Where my phone placed the new line was truly a rollercoaster:
Japan's Birth Rate Set to Break Even
Wow, breaking even? Finally looking up for japan!
... the Bleakest Forecasts
Oh no.
Wow, we're lucky this whole AI thing will fix everything if we just give some tech bros a few more trillion dollars
Let me make it simple.
You can't raise a fucking family if all you're doing is barely surviving.
If Japan capped working at 28 hours a week and anything after that required double the pay (for overtime), this problem would taken care of.
Working all the time makes people miserable. It's an externality that impacts society in all sorts of horrible ways. It would be proper for the government to institute a rule like this.
It would definitely lower GDP of Japan and cause some economic issues, but the alternative (living in a world where people are so miserable that they don't fall in love as much and want to reproduce) is worse for their economy.
Will they do this? No, because it would require thinking outside of the box too much and would be seen as too extreme.
Yup. It is so weird to me how little the destroyed work-life-balance is mentioned whenever declining birth rates are discussed (not only in Japan).
They don't even have to pay overtime for work over 28 hours. If they just paid overtime for the actual or time work that is done, that would make an enormous difference. When I worked in Japan (25 years ago, but I have read/heard nothing to suggest that the situation has changed), it was normal for people to work 60 or 70 hours, but not claim any overtime.
Here in the USA, employers just avoid overtime and benefits by hiring two people to work 35 hours/week, who each have two jobs.
This is the average amount of monthly hours (male/female)worked since 2013, i do not see an honest effort to help the population growth.
Source: https://www.e-stat.go.jp/en/
Amazing how the people in positions to have kids are screaming at the top of their lungs what would help the situation and the geritocracy just ignores them and has the fucking nerve to whine about low birth rates.
Wipe your own asses boomers, we're done propping up this dead society
Surely more austerity and social alienation will solve it
korea is actually worst off than japan.
Italy's not doing great either but it never comes up in the "look at japan" discussions
The birth rate discussion is mostly centered around "can we continue making money?"
Japan and Korea have low immigration rates, so the population falls and capital is unhappy about the prospect of a shrinking and more elderly workforce and domestic market to sell things to. Italy on the other hand has subsaharan and arabic immigration (and the actually larger eastern European and Chinese immigration - but they're not as fantasy inducing for the far-right), so the population decline isn't as fast. There are more workers to replace the dying ones, and capital is happy. Plus, you can use this fact to fuel chud paranoia about "the great replacement"
Immigrants are seen as a tool everywhere. Right wingers want us, only as long as we become loyal servants with 0 political power and living in fear of the state and society's iron fist. Liberals want us, because "who will clean the toilets?".
And the fact that something is happening to cause people to consider reproducing as outright harmful to their well-being among people who would otherwise have wanted offspring is a crisis of bourgeois society that few people actually want to talk about.
Probably because, compared to those 2 countries, Italy is easier to immigrate to.
There are three solutions to adjusting the so-called 'replacement rate:'
Options 1 and 2 haven't worked too well, and option 3 can cause a lot of political issues.
Not sure there's a good way to avert the end-game.
Edit: actually there are two other solutions: cloning, and senecide (killing the elderly). It's dystopian SciFi and totally unethical, but they're there.
I'd argue that Japan has historically done pretty well at the first. I don't find the healthcare system here perfect, but I have many elderly in-laws who get great care. There's probably going to be a decline in quality and/or availability as the issues persist, though.
You can't complain about a birthrate crisis when the world is full of immigrants and there is a domestic cost of living crisis unless you are a eugenicist on some level.
Throwing rocks from the glass house that is the US I know
Japan is super racist despite the polite facade. It also doesn’t help that they have a “work and drink yourself to death at the expense of having a life” culture.
America certainly does similar things, but we don’t bother polishing the turd with politeness.
It also doesn’t help that they have a “work and drink yourself to death at the expense of having a life” culture.
Americans, on average, work more hours per year than Japanese people (1765 vs 1691). Per capita alcohol consumption is also higher in the US than it is in Japan.
It was different in the 80s, but that's now it is now.
I remember living it in Mexico like a free soul as a kid. We had poor people but I think I never really saw homeless people. Even the poorest person I knew had a little house where he lived with a few donkeys. We called him Toño La Muerte because his eyes were deep into his very thin looking skull eye sockets. He also lived right outside of the city pantheon. His little house burnt down once and besides the time my father died I can't remember having such a sinking feeling. Anyway his house was promptly rebuilt With community help. We didn't just let Toñito die out in despair having nothing. Anyway, now things are bleak for all kids out there. How can they ever dream of owning a place to live? And so if you can only focus on that problem, there's no room for the having kids problem. Its simple, you got no place to live so bring no kids until you do. Okay so let's say 50 year old men can finally afford a house so they start courting 20 year old women. That's a big gap. Maybe their sperm is not great. But then it also means that they are easily outcompeting young men for women who can have kids. Ofcourse for women this all means that they can't have a future of their own. They live so they can make bsbies with 50 year old men shooting blanks. Some of this might be true. My wife and I are similar age and married close to our 40's. We knew we had to make some babies asap or we would miss that chance. 5 years and you're done. Once women hit 40, its very hard to be pregnant. Having kids within 5 years is a lot of pressure.
Japan before WWII
So:
→ lots of children
→ many young adults
→ few elderly
**Japan after WWII
**
→ baby boom
→ improved healthcare
→ Japan gives women more freedom to study and work. But… the system around family, work, and care barely changes.
Fertility collapses + a huge adult generation (from the baby boom) From the 1970s onward, the birth rate drops dramatically due to:
Lessons / Conclusion: Japan shows what happens when you don’t make structural changes for a long time. Too few workers + too many elderly = shortages of labor, money, and care.
Solutions
Countries like France and the Scandinavian nations do better:
Result: higher birth rates than Japan, Italy, Spain, and formerly Germany. If you want a “younger” society → invest structurally in good family life.
Without immigration → extreme population decline and extreme aging.
In Europe: immigration + integration makes aging far less severe.
Japan can insist “we don’t want immigration,” “we are homogeneous,” “we’ll manage through discipline,” but eventually this collides with simple math. If we want to preserve our way of life, we have to take demographic reality seriously, with better childcare, higher productivity, and controlled immigration.
Article claims they expected these numbers but in 16 years. Numerically, its not that far off from the expected number of 750k births. Its 90%. I dont think thats too much of a difference to be alarmed about until you read into it more. Taxes will increase and pensions will be effected if this continues. To make matters worse this is after they already dumped billions into policies like extra free money (63$ per month🤣) until child is in high school proving that current efforts are not enough. Shame they cant address the root cause:
real reason is that they were victims of the ‘ice age generation (job shortage generation)’ and the stagnation of economies that followed, which prevented them from marrying or having children if they wanted to,” she said quoting research data.
It's wild how much pearl clutching goes on about birth rates, and how it isn't common knowledge that this shit is a cyclical pattern. People get antsy about birth rates any time there's economic contraction happening.
The Japanese are not going to die out and Japanese society is not going to collapse.
All the MBAs and politicians throwing their hands up about birth rates because the real answer is the unthinkable "number might go down"
Didn’t they have a program a few years ago inviting foreigners to come and have (effectively) anchor babies?
That doesn’t seem right. Japan is very conservative of its “genealogy” and would treat “halfus” very differently than people who look Japanese regardless of mastery of the language. They also have strict immigration laws because, they don’t view immigration as a positive. It would be a threat to their homogeneous culture and society.
Dropping dead on the factory floor only to be replaced hours later isn't very motivating I'd imagine
Another stupid article assuming that a population reduction is a bad thing.
No, no, of course, just keep increasing the human population until it crashes. Then it'll be an actual problem.
The numbers look bad because increasing population increases the GDP, and GDP has become the archetypal example of what happens when you turn a metric into a goal.
It's not just about GDP, if your retired population starts to outnumber your working population by a large amount, who will support all those old people? Nowadays children can't care for their parents because they have to go to their 9-5 every day, so we rely on other people to do that job for us, and if they disappear then what? The problem isn't the deflating population per se, it's the inverted demographic pyramid and our work culture
The problem is made up. We're more productive than ever and should have plenty of leisure time and plenty of safety nets for old age....but that wealth has all been siphoned off by a very few. The solution to this is tax the wealthy.
Japan does not get enough hate for being a racist anti-immigrant conservative hell hole.
I don't see the problem. What's the problem here? How is this bleak, except for the linegoup?
More babies is just more people later. I don't know that we need fewer, but we certainly don't need more.
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