Japan's fertility crisis is terrifying and unprecedented
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Stat of the day right there.
- open up the economy to more people (women, in Japan's male-dominated workforce)
- open up the economy to more people (immigrants -- while unpopular in Japan, certainly acceptable in plenty of other places; look at Germany's example of the Gastarbeiter in the 50s/60s to make up for the labor force lost in war)
- automation.
It's not like these solutions are unavailable to the rest of the OECD. Personally I look forward to a massively automated economy to free human creativity and leisure.
As for bankruptcy, not going to happen in Japan since the local banks own the debt and declaring bankruptcy would make the banking system in Japan crash, leading to unknown consequences. I think they rather want to keep it under control as long as they can, while they are progressively getting their backs against the wall.
This may be a short term solution to budgetary problems, but it's likely to push the birth rate down even farther.
The section of the article labeled "The new world of work" discusses this issue, although it doesn't go into much details about the pressure on new mothers to quit their jobs.
So let's simply introduce a law:
"Any legal entity that fires any woman within 2 years of her having a child for any reason has to pay out 10 years of pay to her on the spot. If there is so much of a suspicion of her getting fired because of having a child, same. If there is a suspicion of a woman not getting hired for getting a kid, same"
Problem solved.
I'd much prefer a nuanced (i.e. not simple) solution that avoids negative consequences.
We need to figure out how to cause our populations to decline naturally until we can get the number of humans down to the point where everyone can live good, happy, resource rich lives without cooking the planet.
Japan is on the vanguard of figuring out how to do that. Obviously there are difficulties involved. Not the least is dealing with the relentless march of Capitalism which requires every year be more, and bigger, than the year before, lest the whole thing fall over.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare_in_Japan, https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SOCX_AGG [1] https://www.infoplease.com/world/health-and-social-statistic...
EDIT: Better source for [0]
Good for Japan because of xenophobia towards immigrants (and that cultural phenomenon is definitely not changing anytime soon), good for the US because we're broke and can't afford to keep extracting more for entitlements because we didn't save enough for it and kicked the can.
Japan has no plan. Let's not write sentences like there is a big mastermind behind everything. Politicians are not even able to take care of the ongoing budget and pressing issues, so let's not assume they know what to do 10 years from now.
I can get behind this. but...
> I'm not sure what's supposed to be terrifying about it.
So, so many things. The world is not as unified as it needs to be for this to be a good thing. Population decline is Japan is a) too small to ease overall resource burden on the world, b) increasing resource burden on Japan itself, c) Japan's situation to enjoy/deal with, the rest of the world is hardly going to reward it for it. Trying to maintain a functioning economy is going to get harder with a shrinking able-bodied workforce in the near future, I would not want to be responsible for addressing that.
If and when the Japanese economy collapses in the current world immigration climate, people will have little recourse too -- with their language and culture isolation so far, they'll just be stuck in their crumbling economy.
One of the reasonable solutions is to increase worker mobility, and encourage economic contributors to migrate to and operate in Japan, and not worry so much about indigenous population decline. But this is a major big cultural, economic and social change to embrace, which is starting to get harder to adopt in today's increasingly isolationist rhetoric.
Japan has way too much fluff in its economy: People working with almost zero productivity, or completely useless jobs (purely bureaucratic) or facade kind of jobs (folks just hired to stand around) - it's actually very good to see the worker base shrinking, it will bring a lot more focus in the long run, hopefully.
> and not worry so much about indigenous population decline
Japan became a major world power when it only had something like 40-50M inhabitants. You don't need 120 Millions folks in Japan to be a powerful country. Like, not at all.
All economies have a lot of fluff, but yeah, it would be exciting if the shrinking workforce meant a focus on optimizing the productivity of individual workers, while the country doesn't have to deal with unemployment at the same time. Really the only issue is the short period of time in the immediate future of providing current levels of welfare to the large elderly population with a much smaller still-inefficient younger workforce facing the burden of doing so.
It's possible if they figure out a good short term solution, it could put Japan into a lean diet that is really good for it in the long-run.
However they also run the risk of suffering some serious long-term economic damage if this rough patch doesn't go well. Way too many things can go wrong -- if the young decide to also ditch the workforce and rely on state welfare while it lasts, or are not supported enough, or the focus goes too heavily on making babies and not on optimizing economic output, etc.
Even if it were the case that "this planet has way too many humans on it," which is debatable, why is that Japan's problem if there aren't even "way too many people" in Japan?
That's going to take demand out of the system for many things and add demand for things where automation is hardest such as taking care of the old and infirm.
Some aspects of automation, like cheap autonomous meal delivery help, but taking care of people is highly labour intensive.
That coupled with lower productivity growth is going to have big impacts everywhere. The Welfare state might become unsustainable.
Places like Australia and the US with high immigration will delay these issues somewhat, but even there as the countries where immigrants get richer and themselves have fewer children immigration is likely to reduce in the next 20-50 years.
It's not "might become", we already know it's unsustainable. It's just that presently we are taking on so much debt to make up for the ongoing costs of it, but at some point the future generations of workers may wonder why they have to pay so much when they don't get any of the benefits.
Also the welfare state might be reduced somewhat to make it sustainable.
Or a combination of both.
That's already progressively happening, but it's because it's progressive it becomes a problem: you are for example paying for the pensions of folks who are retired now, but not for yours and there will be either no pension for when you reach 65, or they'll push it back to 75 to manage the costs. Folks who will retire in 20 years cannot count on the government's welfare at all.
What are you talking about? Corporate profits are nothing compared to the national budget for redistribution. Check your figures.
http://usafacts.org/the-big-picture/revenue?return_to=%2F
In addition they employ a lot of the people who pay the 1.7Trn in Income and 1 Trn in payroll tax the US government gets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement
Point to the fact that global corporations spend a lot of effort making sure they get away with paying less than they should. If there was a fair taxation of corps at the level they should be taxed, they would be paying more. Obviously the corporations keep getting bigger and richer, and the 1% wealthier, yet we see countries struggling with welfare state. Doesn't seem right.
In practice, of course, the law across different countries effectively allows for different tax rates. This was decided and entered into law.
Of course all of these tax rates are agreed to be what the corporation "should" pay.
Corporations simply select the lowest of the choices available to them. Is that not what they "should" pay ? Not a problem: congress can vote laws that make these constructions impossible. They are not doing so.
Don't blame corporations here, they're simply responding to incentives congress put there for them. Instead, blame congress. They can change the tax rate, even for international profits and revenues (in fact the US is infamous for doing that in several ways already), and they make the rules about what can be tax deferred and what can't. They're not changing those rules, and you can bet they know what they're doing.
I think the bigger issue is that because states are paying for things that are unsustainable (ie. the welfare state, even in the US, is unsustainable) the tax level doesn't matter : it's too low. Changing the tax level simply changes the point in time where the system crashes, but fixing is not possible. We simply cannot put the current level of economic activity into elder care in the future.
I disagree that a welfare state is unsustainable. I think it's not and if anything, seems most of the thinking of the future once automation and ML take over most of the world is that some type of UBI will be necessary. I don't know the exact form but I agree. The brutal increase in productivity and value added by technology will have to be offset with a redistribution of that wealth if we want a functioning society. We might start now and fix the welfare state.
Healthcare and elderly care currently consumes 20% of all economic activity. That is what's unsustainable. This is out of the question towards the future, since those people do not contribute 20% of GDP in the first place (and they'd need to contribute almost 40% to justify that).
I guess the question I'm asking is simple: you want to increase this expenditure ... ok. What do you drop ? Please pick other parts of the economy that we can just drop ...
Please don't just handwave "just automate it and save 50%" but ...
Yeah, and military spending is at 600 billion dollars a year. Don't you think that ought to be cut first instead of starting to attack profits from companies? Profitable companies reinvest their gains back into the market anyway, which is essential for a functioning economy. Military spending is almost pure loss in comparison.
Profitable companies seem to be increasingly spending a disproportionate large amount of their profits in making a few people richer and richer. New companies like tech don't even create that many jobs to begin with, in fact they tend to destroy them. We are moving into a new paradigm where something will need to be done so everyone and not just 4 guys in Silicon Valley partake of the benefits of tech.
People don't have kids because they dont want to have kids. That's more a choice now than it ever was. Automation, Basic Income, won't change the global trend, especially in Japan.
"According to some, zero population growth, perhaps after stabilizing at some optimum population, is the ideal towards which countries and the whole world should aspire in the interests of accomplishing long-term environmental sustainability."
But there are probably outiers who have more which even that out.
That said... if we aren't talking about legislation, yeah, that makes it much more reasonable.
source:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
1. The birth rate for males is usually (always?) slightly higher than for females, roughly 105:100, and the fertility rate for a stable population is the average number of children a woman has to have to replace herself, so the ratio disparity makes the needed replacement fertility rate slightly more than two.
2. Not all females survive and remain fertile through their child-bearing years.
There are various environmental factors thought to cause variations in sex ratios by way of slight hormone variations, so one shouldn't expect the male:female ratio to be constant from region to region. Medical care and disease and mortality rates vary, too. So there's no single exact fertility rate for a stable population, but it's roughly 2.07-2.10 for developed countries.
Also people have reproductive control.
Also people are richer and have more choice about getting married and having 5 kids (of which only half used to survive to 5).
The problem is extremely long hours are surely deeply ingrained in Japanese work culture at this point.