5 ms·
"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor
by maerF0x0 7mo ago
"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today.
A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
(Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unemployment rate, i'm talking about labor non-participation rate as a measure of people who could be enticed into the workforce with a living wage)
- epolanski 7mo ago18% is one of the.lowest rates on the planet. 4th in fact. This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
- maerF0x0 7mo agoIt's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw) Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoWhy would the retirees want to be put back to work? Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once? Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task? Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed? There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
- ryandrake 7mo agoMoney, money, money, and money. We need it to survive. Until people's basic needs are taken care of for them, they need to do what they can to live.
- ceejayoz 7mo agoAgain, we're talking about retirees, homemakers, college students, disabled, etc. here.
- throwaway173738 7mo agoWhy not simply pay the homemakers? Why is it so important that everyone produce economic output at the widget factory? Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
- nradov 7mo ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 7mo agoHuh. You used to be concerned with declining birth rates. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735888 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735888
- Hikikomori 7mo agoNot if it costs something.
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoIMO, basic income for parents is absolutely a policy that Japan should enact. And the question of how much the payment should be has a straightforward answer: adjust until the birth rate reaches replacement. If the payment ends up high enough that some mothers or fathers opt to leave the labor force to focus on raising their kids, then so be it; that's probably healthier for society in the long term. It would be expensive, yes, but cheaper than the alternatives. And anyway, Japan's stagnant economy would likely benefit from the boost to consumer demand.
- epolanski 7mo agoJapan has one of the lowest unemployments on the planet, 2.5%. Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't. As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.
- senordevnyc 7mo agoBut this guy googled it and apparently there are 18% of Japanese people not working, so obviously their entire society pivoting towards automation is wrong.
- mitthrowaway2 7mo agoYep. In a society with an aging population and a low birth rate, people who would prefer to be full-time parents staying home and raising their kids ought to instead be doing undesirable, monotonous, easily-automatable jobs that robots can do. Or at least two families could agree to pay each other to raise the other's children, so that it counts as employment, rather than raising their own. Yes, maximizing labor force participation... That's how things ought to be.
- 2000UltraDeluxe 7mo agoThat's how you ensure the birth rate stays low.
- tonyedgecombe 7mo agoI think you are missing the sarcasm.
- pj_mukh 7mo agoI don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job. If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
- singpolyma3 7mo agoIndeed. My first job was in a factory doing things that we had machines to do, but not enough of them or efficient enough. I spent the whole time dreaming of automating the factory properly.
- maerF0x0 7mo agoI agree with aspects of what you mean. But there are exceptions on both sides. Ofc people dont want to become human fax machines (Morse decoders) nowadays, it would feel absurd. But also if a role allows someone to feel satisfaction in accomplishment and in being an active member of a society it can be meaningful. For example tidying up streets/yards in low income neighborhoods can make the place look much better and you can feel like you're serving folks who are in need.
- hamasho 7mo agoI think that nihilistic sentiment arises only when you are materially satisfied, maybe in the 90s and 00s (like office workers in Fight Club or Office Space). Many of us are in survival mode now. We just need money to keep up with inflation. We don't have time to think about the deep meaning of life.
- makeitdouble 7mo agoJapan's employment rate is hard to compare, in that many of these job just wouldn't be seen as real jobs in any other country ("bullshit job"), and it's compound by half of the population being over 50. A high employment among the elderly could just be masking the harsher truth when that upper half passes away.
- epolanski 7mo agoNo because the stat is 15-64.
- chaostheory 7mo ago1. There is only so much you can pay the people doing the kind of work like cleaning the Shinkansens or manning the 7-11's because it affects customer costs. i.e. There's a point where you increase the salary of 7-11 workers that it causes a $2 fried chicken snack to inflate to $10 that customers will refuse to buy 2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
- seanmcdirmid 7mo agoDifferent from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.
- alephnerd 7mo agoThis. Also there is a social backlash against Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai service workers in Japan now (the people who tend to be working the counter at a kombini, but apparently Asians all look the same to Western HNers), as well as Western tourists. Edit: can't reply > I doubt many Chinese youths want to work for minimum wage in Japan Chinese are the 2nd largest nationality of foreign agricultural and food workers in Japan [0]. As long as the median household income in China [1] remains below the minimum wage in Japan [2], members of the bottom half of Chinese society will continue to emigrate there, Korea, and other countries to work, that said not at the same rate as was seen a decade ago. [0] - https://catalog.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/opac_download_md/4738336/18_p025.pdf https://catalog.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/opac_download_md/4738336/... [1] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202507/t20250730_1960541.html https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202507/t202507... [2] - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%80%E4%BD%8E%E8%B3%83%E9%87%91_(%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC) https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%80%E4%BD%8E%E8%B3%83%E9...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jamiek88 7mo ago
- alephnerd 7mo agoNo one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan. Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules. Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN. They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation. Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol. Edit: can't reply > I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program. > NYC sanitation dept... Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors. Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation. > So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there What's with this kind of orientalism?!? Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages. And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a Teidai/Sokei/Hitotsubashi/TokyoTech/Ivy/Stanford, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters. There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2]. [0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-around-the-world-view-ai/ https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro... [1] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf [2] - https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/11d033af448e404c3f575a894cddfd20f833e08e https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/11d033af448e404c3f5...
- wileydragonfly 7mo agoYou’re allowed to type shit. We’re all adults here.
- Buttons840 7mo agoI clean shit for free often. I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.
- wilg 7mo agoIn case you think 18% is Japan's unemployment rate: it's not. Japan's unemployment rate is 2.5%. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?locations=JP https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location... This is basically the best in the world. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2026/02/unemployment-rates-updated-february-2026.html https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2... Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
- jmalicki 7mo ago> You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated. You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories. This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.
- wilg 7mo agoYes, I agree. The person I'm replying to knows only enough about employment rates to have bad conspiracy takes.
- maerF0x0 7mo agoCorrect. I was using labor participation rates. As a society gets depressed and has a hard time people stop trying (ie they no longer count as unemployed, which doesnt count the people who are no longer trying to get a job). Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)
- wilg 7mo agoI think that fudging the numbers to bolster your pet theory is not an acceptable way of looking at this data.
- youre-wrong3 7mo agoEven tho you added an edit. You’re still wrong. Garbage collection is typically a high paying job because no one wants to do it. But people still consider it “below” them and don’t want to do it even when there’s a high unemployment rate.
- beeflet 7mo agookay, so the lack of robots/supply increases garbage collector wages, which broadly results in wealth distribution vs robots.
- rohansood15 7mo agoWhy do you think that making people do what they don't want to do for more money is the most effective way to distribute wealth?
- Nevermark 7mo agoPaying people more to do work that less people want to do makes sense. > … the most effective way to distribute wealth? Nobody said this is a template for every problem, opportunity or other situation in economics.
- beeflet 7mo agoThey do want to do it, they just need to be able to justify it logicially.
- thfuran 7mo agoI guarantee you that a lot more people would be willing to put up with it for $10 million a year.
- upsuper 7mo agoYou would probably need to face voters questioning whether that's the best way to use their money.
- surajrmal 7mo agoDoes that include stay at home parents?
- xelxebar 7mo ago> A quick google suggests ~18% FWIW, this figure looks to be the fraction of 20–69 year olds in the entire population who are unemployed[0]. Referencing the official definitions[1], the standard unemployment figure of 2.6 (as of 2026-02) narrows that denominator to people who are receiving wages or actively looking for work. > which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training. From the above, 18% seems like the wrong number to look at. Heck, why not quote 38.1%, since it captures everyone who can legally work (including 15 and 90 year olds)? IMO, the base population we want to look at is people who actually want a job, which is captured by various Labor Underutilization (LU) metrics. These all hover around 2.5–6.0% according to public records[2], and are also defined in the official docs[1]. [0]:https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/sokuhou/tsuki/pdf/gaiyou.pdf https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/sokuhou/tsuki/pdf/gaiyou.... [1]:https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/pdf/hndbk5_2.pdf https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/pdf/hndbk5_2.pdf [2]:file:///var/folders/96/k0p95wxn7sg5_xjnv5n233bc0000gn/T/gaiyou-1.pdf
- j-bos 7mo agoIt seems to be human nature to chase after easy to understand solutions rather than addressing ifficult bottlenecks and friction. Doctors are a great example. In order to be a doctor, you have to study for 12 years. But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade. Then on top of that, you have the limited spaces for residents anyway, so more great med students still != more doctors. And then on top of that you have the issue that teaching hospitals are usually split apart from regular hospitals and A med student who ends up at a particular teaching hospital basically ends up locked in until their residency finishes leaving them vulnerable to even more pressure.
- renewiltord 7mo agoThat’s a North American quirk.
- NitpickLawyer 7mo agoMaybe the particularities, but there are overall issues with placing in EU as well. There's a big discrepancy in general practice availability between large cities / capitals and smaller cities / country side. And it's not necessarily a lack of "living wages" nor is it poor conditions (often they'll have strong support from local municipalities w/ things like clinic space, local community support, etc) but it's simply that younger doctors don't want to move there.
- renewiltord 7mo agoI should have done better with my comment. I intended to reference the pre-med undergraduate degree.
- shiroiuma 7mo agoYep, this is the same almost everywhere. You're not going to find many young people who will go to a university to get the qualifications to be a medical professional, and then willingly move back to their middle-of-nowhere small town to do that job, even if it pays more.
- retinaros 7mo agoyes. this is correct. but that is not how the market works unfortunately or else we would have 0% unemployment. market works in a way that if no one in the country wants to do the job for this wage then you import people from poorer countries that will be able to send money to their family even on a shitty wage. Robots are the other solution and a much easier one for a society. you don't need to build the structure to welcome mass immigration from poorer countries and all the things you'd need to solve when bringing people from different - often less tolerant / more restrictive - cultures.