things worse.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  Maybe I’m under thinking it, but this problem seems relatively simple to solve. Just make raising kids free. You get free childcare, and get paid a wage to raise your kids.
  - incomingpain 2y ago
    >Maybe I’m under thinking it, but this problem seems relatively simple to solve. Just make raising kids free. You get free childcare, and get paid a wage to raise your kids. Way too simple. This is the case already. Here in Canada you literally get paid ~$2000/kid/year. straight up cash. This is true elsewhere as well, and each place has the same aging population and low fertility. This isn't a matter of what can fix the problem. The actual cause of the problem is government essentially legislated this to be the case. This problem largely speaking is the root cause of political polarization.
    - acdha 2y ago
      $2k/year is nowhere near even the direct costs of raising a child. Think about how much an extra bedroom and food would cost even before you get to things like childcare, education, increased travel costs, etc.

54 points by jnord 2y ago

Talkative32 2y ago

[dead]

decremental 2y ago

[dead]

gauravphoenix 2y ago

A highly insightful book on Japanese culture on what makes people reluctant to be part of society (getting married, having children etc) is "Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation" https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1400077796/ https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/1400077796/

reducesuffering 2y ago

In 80 years, societies are going from 2 children supporting each adult, to each child supporting 2 adults. That's a 4x elderly burden that I don't think is significantly ameliorated by lack of kids. Socialized medical care for the elderly around the developed world is already barely able to manage. Elderly countries like Japan, Greece, Italy, and Portgual are already at debt-to-GDP burdens of 261%, 177%, 145%, and 116%, respectively. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe every 100% debt-to-GDP at current 5% rates is like an extra indefinite 5%/year tax taken from everyone, with no benefit (you already got the benefit in the past).

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe every 100% debt-to-GDP at current 5% rates is like an extra indefinite 5%/year tax taken from everyone You're wrong. You need to consider the real returns on that debt, its real burden, and interagency holdings (e.g. the Treasury paying the Fed interest). Also, that debt is serviced with taxes. Adding it to the tax burden is double counting. The debt is analogous to taxation. But not so much that you can numerically equate them.
- reducesuffering 2y ago
  > real returns on that debt, its real burden It's real GDP, and it's not being inflated away. It theoretically attempts to, (2% inflation), but because more real debt is taken out, GDP still goes from 100% -> 105% the next year. The real returns on this debt is hardly investments and infrastructure that will make more things in the future, it's mostly social spending like healthcare. > that debt is serviced with taxes. Adding it to the tax burden is double counting. If I would normally pay 35% taxes for the country's defense and social spending, but there's also servicing interest, I now have to pay 40% taxes. So it's an extra indefinite 5%/yr tax like I said, but I only got 35% of defense and social benefits.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > If I would normally pay 35% taxes for the country's defense and social spending, but there's also servicing interest, I now have to pay 40% taxes This is where interagency holdings and real debt burdens kick in. (Also, again, that 35% already includes interest payments already.) Let's assume a rule that says no new borrowing and no spending cuts. There would need to be tax raises. But if we know one thing, we know it would be less than 5%. Even if we remove the 20% held by agencies [1], which is absolutely not a clean procedure, we know the number would still be less than 4%. Because that debt is nominally denominated, and you're making interest payments in the future with less-valuable money, and, of course, the double counting. This is before we even touch monetising the debt. Taxation is a bad mental model for thinking about our federal debt. It's in some ways more benign, and other ways much nastier, than a simple tax increase. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...
    - reducesuffering 2y ago
      > (Also, again, that 35% already includes interest payments already.) Again, no, because if the 35% included interest payments, then if hypothetically there were no interest payments, my tax burden would be 30% now (no 5% taxes to interest). I understand that if nominal debt remained the same, then 2% inflation would eventually whittle it away (or whichever inflation/monetizing rate), but effectively whether by monetary inflation or taxes, taxpayers still pays the same amount, just a matter of when and in what way.
thefz 2y ago
Our bad, we should not have built a society based on debt and now we are going to take the brunt of it, there needs to be an inflection point to turn things around, though.

inflationq 2y ago

I wonder when people will make the connection between monetary inflation and birth rates. You can also see the crash in birth rates even in rural provinces of Turkey.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> wonder when people will make the connection between monetary inflation and birth rates It's been studied. The connections are as non-obvious as they are fascinating. In the Pacific Islands, a "1% increase in CPI (inflation) will decrease total fertility rate by 0.41%" [1]. (This effect was much stronger than female education and real GDP changes.) This supports your hypothesis. When we look at rich countries, however, we find that "an increase in annual inflation of 1 percentage point would bring an increase of 0.06 percentage point in the annual growth of the total population" [2]. Inflation increases fertility! A clue as to why might be found in the U.K., where among "home owners" they found "evidence of positive but temporary effects of house prices on fertility," with "a 10% increase in the average house price in a given month increases the fertility of home owners by 2.4% in the following year" [3]. Among renters, on the other hand, "fertility rates are lower by the order of 2 to 4%. Fertility rates for this group remain lower three years later, suggesting house price increases affect completed fertility as well as the timing of births." [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8457485/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8457485/ Table 8 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1059056018300078 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10590... [3] https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/research/housing/publications/do-high-prices-deter-fertility.html3 https://www.bristol.ac.uk/cmm/research/housing/publications/...
SSJPython 2y ago
Japanese inflation is only a recent phenomenon. Prior to the pandemic, they were experiencing deflation and the BoJ was doing everything in its power to get some inflation. The falling birth rate, on the other hand, has been going on for far longer than monetary inflation. Falling birth rates are often correlated with discretionary income levels and women's education.

pylua 2y ago

Only six years to turn that around? That is a mammoth task. I’m not sure that will be possible.

rainsford 2y ago

What's most interesting to me about this trend around the developed world is that nobody has put together a truly compelling theory as to the root cause. There's lots of obviously politically motivated theories, like liberals saying it's because of soul crushing capitalism run amok or conservatives saying it's because women aren't kept barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, but for as consequential as the whole thing is it seems very light on legitimate analysis (at least that I've seen).

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
For everyone else who heard this for the first time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_and_pregnant https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barefoot_and_pregnant
jiggawatts 2y ago
There have been scientific studies done by anthropologists, but they're a different clique to economists and they basically "don't talk to each other". Essentially, there's a sort-of phase diagram for the optimal human reproduction strategy where the axes are things like "income inequality" and "environmental stress". You can then color in patches of the diagram with what strategy members of a society will settle on. For example, high-stress, high-inequality societies practice polygamy. The game-theoretic logic is that women need a partner that can provide consistent excess calories. If you can't feed your kids in just one year out of twenty, they die. It doesn't matter what the average income is, just how steady the income is. In societies like that, only the richest 10% of men can provide this, so they all have 10 wives. The other 90% of men remain bachelors and often participate in tribal warfare, exacerbating the problem. Saudi Arabia used to be like this, and parts of Africa still is. Similarly, in "one corner" of this graph is super rich men in stable societies, where their optimal reproduction strategy is serial monogamy to young wives. Look at Hollywood A-listers or billionaries to see this play out in real life. Japan got stuck in a part of the phase diagram where the optimal reproduction strategy is "don't."
- dalyons 2y ago
  im always kinda skeptical of these evolutionary game theory type theories when applying them to modern developed societies. Maybe they were true in the past, but we have largely removed ourselves from natural selection in any of the traditional ways. It doesn't mean there arent other game selection mechanisms, but they're likely very different to 1000s of years ago. Like, for example broadly no-one is having their kids all starve to death in modern japan.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ldehaan 2y ago

[dead]

Barrin92 2y ago

Genuine question, why instead of going down this evidently ineffective route of trying to dial back family structures and social relations we don't just go in the opposite direction? Fire up a Manhattan project for longevity and age related disease. Not even talking about reversing aging, but if we could give the average person 100 healthy and productive years and minimize the cost of aging we've at the very least gotten rid of the single biggest pressing issue of the demographic changes.

__warlord__ 2y ago
I think this will backfire sooner than later, Imagine a dictator living "100 healthy and productive years" or a billionaire amazing more and more wealth for longer whereas poor people are kept working for longer with poorer and poorer conditions.

xeornet 2y ago

At least they won’t open up to mass immigration to replace the native population - something being looked at as a solution in the West. https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.development.desa.pd/files/unpd-egm_200010_un_2001_replacementmigration.pdf https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...

pupppet 2y ago
That’s not replacing the native population, it’s replacing the births that never took place.
- marcusverus 2y ago
  The Mexicans who lived in Texas in the early 19th century saw a relentless stream of Anglo settlers from the USA and beyond. Within a couple of decades, Texas demographics changed radically, and society changed along with it. The previous (Mexican) inhabitants' children went on to grow up in a society with a radically different culture with a different language. Imagine a Mexican child coming home from a visit to a white-majority, English-language town. Imagine them complaining about the feeling of otherness in their own country, and asking their parents why they allowed themselves to be replaced by the Anglos. Imagine their parent bending over, looking that child in the eye, and saying: "ackshually, they didn't "replace" us, chico. They merely replaced births that never took place."
  - pupppet 2y ago
    The need to preserve culture goes out the window when there's no young person to change your bed pan.
    - ffsm8 2y ago
      Considering that Japan and Korea do just fine is proof that youre arguing with a straw man. Same with European nations that didn't just invite everyone and their grandma to immigrate such as Switzerland. The technological advances / robots will outpace the need for immigration, and has for the last decades too. Its just profitable for the capital as immigrants are a source of cheap labor which can be used to surpress wages.

PeterHolzwarth 2y ago

It's good that we all prepare for this trend which has been ongoing all over the place for decades: wealth drops birthrates. Recall that in the 1970s, it was assumed that growth rates would continue unabated - this is why the 70s had so much apocalypse pop media about overpop like Soylent Green etc. The green revolution that was going on at the time hadn't yet registered with demographers. This apparently inexorable process of growth leading to lower birthrate means that mankind's impact on the planet has at least a partial limit (number of humans screwing the pooch will peak and recede, even if the impact per human may keep growing), so we can take some degree of consolation in that. But that leaves the remaining question of how we deal with the fact that the number of economic participants peaks and then recedes (negative growth ain't a pretty process). We can look at recessions as a starting guide to this process, but it does still give one a shiver to envision what we'll have to master to navigate this process down to the projected population equilibrium. It's all the above that explains the nods that countries like the U.S. get from economists: when there is a global trend of dropping birthrates which can impact econ growth, countries that specialize in immigration can buck that trend for a bit.

RestlessMind 2y ago
> but it does still give one a shiver to envision what we'll have to master to navigate this process down to the projected population equilibrium. Easier said than done. This is where I see the most of hand waving. Robots haven't materialized yet, neither any political will to shrink the safety net.
- alx_the_new_guy 2y ago
  >Robots haven't materialized yet, neither any political will to shrink the safety net. Human-like general-purpose robots - yes. Except, by definition, a robot, essentially a programmable mechanism, not something human-like. Stuff like warehouses is getting increasingly automated, planes basically can fly and land themselves without human in the loop, autonomous cars are not here, but are coming in the next decade probably. Personally, I haven't bought a cup of coffe a human made in at least a decade. That's some poor barista's salary not getting paid. Not that I would know the difference between a 5/10 coffe from a machine and a theoretically 10/10 coffe a professional would make. And a machine makes one for a whole lot cheaper.

sam_goody 2y ago

I read on HN a pretty convincing essay that if a car-seat was only required while under a year, and a booster while under 2, there would be something like 10% more births in the U.S. every year. There are always those families (especially among the religious) that would have larger families, with not obvious things that limit them. Knowing nothing about Japan, but living in the U.S. where birthrates are also falling, I would think state effort should be put into this.

speff 2y ago
Was interested in the stat you mentioned. Here[1] it is for anyone else who wants to read up on it [1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c4daDbQD398BmW5k5/on-car-seats-as-contraception https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/c4daDbQD398BmW5k5/on-car-sea...

akasakahakada 2y ago

But guess what, the Nation Population Institution said birth rate is going to rise and keep steady afterwards in 2023 without explanation. And everyone inside the gov believe this bs. https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/j/zenkoku2023/pp_zenkoku2023.asp https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/j/zenkoku2023/pp_zenkoku20...

incomingpain 2y ago

>The next six years, until the 2030s, will be “the last chance for us to possibly reverse the trend,” he said. I feel like this is set in stone at this point. Virtually no chance these will change in the next 6 years. >“Simple economic measures such as increase of subsidies are not going to resolve the serious problem of declining births,” This is going to be shockingly bad for Japan. They are about 15 years too late to do anything about this anymore. Though at the same time they have no choice but to do something regardless. Else become much worse off later. >adding that a conservative mindset espousing traditional gender roles at home and at the workplace also needs to change. That's a very bad decision on their part that will exacerbate their crisis. >Surveys show that younger Japanese are increasingly reluctant to marry or have children, discouraged by bleak job prospects, the high cost of living Easy enough to understand the root cause here. Extreme taxation for their growing 260% public debt to gdp. You might say, "default on the debt" but that isn't going to fix anything neither, probably make things worse.

Gigachad 2y ago
Maybe I’m under thinking it, but this problem seems relatively simple to solve. Just make raising kids free. You get free childcare, and get paid a wage to raise your kids.
- incomingpain 2y ago
  >Maybe I’m under thinking it, but this problem seems relatively simple to solve. Just make raising kids free. You get free childcare, and get paid a wage to raise your kids. Way too simple. This is the case already. Here in Canada you literally get paid ~$2000/kid/year. straight up cash. This is true elsewhere as well, and each place has the same aging population and low fertility. This isn't a matter of what can fix the problem. The actual cause of the problem is government essentially legislated this to be the case. This problem largely speaking is the root cause of political polarization.
  - acdha 2y ago
    $2k/year is nowhere near even the direct costs of raising a child. Think about how much an extra bedroom and food would cost even before you get to things like childcare, education, increased travel costs, etc.