Japan's population declines for first time since 1920s
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
For a country with a ton of Government debt and a society dominated by small number of big companies that's a bad thing.
If a single big company fails then you have an instant drop in tax receipts and a rise in benefits. The communities in which the business is located instantly suffers which then flows through to supporting businesses also going under. All of which puts immediate pressure on the job market as you have lots of skilled people looking for work.
And nobody is saying that problems associated Japan's shrinking population of working adults are going to manifest immediately. It's a long term macroeconomic trend which when you combine with an ageing population means significant structural risks. Every Western country e.g. UK, US, Australia, Europe all have quite sizeable immigration rates purely to cater for these risks.
Yes. Because you're making the assumption that fewer jobs is a bad thing even though the number of people who actually need jobs is going down.
Is that such a difficult concept to grasp?
>If a single big company fails then you have an instant drop in tax receipts and a rise in benefits.
Not true. Again, Japan has a 3.1% unemployment rate. It's a lot easier to find a job in Japan than it is to find a job in the US, where we've seen between a million and two million immigrants a year for decades.
In terms of tax receipts, again, tax receipts go down but you have less to spend money on. Fewer schools, less road work, fewer prisons. Particularly in a culture where the family takes care of aging relatives, I don't see this as a big budgetary calamity.
>And nobody is saying that problems associated Japan's shrinking population of working adults are going to manifest immediately.
Why not? Why wouldn't we see at least some trending along these lines?
>Every Western country e.g. UK, US, Australia, Europe all have quite sizeable immigration rates purely to cater for these risks.
The risks they're trying to mitigate aren't the ones you think they're trying to mitigate. If you're running a large corporation a shrinking population scares you because it means rising labor costs and a smaller market for your goods. So you use your influence to make sure the government allows a lot of immigration.
Since I'm not running a multinational corporation the national GDP doesn't matter that much to me. What matters is how much I get paid, how high my taxes are, and how much things cost. I'd rather have fewer neighbors who share my culture than a higher GDP.
When enterprise is not so centralized, little firms fail all the time, and are quickly replaced by other little firms. OTOH in the Japan/Korea situation (and with TPP etc., probably USA in the near future), ineffective organizations hide within bigco's indefinitely, consuming resources in inefficient, anticonsumer fashion.
If you don't look Japanese you aren't Japanese no matter how good your language, cultural or social skills are. And if you aren't Japanese then you will be treated as a seperate class and often discriminated against e.g. housing.
The institutional xenophobia/racism in Japan is simply unlike what most countries have.
You can't simultaneously be concerned about the robots taking our jobs and a high ratio of retirees to workers.
Maybe not so good if you're in the drywall business.
[1] The kind that focuses on aggregate money flows and spending to the exclusion of everything actually important.
Yeah, but every year you have as much infrastructure as you had last year, except some of it degrades or is abandoned and becomes dangerous.
Yes, you can do that: that's a capital cost of maintaining quality of life under declining population. I'm not sure how a choice between continued declining quality of life or incurring a significant capital cost is a "benefit", however.
There might be some benefits, but I've yet to see an argument that they are such that the balance is negative for the specific case of Japan.
> Such as every year you don't need as much infrastructure.
Which would be fine, if X infrastructure with Y proportion degradation due to lack of maintenance was equivalent to X*(1-Y) of optimally-structured infrastructure.
The problem is, its not.
Problem with it is that it ignores that physical things don't follow standard accounting depreciation schedules. Like I mentioned, you can't make the assumption that physical resources like energy, labor, and materials flow through the economy like intangible 'money'
The problem with your equation is that real things don't degrade by X percent per year. Or more that the utility tends not to. For maintenance you usually have a fix part that is based on time and a variable part that depends on use. And typically the the cost of depreciation occurs mostly at the end of life when you need to expend real resources to replace it. However if you don't need to replace it then what? Bonus.
That's like saying, I have a 1TB hard disk.
Now I have less files, so I can save money by not upgrading.
Sure, you might not be forced to upgrade due to space constraints.
But harddisks are mechanical devices - they degrade over time (just like trains, roads, plumbing etc.). If you don't replace your harddisks for 10 years, because you somehow manage to delete a bunch of files, and not replace them ....well, good luck trying to access your data.
Also, technology is constantly evolving - and trite as it may sound, if you're not going forwards, you're going backwards.
Have you tried using, oh, say, a Quantum fireball drive lately, to run a modern operating system or modern applications?
I mean, apart from the incompatibility issues, even if you got it running, and even if you managed to fit it on there, it just wouldn't be able to keep up.
So no, having a falling population doesn't mean you can just sit and let your infrastructure run into the ground.
However, at some point, all the reasons for not having children will be overcome by survival instinct kicking in. Japan has already reached the inflection point with birthrate going up again.
They also have the side effect of, in most case, raising the birth rate for you.
What country with a declining population did this and succeeded ?
http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/11-630-x/11-630-x2014001-eng.ht...
Britain post-WW2, took in a ton of Indian/Pakistani migrants.
For that matter, some people say that Germany currently is trying the exact same with Syrian refugees.
The Syrian refugees are mostly educated, middle class and not only was it a good thing to do from a humanitarian perspective. It's a very shrewd move from an economic one as well.
That's what they're calling mass population replacement now?
I think the native peoples of those countries would take issue with the idea that "skilled migrants"/"colonists" were a good thing for their nations.
It seems bizarre to say we're optimizing for the economic success of the landmass and not the people currently living in it.
see also: taiwan, hong kong.
I was expecting Japan to figure out how to become a successful post-industrial society. But no. Government attempts to fix the economy have mostly involved heavy spending on infrastructure, which beats the US approach of pumping money into the banking system. At least the infrastructure is in good shape. But Japan hasn't returned to being the industrial powerhouse it once was.
[1] http://www.forecast-chart.com/historical-nikkei-225.html
A good thing that Japanese people care very little about what the "Gaijin" thinks.
Sometimes civilizations, countries and even whole empires just wither and die.
Japan as a unified nation in the modern sense is newer than the United States of America. Prior to the Meiji Restoration in the 1860s Japan was a feudal society lead by warlords. The rule under the Tokugawa shogunate was relatively stable, but it was still a feudal society.
I don't think anyone is claiming Japan will cease to exist as a country and that the Japanese people would die out, but something with as radical a change as the Restoration (Which included multiple civil wars...) would probably not count as the nation just correcting itself. It is the effective death of one form of the nation and the birth of the other.
When the shogunate emerged in Japan to govern in place of the abdicating, distracted Heian imperial court, USA was populated by various neolithic tribes. Akihito is a direct descendant of the emperors who ruled then, and speaks the same language in his court that they did. I haven't heard much pre-Columbian Algonquin spoken in the White House.
Civil wars don't switch to a different "civilization". (The one in USA didn't, did it?) Japan's remarkable post-WWII recovery from the devastation of war and poor governance in the 1940s to economic success in the 1960s-80s (which IMHO is more impressive than the Meiji restoration to which you refer) is compared by Japanese themselves to earlier recoveries such as that during the early Edo period. The culture, language, and society that exists in Japan today descends directly from those that accomplished previous impressive transitions.
It's hardly jealousy. And you're arguing against claims I didn't make - I never said a civil war changes civilization in and of itself. But we're talking about a period where the way the country had been ruled for hundred of years completely changed, with huge amounts of turmoil, lots of bloodshed, and came out on the other site vastly changed. To try to compare it to the US Civil War, where in comparison things were static (As far as the governance of any nation remains static) when it comes government reform, is silly. The US punished the South, but the federal government behaved much as it had before.
In comparison, the Meiji restoration ended centuries of feudal society.
Give me a break.