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They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values. Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we

They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values. Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”? Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? It’s not even a bad thing, but even if it was, it’s a fact.

ares623 4mo ago
I think the point is we can't have our cake and eat it too. They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear. And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?
- CamperBob2 4mo ago
  They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear. That's what the robots are (or, rather, will be) for. More seriously, I'm all for liberalizing immigration policy, myself, in almost every respect. But unfortunately the conservative reaction is costing us everything. It's too easy for them to use "Open borders, ooga booga!" to scare the rubes. When conservatives have nothing more to offer the future and no defense for their past, they can always fall back on that. It works. Every country will end up with its own army of MAGA zombies if it pursues this course, and Japan is no exception.
- lmm 4mo ago
  > They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear. They don't though? Pensions will be cut. Retirements will be pushed back. Grandparents with dementia will be kept mostly-alive in their children's homes rather than getting proper care. There will be pain and suffering. But I don't see any of that pushing the country to breaking point. > And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now? As hard as fixing a low population is, it's easier than fixing a society where trust has broken down, which is what the western countries that went hard on immigration are already starting to face.
  - vachina 4mo ago
    Yeah not sure why you’re being downvoted. Work hard on making elderly care as easy as possible, automate automatable things. Importing people is just kicking the ageing population can down the road; these immigrant will grow old one day, and then what, import even more people?
    - bulbar 4mo ago
      People from other cultures tend to have more babies.
      - lmm 4mo ago
        For one generation, maybe. Once they've assimilated even a little (which is usually what you want, right?) they revert to the same birthrate as everyone else.
  - auyez 4mo ago
    Also different cultures can withstand different level of hardships. With population decline what kind of quality of life drop we are talking about? Even if people get 2 times poorer, it is still way above than whatever people had in old times. That level can easily drop way further and people can adapt. I think it is even better to not have immigration as a solution, because it accelerates this whole problem and forces the society to search for other ways to solve the issue.
plaidthunder 4mo ago
> Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”? If you become poor enough and weak enough, you'll be "replaced" anyway. And not on your own terms.
- auyez 4mo ago
  It is not necessarily true, I think it is opposite. More poorer they get, less attractive that place becomes. Especially since Japan is not rich with natural resources, there is nothing really to steal there
  - plaidthunder 4mo ago
    They become less attractive to immigrants looking to engage in economic arbitrage. They become more attractive to outside non-governmental powers looking to engage in economic arbitrage, which brings its own challenges. They have less negotiating power with wealthier countries which impacts their sovereignty. Poor countries also tend to have more internal conflict: https://gsdrc.org/professional-dev/poverty-and-conflict/ https://gsdrc.org/professional-dev/poverty-and-conflict/ If we look at this empirically it seems clear that countries that trade ethnic sameness for economic prosperity end up more stable, peaceful and capable of directing their own affairs. There could be some advantages to living in a country where strangers are also distant cousins, but they seem marginal. There could even be emotional improvements for parts of the population who feel anxious about living near people who are genetically distant from themselves, but I've not seen great evidence of that. Particularly since ethnically cohesive but poor countries tend to fall into civil war regardless. When you put it to the test and measure outcomes, there are tradeoffs that go far beyond giving up consumerism.
jesterson 4mo ago
[flagged]
add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago
Not everyone views outsiders with unease, it's actually possible to nurture curiosity over fear.
chaostheory 4mo ago
Because it takes 18 years to create an adult and nothing other than immigration is working at the moment. If any country was truly serious about this problem, they would end social programs for the elderly and focus that funding for families.
- HerbManic 4mo ago
  This is one of those thing, yes that is a true statement but what do you do with that information? Would you be willing to make that call? Looks like the trolley problem in action.
  - chaostheory 4mo ago
    Yes, because otherwise your economy and country collapse sooner or later. ie everyone dies. Why do think homogenous countries like Japan and South Korea are finally opening up the immigration floodgates? Because there’s currently no other choice. The other options (directly lowering the costs of child care, lowering work hours, robots, et al) still haven’t worked. Immigration buys you time. If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly.
    - nec4b 4mo ago
      > If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly. One big downside of any kind of social programs is that it conditions the population to rely solely on the state, thinking that their payments into the system will guarantee them safety. We tend to forget for a state to exist and to provide services, it needs people. Those people need to be born, raised and cultured in order to act as a community.
Erem 4mo ago
> Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? I'll bite. In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today. Or an ancestor that suffered because the locals did think that way. We honor that heritage by paying it forward, lest we be lumped among the trash of history that punished the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews for the cardinal sin of living down the street. Lot of Americans in this forum, so that's why.
- s5300 4mo ago
  [dead]
- Ekaros 4mo ago
  You are forgetting the natives who royally massively got screwed. Perfect example why they should have done everything possible to stop migration.
  - Erem 4mo ago
    That analogy doesn't work well. Their situation involved foreign powers enforcing jurisdiction and property claims over their land with a regular standing army; a completely different situation than modern immigration
    - moi2388 4mo ago
      Yes. Now it’s through a judicial army based on criminalising speech, and instead of based on a country, based on a religion. Because that’s so much better
      - Erem 4mo ago
        I certainly don't understand all you're saying through this tortured analogy, but yes an "army" of judges that issue rulings is much, much better than an army of soldiers that issue killings
malicka 4mo ago
> the deep psychological truths about human tribalism … that the races should keep to themselves? Yea, I’m going to have to disagree on this one. This was pretty handily disproven by the New World. Mixing, sharing, cohabiting… this creates culture and makes us stronger. Isolation, protectionism, and fear makes us weak.
- HerbManic 4mo ago
  Yep, there is a lot of evidence that says even nomadic tribes heavily intermingled with others because it was seen as a means of building resilience for all.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
    There is a lot of evidence that didn’t happen all at once and funded by social programs that effectively discourage integration.
- kmijyiyxfbklao 4mo ago
  How was it disproven by the New World? The countries that mixed (Latin America) are weaker than the country that didn't (USA)
  - malicka 4mo ago
    The USA is pretty dang diverse, and definitely mixed. That mixing is a core part of it’s culture and history, actually. And now, the country that mixed (USA) is stronger than the Old World that didn’t (Europe). Which is to say: There is no inherent psychological tribalism that makes having a diverse country impossible or ruinous; rather, this tribalism is manufactured and spread by hatemongers. The New World is a very good case study, here.
    - nec4b 4mo ago
      It's culture and values come from the dominant group. It didn't really mix equally between groups. If the dominant groups will shrink and another arises the values and the culture will change.
arikrahman 4mo ago
I completely agree, very well said.
bulbar 4mo ago
> Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”? I'm not "... liberal", however there are two reasons. For one it has turned or to be very hard to convince people to "just have more babies". Second reason is that immigration workforce is available immediately, while an increase in birth rate will only help 20 years later. Even if you manage to reverse the trajectory of the birth rate, how long would it take to approach 2.0? How long until you have healthy demographics? 50, 70 years, maybe, that's just too long. > truths about human tribalism? Truth is that human are complicated and have survived for so long not because of their thumbs or their language, but because of their adaptability.
- HerbManic 4mo ago
  It isn't just about getting it above 2.0, it is having those people in the work force. Even if you could magic up enough babies today, it would be about 20 years until they would be actively offsetting the issue. The is why demographic issues are so insidious. The problems that keep birth rates down today, end up amplifying these issues in the future further suppressing them. Eventually you hit equilibrium but it is a long way down until you get there.
bulbar 4mo ago
> They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values. Talking about homogenous culture I hope you don't live in the US, because that guys for sure never had one. US is way too big for that which is also why so many laws are still defined by the states.
Tor3 4mo ago
>They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values. That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any. The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".
- DrProtic 4mo ago
  You refer to a period where we had constant war in Europe? You literally posted an example of the opposite.
  - Tor3 4mo ago
    In what way? I included England just because those particular periods are well-known. If you look at ALL of Europe's history, all up to recent times, there's been constant movements and migrations. People with different backgrounds, moving around, a lot of movement came as trade increased (and, as it has lately been found, there was much more trade even 3k years ago than anyone had previously anticipated). If you look at a snapshot of time it looks pretty static, but let your time-tick be generations and you see constant changes.
    - nec4b 4mo ago
      It really hasn't been constant movement and migrations. Once the Germanic and Slavic tribes settled, which wasn't fun for the natives before them and certainly not for the Romans as well, the migration more or less stopped statistically speaking (exceptions were the wars).
      - SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
        Right, and this latest influx certainly outpaces anything in many generations.
porkloin 4mo ago
The idea that Japan is a uniquely "homogeneous culture" is honestly a modern construct anyway. Japanese culture and language has been enormously influenced by colonial and migrant presence in the country, from Chinese to Dutch to British to American, and a zillion others. Just look at the language! I don't have the exact figure in front of me, but I remember when taking Japanese language courses that something like 30% of the lexicon is loanwords from other languages (edit: I looked it up and it's apparently closer to 50%) Way higher than most other widely spoken languages on the planet. Japanese culture is legitimately _amazing_ in its capacity to absorb and domesticate outside influence, and it's unfortunate that people both in the country and abroad are so short-sighted to not see that. The Meiji and Showa era militarism benefited a lot by promoting this myth. They weren't alone, mind you. Lots of folks across the EU and the US are still falling for the same nationalist stories that their governments cooked up in the early 1900s to drive them all to war. The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity, but the problem is in attributing that to some kind of unique isolationism rather than their long history of pluralism.
- HerbManic 4mo ago
  I was going to say, Japans history is one that was very... combative. They fought amongst themselves heavily for a long time.
  - porkloin 4mo ago
    I think a lot of places were at various points in time, right? It's always a little easier to paint with a broad brush and lump hundreds of years into a single statement when you're talking about the history of "foreign" places that we don't learn the history of very deeply in western education. For Japan in particular, it's hard because a big part of the Meiji nationalist movements was to recast Japanese history with a heavy focus on the "bushido" and an arguably manufactured version of some points in the country's history that _were_ undoutably bloody. That yarn-spinning from 100+ years ago has actively shaped how the rest of the world thinks about Japanese history. Western governments during WW2 were happy to take that narrative and paint the entire history as blood-soaked and brutal to dehumanize their enemies. But it's not hard to find evidence of how many long stretches of internal peace existed in Japan. After the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate there was 250 years of more or less continuous peace internally. Arguably continental Europe from the middle-ages onward is more fractured and bloody in total than Japan was in the same period. Classical Greece was a zillion times more bloody.

ares623 4mo ago

I think the point is we can't have our cake and eat it too. They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear. And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now?

CamperBob2 4mo ago
They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear. That's what the robots are (or, rather, will be) for. More seriously, I'm all for liberalizing immigration policy, myself, in almost every respect. But unfortunately the conservative reaction is costing us everything. It's too easy for them to use "Open borders, ooga booga!" to scare the rubes. When conservatives have nothing more to offer the future and no defense for their past, they can always fall back on that. It works. Every country will end up with its own army of MAGA zombies if it pursues this course, and Japan is no exception.
lmm 4mo ago
> They need _someone_ (or something, if they can manage) to sustain the way of life they hold so dear. They don't though? Pensions will be cut. Retirements will be pushed back. Grandparents with dementia will be kept mostly-alive in their children's homes rather than getting proper care. There will be pain and suffering. But I don't see any of that pushing the country to breaking point. > And it's not something a country can just decide on a whim like "oop looks like we really need more people tomorrow folks". What are they going to do? Import millions of people 18 years from now? Or plan ahead to make sure millions of babies are born now to grow into the people they like 18 years from now? As hard as fixing a low population is, it's easier than fixing a society where trust has broken down, which is what the western countries that went hard on immigration are already starting to face.
- vachina 4mo ago
  Yeah not sure why you’re being downvoted. Work hard on making elderly care as easy as possible, automate automatable things. Importing people is just kicking the ageing population can down the road; these immigrant will grow old one day, and then what, import even more people?
  - bulbar 4mo ago
    People from other cultures tend to have more babies.
    - lmm 4mo ago
      For one generation, maybe. Once they've assimilated even a little (which is usually what you want, right?) they revert to the same birthrate as everyone else.
- auyez 4mo ago
  Also different cultures can withstand different level of hardships. With population decline what kind of quality of life drop we are talking about? Even if people get 2 times poorer, it is still way above than whatever people had in old times. That level can easily drop way further and people can adapt. I think it is even better to not have immigration as a solution, because it accelerates this whole problem and forces the society to search for other ways to solve the issue.

plaidthunder 4mo ago

> Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”? If you become poor enough and weak enough, you'll be "replaced" anyway. And not on your own terms.

auyez 4mo ago
It is not necessarily true, I think it is opposite. More poorer they get, less attractive that place becomes. Especially since Japan is not rich with natural resources, there is nothing really to steal there
- plaidthunder 4mo ago
  They become less attractive to immigrants looking to engage in economic arbitrage. They become more attractive to outside non-governmental powers looking to engage in economic arbitrage, which brings its own challenges. They have less negotiating power with wealthier countries which impacts their sovereignty. Poor countries also tend to have more internal conflict: https://gsdrc.org/professional-dev/poverty-and-conflict/ https://gsdrc.org/professional-dev/poverty-and-conflict/ If we look at this empirically it seems clear that countries that trade ethnic sameness for economic prosperity end up more stable, peaceful and capable of directing their own affairs. There could be some advantages to living in a country where strangers are also distant cousins, but they seem marginal. There could even be emotional improvements for parts of the population who feel anxious about living near people who are genetically distant from themselves, but I've not seen great evidence of that. Particularly since ethnically cohesive but poor countries tend to fall into civil war regardless. When you put it to the test and measure outcomes, there are tradeoffs that go far beyond giving up consumerism.

jesterson 4mo ago

[flagged]

add-sub-mul-div 4mo ago

Not everyone views outsiders with unease, it's actually possible to nurture curiosity over fear.

chaostheory 4mo ago

Because it takes 18 years to create an adult and nothing other than immigration is working at the moment. If any country was truly serious about this problem, they would end social programs for the elderly and focus that funding for families.

HerbManic 4mo ago
This is one of those thing, yes that is a true statement but what do you do with that information? Would you be willing to make that call? Looks like the trolley problem in action.
- chaostheory 4mo ago
  Yes, because otherwise your economy and country collapse sooner or later. ie everyone dies. Why do think homogenous countries like Japan and South Korea are finally opening up the immigration floodgates? Because there’s currently no other choice. The other options (directly lowering the costs of child care, lowering work hours, robots, et al) still haven’t worked. Immigration buys you time. If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly.
  - nec4b 4mo ago
    > If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly. One big downside of any kind of social programs is that it conditions the population to rely solely on the state, thinking that their payments into the system will guarantee them safety. We tend to forget for a state to exist and to provide services, it needs people. Those people need to be born, raised and cultured in order to act as a community.

Erem 4mo ago

> Why does ever single bleeding heart liberal globalist try and ignore the deep psychological truths about human tribalism? I'll bite. In the US, for one, every single person has an ancestor that thanked their lucky stars the locals didn't think the way that you are recommending we think today. Or an ancestor that suffered because the locals did think that way. We honor that heritage by paying it forward, lest we be lumped among the trash of history that punished the Irish, the Chinese, and the Jews for the cardinal sin of living down the street. Lot of Americans in this forum, so that's why.

s5300 4mo ago
[dead]
Ekaros 4mo ago
You are forgetting the natives who royally massively got screwed. Perfect example why they should have done everything possible to stop migration.
- Erem 4mo ago
  That analogy doesn't work well. Their situation involved foreign powers enforcing jurisdiction and property claims over their land with a regular standing army; a completely different situation than modern immigration
  - moi2388 4mo ago
    Yes. Now it’s through a judicial army based on criminalising speech, and instead of based on a country, based on a religion. Because that’s so much better
    - Erem 4mo ago
      I certainly don't understand all you're saying through this tortured analogy, but yes an "army" of judges that issue rulings is much, much better than an army of soldiers that issue killings

malicka 4mo ago

> the deep psychological truths about human tribalism … that the races should keep to themselves? Yea, I’m going to have to disagree on this one. This was pretty handily disproven by the New World. Mixing, sharing, cohabiting… this creates culture and makes us stronger. Isolation, protectionism, and fear makes us weak.

HerbManic 4mo ago
Yep, there is a lot of evidence that says even nomadic tribes heavily intermingled with others because it was seen as a means of building resilience for all.
- SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
  There is a lot of evidence that didn’t happen all at once and funded by social programs that effectively discourage integration.
kmijyiyxfbklao 4mo ago
How was it disproven by the New World? The countries that mixed (Latin America) are weaker than the country that didn't (USA)
- malicka 4mo ago
  The USA is pretty dang diverse, and definitely mixed. That mixing is a core part of it’s culture and history, actually. And now, the country that mixed (USA) is stronger than the Old World that didn’t (Europe). Which is to say: There is no inherent psychological tribalism that makes having a diverse country impossible or ruinous; rather, this tribalism is manufactured and spread by hatemongers. The New World is a very good case study, here.
  - nec4b 4mo ago
    It's culture and values come from the dominant group. It didn't really mix equally between groups. If the dominant groups will shrink and another arises the values and the culture will change.

arikrahman 4mo ago

I completely agree, very well said.

bulbar 4mo ago

> Why would the solution to “our people aren’t having enough babies” be “we should import different people to have their babies here”? I'm not "... liberal", however there are two reasons. For one it has turned or to be very hard to convince people to "just have more babies". Second reason is that immigration workforce is available immediately, while an increase in birth rate will only help 20 years later. Even if you manage to reverse the trajectory of the birth rate, how long would it take to approach 2.0? How long until you have healthy demographics? 50, 70 years, maybe, that's just too long. > truths about human tribalism? Truth is that human are complicated and have survived for so long not because of their thumbs or their language, but because of their adaptability.

HerbManic 4mo ago
It isn't just about getting it above 2.0, it is having those people in the work force. Even if you could magic up enough babies today, it would be about 20 years until they would be actively offsetting the issue. The is why demographic issues are so insidious. The problems that keep birth rates down today, end up amplifying these issues in the future further suppressing them. Eventually you hit equilibrium but it is a long way down until you get there.

bulbar 4mo ago

> They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values. Talking about homogenous culture I hope you don't live in the US, because that guys for sure never had one. US is way too big for that which is also why so many laws are still defined by the states.

Tor3 4mo ago

>They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values. That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any. The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".

DrProtic 4mo ago
You refer to a period where we had constant war in Europe? You literally posted an example of the opposite.
- Tor3 4mo ago
  In what way? I included England just because those particular periods are well-known. If you look at ALL of Europe's history, all up to recent times, there's been constant movements and migrations. People with different backgrounds, moving around, a lot of movement came as trade increased (and, as it has lately been found, there was much more trade even 3k years ago than anyone had previously anticipated). If you look at a snapshot of time it looks pretty static, but let your time-tick be generations and you see constant changes.
  - nec4b 4mo ago
    It really hasn't been constant movement and migrations. Once the Germanic and Slavic tribes settled, which wasn't fun for the natives before them and certainly not for the Romans as well, the migration more or less stopped statistically speaking (exceptions were the wars).
    - SV_BubbleTime 4mo ago
      Right, and this latest influx certainly outpaces anything in many generations.

porkloin 4mo ago

The idea that Japan is a uniquely "homogeneous culture" is honestly a modern construct anyway. Japanese culture and language has been enormously influenced by colonial and migrant presence in the country, from Chinese to Dutch to British to American, and a zillion others. Just look at the language! I don't have the exact figure in front of me, but I remember when taking Japanese language courses that something like 30% of the lexicon is loanwords from other languages (edit: I looked it up and it's apparently closer to 50%) Way higher than most other widely spoken languages on the planet. Japanese culture is legitimately _amazing_ in its capacity to absorb and domesticate outside influence, and it's unfortunate that people both in the country and abroad are so short-sighted to not see that. The Meiji and Showa era militarism benefited a lot by promoting this myth. They weren't alone, mind you. Lots of folks across the EU and the US are still falling for the same nationalist stories that their governments cooked up in the early 1900s to drive them all to war. The country _does_ have a really notable cohesion and shared identity, but the problem is in attributing that to some kind of unique isolationism rather than their long history of pluralism.

HerbManic 4mo ago
I was going to say, Japans history is one that was very... combative. They fought amongst themselves heavily for a long time.
- porkloin 4mo ago
  I think a lot of places were at various points in time, right? It's always a little easier to paint with a broad brush and lump hundreds of years into a single statement when you're talking about the history of "foreign" places that we don't learn the history of very deeply in western education. For Japan in particular, it's hard because a big part of the Meiji nationalist movements was to recast Japanese history with a heavy focus on the "bushido" and an arguably manufactured version of some points in the country's history that _were_ undoutably bloody. That yarn-spinning from 100+ years ago has actively shaped how the rest of the world thinks about Japanese history. Western governments during WW2 were happy to take that narrative and paint the entire history as blood-soaked and brutal to dehumanize their enemies. But it's not hard to find evidence of how many long stretches of internal peace existed in Japan. After the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate there was 250 years of more or less continuous peace internally. Arguably continental Europe from the middle-ages onward is more fractured and bloody in total than Japan was in the same period. Classical Greece was a zillion times more bloody.