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It's not just about productivity. As the article says, "People in Japan tend to live a long time; elderly Japanese are expensive to care for because they spend
by anindyabd 12y ago
It's not just about productivity. As the article says,
"People in Japan tend to live a long time; elderly Japanese are expensive to care for because they spend so many years in retirement and because they're accustomed to a high standard of living and medical care. For any economy to stay healthy, there need to be enough taxpayers to support all the retirees. But Japan's population is shrinking and aging simultaneously, which means that the number of old people is skyrocketing just as the base of taxpayers shrinks."
- adventured 12y agoWhen you adjust for Japan's fraudulent age accounting, they're not living much longer than Germans. Maybe 1 to 1.5 years tops. It's just another bogus excuse for the extraordinary mismanagement by the Japanese government over the last 25 years.
- mahouse 12y agoCare to explain "Japan's fraudulent age accounting"?
- potatolicious 12y agoJapan is often claimed to have "lost" a lot of seniors who have actually died but were never recorded. The explanation for this has ranged from welfare fraud (relatives continuing to collect on the dead) to simple incompetence. But either way AFAIK there is strong evidence that quite a large number of dead people slip through the cracks and are never marked as dead, at least for statistical purposes, which inflates life expectancies.