Japan, Short on Babies, Reaches a Worrisome Milestone | Hacker News Reader

Japan, Short on Babies, Reaches a Worrisome Milestone

nytimes.com

43 pointsDiabloD388 comments

The argument to increase immigration seems like a quick-fix for countries poised to become elderly-heavy, but when those immigrants are uneducated and most likely to perform jobs that will be automated away in 15-20 years (and face enormous linguistic barriers to participate in e.g. japanese society), such immigrants may be as much or more long-term dependents as they would have previously been assets in labor-heavy economies. Weathering the geriatric storm for a generation or two until a new and lower post-industrial carrying capacity is reached could be a smoother long term social and economic proposition for such countries, especially if they aren't immigrant-friendly already.

Also Japan is xenophobic so such a solution would never fly anyway

Nations are more than identity-less economic zones.

Saying "Japan is xenophobic" is perhaps a poor choice of words, but why the downvotes??

Even if Japanese Citizens are welcoming of and friendly towards foreigners, Japan as a Country is quite well known for it's strict immigration policy.

> Discrimination in Japan is based on nationality. Guest workers are not considered true immigrants, and their children and grandchildren are often seen as outsiders because of the absence of birthright citizenship. Employers tend to treat them as foreigners.

Source: Immigration Is Tough for Japan, But it's the solution for population loss. => https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-12-07/immigrati...

and

> Call it an opportunity, maybe, but don’t call it work. Legally, the time Ms. Liu spent ironing and packing women’s wear in Japan is considered “training.” She had entered the murky and at times abusive world of Japan’s technical trainees — essentially second-class laborers brought in from abroad to fill jobs that Japanese citizens aren’t taking.

Source: Japan Limited Immigration; Now It’s Short of Workers => https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/10/business/japan-immigrants...

Xenophobia implies malintent and an unenlightened view. I could just as easily say that Japan is very protective of its society and thus is selective about who gets to join. It is fundamentally a balanced approach to immigration.

Of course, this is offensive to those who have been indoctrinated with the dogma that all people are the same and deserve the same opportunities, regardless of the cost to society. I think you can see clearly the flaws in the post-enlightenment primacy of personal liberty in America and Europe today. It's a kind of extremism, which will inevitably repeat the cycle of destruction, revolution, conquest, etc.

> those who have been indoctrinated with the dogma that all people are the same

It's amazing how widespread and deeply ingrained an idea perhaps 20 years old is, especially considering how obviously false it is from simple observation. Of course, it hasn't been an organic acceptance.

People have only heard one side of the argument from mainstream "news" sources their entire lives, even though the social science is clear that diversity is bad for social trust, empathy, peace, etc.

Cap'n Obvious here, but immigration by non-Japanese in face of falling Japanese demographics will ultimately result in a country that's not really Japan anymore. That's probably a fact of life, if you consider societies to be living entities, and thus bound by the same constraints...and yet even as a non-Japanese it feels really sad to recognize that Japan as a unique nation, with a unique culture and society might disappear. Not much to do, though, if they don't want to have kids...

Societies come and go and there is nothing wrong with it that was the response I got from a Japanese elderly man few years ago when we were discussing declining population and future of Japan during my visit to Japan.

Japan's great skill is adaptation without throwing away all the lessons of the past. It's an extremely delicate balancing act that requires a lot of trust in your neighbors. They've been doing it more or less for at least a thousand years, so there's plenty of room for an optimistic outcome. As usual, the narrative in the west is that Japan is going to fail any minute because it hasn't followed the lead of enlightened nations. Meanwhile, moving from NYC to Japan felt like leaping twenty years into a brighter future that I can only hope others will be able to discover. One thing is for sure: Japan in fifty years won't be the same as Japan today. Rapid and determined change is a constant here.

Most of the unique elements of Japan's culture come from emulating Western programs. First in a militaristic way as a response to Commodore Perry, then as a result of the post-war occupation.

Tea ceremony, Zen buddhism, Geisha, Samurai, ... from emulating Western programs?

Have you read about Japanese culture before commenting?

Tea ceremony and Zen Buddhism are Chinese traditions. Zen's influence today is largely related to the turn away from militarized Shinto and western interest during the period. The tea ceremony has changed in Japan and it is one of their longest traditions.

Geisha were sex workers with a bit of mystique attached. Similarly, samurai were knights or dukes, and any influence they currently have comes from a romanticised version much like knights received.

Yes, and I understand the difference between history and the cultural perception of it. The ideas these things represent often come from the Meiji period propaganda.

>and any influence they currently have comes from a romanticised version much like knights received.

Much of it fabricated by the samurai themselves long after they had to put down their swords and were relegated to bureaucrats. Even the concept of "bushido[0]" has been argued to be a modern anarchronism, and an intentionally Westernized 20th century fiction based on the Romantic ideals of knights and chivalry.

[0]https://www.tofugu.com/japan/bushido/

Same can be said for Sweden, Germany, etc.

Japan's cultural uniqueness is mostly a romantic myth. People act as if the Sakoku period was the norm for Japan and not an exception, but Japan has been just as susceptible to cultural influence as any other country. Much of that "unique culture" was adapted from China, much more of it from the West. That's not in any way calling it illegitimate, a lot of Western countries borrow from one another (or impose cultural change through violence) or crib from the ancient Greeks or Romans. The process of cultural admixture and transformation through trade, religion and violence is the same everywhere. Westerners just seem to ignore the phenomenon as it relates to Japan, I suspect, to maintain some sense of exoticism about the place.

Japan would lose its ethnic homogeneity, but to me that's not something worth caring about or mourning the loss of. The culture would change, but culture always changes.

Why would the loss of ethnic identity in Japan not be a bad thing? It would be a loss for diversity.

It would be a gain for diversity in Japan, though. These things are relative.

Confused. On a planetary scale, it would result in a net loss of diversity. Let's take it to the extreme and claim the Japanese completely die out as an ethnic group. Why would the diversity increase?

> Japan's cultural uniqueness is mostly a romantic myth

Have you been there? I can't imagine anyone who has spent any amount of time in Japan would claim there is no cultural uniqueness.

I may have just been imprecise in my wording. I was addressing andreiw's assertion that Japan would "not really (be) Japan anymore" after cultural influence from immigration. But Japan's culture is already the beneficiary of a great deal of foreign cultural influence, so nothing would happen to it with respect to immigration that hasn't been happening to it since practically the dawn of time.

At best, the rate of cultural transformation might be accelerated, but even then I suspect the doomsday scenario of Japan simply vanishing in a generation (or whatever) due to an influx of immigrants is unlikely. If the Meiji restoration or the American occupation didn't destroy Japan's cultural identity then a few thousand more gaijin won't either.

True. Japan has long been a leader in automation. Maybe they can pull it off. And elder care will be largely automated too.

On the other hand, limitations on immigration (not just to Japan, I suspect) won't reduce overall population growth. Indeed, it will arguably increase it, because those people will be stuck in subsistence economies.

The problem is in the future, and those uneducated immigrants will have college aged kids in the time frame you mention. They will have the resources needed to develop this automated society, and the automation of labor makes being a dependent less of an issue.

I think that your comment in not accurate in this context.

Most of the work visas that are extended in Japan are for qualified jobs. Having a university degree is mandatory for most of the types of visa. Also, they need to offer you a good salary.

Actually, one of the few ways to get a visa without having qualification is to come from an English speaking country and work as an English teacher because they need a lot them.

http://www.juridique.jp/immigration.html#workvisa

Seems like a completely valid social trajectory. I don't get why it is considered so grim.

> "The government has taken steps to keep older workers in their jobs longer, and to encourage companies to invest in automation."

> "Individual Japanese will not necessarily be poorer just because the economy is smaller."

Sure there will be shrinking pains, but it doesn't seem like a catastrophe. Seems like it will ease more responsible use of our space and environment.

Young are fewer and fewer, there will be few tax income to pay pension to the old people, thus, the government either slash the pension or raise tax. And it is death spiral anyway.

Japan's good days are indeed numbered. The breakpoint will come, and I would predict an huge exdous of young people leaving Japan, because they don't want to spend their whole life working for older generation then finding there will be no one for themselves.

But where will they go as the same thing will be happening to most western countries as their tax base is hollowed out due to the failure of largely trust based basis of their taxation systems, and as more and more economic activity has moved overseas or under the table, and profits stored outside the formal system?

There will be countries that will die later.

An economy depending on population growth is incompatible with physics. If we care about climate change we should want every country to have a population decline until we can live within our carbon means.

The universe is a big place. Moving to other planets isn't only reasonable, people are planning for it. Sustained growth is possible.

Until you have hard data on how people born and raised in <40% Earth gravity turn out, moving to other planets is only a possibility, not something you can plan for.

Also, with new technologies like CRISPR, AI, and bionics (and beyond) will we soon dramatically alter fundamentally what it means to be human? Perhaps on a unit basis our future selves will be far more resource efficient.

There is nothing reasonable about moving to Mars - a place where the average temperature is -55C and there is no breathable atmosphere. Imagine such a place on earth, and now imagine trying to sell a home there to someone.

We may, one day, colonize other planets. But we evolved specifically to exist on this one. Each new environment will likely take centuries, if not millenia, to properly colonize. The fact that it is theoretically possible for a comically tiny fraction of Earth's population to eke out a hardscrabble, miserable life on other planets should not impact policy decisions on terra firma.

Anytime I see talk of mass colonization as part of a solution to overpopulation, I direct people to Charles Stross' discussion about the infeasibility of doing so [1] [2]. The TL;DR is: until we find a breakthrough like cheap anti-gravity (like depicted in Interstellar), moving that much sheer mass of humanity is energetically (with the required specific impulse) not within our civilization's current capabilities.

[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high...

[2] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-ca...

Sure..... In the very long run.

But most of the planet is currently uninhabited.

We have at least a couple hundred years before we would really have to worry about overpopulation.

Not that it will get to that point, anyway. Birthrates will be below replacement rate in a couple decades.

>We have at least a couple hundred years before we would really have to worry about overpopulation.

We are using energy and releasing carbon at an unsustainable rate. This means that we are overpopulated.

People were saying that back in the 1960s, and that within 20 years, we'd be facing worldwide famine, where billions die.

Those predictions never came to pass.

Also, peak oil supply was supposed to hit us in the year 2000.

The peak oil people were correct, in the wrong way though.

We aren't going to hit peak oil supply. We are going to hit peak oil DEMAND. As in, our other technological solutions are going to overtake oil, because it will be cheaper and better before we come even close to running out of our non-renewable resources.

By looking at all of the recent developments in solar energy (which is currently following freaking "solar moores law". Within a decade, at current improvement rates it will be cheaper than coal in most locations. It already IS cheaper in high energy cost places like hawaii), and other technology progress, humans are easily easily on track to solving all of the supposed problems of overpopulation before come close to being an issue.

What the overpopulation people never figured out is that our rate of technological progress is faster than the rate that we use up resources, and it is faster by a long shot.

You are creating multiple strawmen and arguing with yourself.

> What the overpopulation people never figured out is that our rate of technological progress is faster than the rate that we use up resources, and it is faster by a long shot.

What the techno-optimists haven't figured out is that technological progress and the resources aren't unlimited, the only case where your argument makes any sense.

"that technological progress and the resources aren't unlimited"

Of course they are not unlimited. In 1 billion years we will have hit that limit of technological progress.

Before we hit that limit, 1 billion years from now, we have a long way to go, and the limit is 'effectively' unlimited, for all intensive purposes.

The only way your argument makes any sense is if you think we will hit that limit within a decade or something. But all evidence points to the contrary, and that we instead will only have to worry about those limits, a long long time from now.

> In 1 billion years we will have hit that limit of technological progress.

Citation needed.

We are hunting wooly mammoths at an unsustainable rate. It means we are overpopulated for our level of technology. We need to switch to domestication of animals and agriculture.

You mean like the low population of medieval Europe that didn't live within its tree-cutting means and destroyed nearly all its forests? Same for the ancient humans who killed off the megafauna, or the 1800's humans who nearly killed off the whales? Lower population also means lower chance of inventing new technology, and thus being harmed by smaller problems.

>You mean like the low population of medieval Europe that didn't live within its tree-cutting means and destroyed nearly all its forests?

What?

Forests get destroyed because of stupidity, not because of population numbers.

And I agree with OP, I don't see what's the big deal about lack of new people. If anything I think it's a good thing.

> Lower population also means lower chance of inventing new technology, and thus being harmed by smaller problems.

Supposing current technology level + ecological constraints, what do you think the rough optimal world population level should be?

  * less?
  * 0.01 billion people
  * 0.1 billion people
  * 1 billion people
  * 10 billion people
  * 100 billion people
  * 1000 billion people
  * more?

edit: to try to answer this question myself, i think 1 or 0.1 billion people would be vastly preferable to the status quo of 7.5b and growing in terms of buying time for us to sort out how to live without damaging global ecology.

i have no idea how to actually reach that state without a lot of planned/unplanned misery.

>world population

It is a big assumption that we will be restricted to the 'world'. When we are not, it doesn't make much sense to stop a population explosion.

At present we pretty much are restricted to the world. Technically we have a few people in a space station, but I am pretty sure that isn't the answer to our overpopulation problems.

Yes it does. Assuming a constant positive reproduction rate (i.e. N children per woman with N > 2.3), the population will grow exponentially, i.e. the population growth function is O(e^t).

If you solve this with space travel, i.e. by colonizing habitable planets within our reach, then you will be limited by the speed of light (i.e., how fast people can reach new planets to colonize). Given a time t, the radius of that available region is O(t), and therefore its volume is O(t^3).

As you see, O(t^3) is much smaller growth than O(e^t). (In fact, there's a theorem in analysis that for any exponential function, there exists no polynomial function that it won't eventually outgrow.)

So, if population growth is the problem, you can buy yourself a few more years by colonizing other planets, but the same problem ultimately re-emerges.

>Lower population also means lower chance of inventing new technology

Really? Who do you think would have more technological advancements? 100 million Americans, or the projected four billion Africans?

Relevant: https://twitter.com/GarettJones/status/875692877770244096

Population growth is about as incompatible with physics as SUVs, that is, not very much, unless you like hyperboles.

Climate change isn't a problem of having too many people on earth, it's a problem of emitting too much CO2 per person. If we got rid of 90% of the world population, we would still be dealing with climate change, it would just be happening more slowly. Trying to fix climate change by reducing population is like trying to fix a leaky pipe by reducing the water pressure; yeah it might cause less water to leak but it doesn't solve the underlying problem.

One could argue that having fewer people on earth would still be a good thing because it would give us more time to solve the real problem of reducing CO2 per person; but it would also mean we'd have fewer scientists and engineers working to develop the sustainable technology needed to solve our problems. It's not clear if fewer people would lead to a better or worse end result, or if it would just get us to the same place more slowly.

Thats not entirely accurate... The planet can adapt to a certain amount of CO2, a small enough population could use fossil fuels indefinitely. Climate change reflects a massive population each with a massive ecological footprint.

Fair point, but in practice we're not likely to get down to such a low population level any time soon (if ever).

>but it would also mean we'd have fewer scientists and engineers working to develop the sustainable technology needed to solve our problems

No it wouldn't. Quality over quantity. Having to support less productive and low-IQ people means less resources available to solve difficult problems.

Could this end up being a blessing in disguise? I know traditional theory says that more people => more productivity => bigger economy. But with no people to produce anything, Japan might be forced to lead the world in AI adoption simply because there is no other way. While US or China might be leading in AI technology, they will face severe pushback because of displacement of jobs. Japan on the other hand might actually require general purpose AI to do daily chores. It could be the first big market for general purpose human-level intelligence robots and all the problems it brings.

Agreed. #of people becomes a liability when you start losing jobs and not being able to replace them.

I am under the impression that IT industry is far less active in Japan than US and China. While more old people may demand more automation, more old people also breed more conservatism, hampering the adoption and development of new technology.

Softbank bought Boston Dynamics from Google recently under a $93 billion fund they have. Japan certainly has a domestic tech industry, but perhaps not much of an international one.

This is something I never heard of thought of in the context of aging populations but it sounds true. It builds a self perpetuating cycle - if the population pyramid leans older, it leans more conservative, which drives an agenda that limits volatility and thus innovation, which can stagnate an economy that can constrict reproduction if there isn't enough prosperity to justify having children.

(first off yes this is just one data point, second I'm an Aussie married to a Japanese woman living in Japan for around 5 years now), I am amazed at how much my wife's grandparents use and embrace technology. They have smartphones and recently we have been looking into a few different robot assistants(grandpa is on permanent oxygen tanks and grandma recently broke her hip, so movement is becoming restricted).

Of course this isn't all seniors here, but I do see a lot more tech used casually among an older crowd that I saw in Australia.

(They are both 93 btw).

> But with no people to produce anything, Japan might be forced to lead the world in AI adoption simply because there is no other way.

With a shrinking population, who's left to do all the work required to develop that AI?

You act like there aren't ~35 million Japanese 30 and younger.

Aging != nobody is being born. There are plenty of young Japanese who can be extremely well educated inheriting the wealth of a larger generation who can apply that education to develop the future.

They've got jobs already—unemployment is what, 2%? And as the population ages even further, there's going to be a shortage of people required to take care of them. So there are plenty of young Japanese, but no huge population that they can dump into AI work.

Economics is not some magical playing field where new players enter and are handed work to be done. It is always about a competition between resources available and labor demanded. The aging Japanese will generate demand for late life care services and that demand will stimulate supply from the youth as it becomes more and more profitable a profession to pursue.

Likewise, as AI R&D becomes more and more valuable (and to whomever it is valuable to) those who would invest in it can grow their offerings until the youth start training to do the R&D.

What this does not mean is that you have an absolute "shortage" of workers. It means you won't be able to get work done as cheaply if you are competing for labor resources, but it seems a bit backwards to have simultaneous discussions about the mass unemployed of America aside a conversation about how Japan has nobody to do in demand jobs.

It is about how the aggregate of society values things. If the people of Japan value AI research, it will be done because the price commanded will be high for it, and will attract talent. I also do not believe for a second that advanced R&D is a discipline that skirts the bottom of labor demand where having a shrinking population might actually cost work being done, the kind of work that is barely break even and is price inelastic to growing wages. From the outset your price is above the wage floor for R&D because you don't want just anyone doing it, you want intelligent people who will already command above minimum wage.

What that kind of pressure does accomplish, in a shrinking population, is more pressure on the youth you have to become educated and professional. I see it as a subconscious manifestation in the work ethic the Japanese have maintained - the US is largely giving up on mass education as an institution because the real demand for professionals in all matter of industries is not great enough to overcome the inertia of youth to have to spend the time and effort to become skilled, and it is made manifest in the student loan bubble - if there were legitimate, unmet demand for some specific profession, even computer science, the prices would keep rising until there was so much demand the opportunity presented to youth would in aggregate not go ignored, and more youth would train into that discipline.

Japan is at risk of running out of the jobs that have marginal to no societal value, that require no training or expertise, and require no effort from youth. Not the ones the nation as a whole will put their money behind in calling valuable.

AI is not there, yet. We are making huge advance, but there is absolutely no guarantee that when we would find AGI. Probably in 5 years, probably 50 years, probably 100 years. From the scale of history, it is nothing. But for Japan, they would reach 50% of old people in the middle of this century. They better pray on breakthrough of AI and by the time they still have a nation to save

'Official efforts to encourage women to have more children have had only modest results, and there is little public support for large-scale immigration — something that has helped to stabilize populations in other wealthy countries with low birthrates. ... “A lot of the things we’re used to in Japan are really products of an era of population growth, like single-breadwinner families and mandatory retirement ages,” said Takaaki Tahara, research director at the Japan Institute for Labor Policy and Training. “The mind-set will have to change.”'

If "the things we're used to" are products of an era of population growth and impossible without it (even with a steady-state population size), then we're basically admitting those aspects were dependent on a ponzi scheme. Might as well let developed countries populations level off, for a number of reasons.

I don't buy into everything in this ZeroHedge post, but there's some interesting data regarding birthrate trends in the United States and elsewhere, and its impact on the economy:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-06-24/why-next-recession-...

It's mildly concerning considering that Europe, Japan and especially China will be facing a more extreme inverted age pyramid than the US 20 years from now. India won't, but it's already straining under the weight of its considerable population.

20 years is a long time though, especially given how much work is getting automated.

What exactly is being automated?

Cars to an extent, but I don't see a great deal else. Supermarkets got automatic checkouts a while ago, yet the majority are still normal staffed ones. The airline industry has been pretty far ahead of the game in terms of automation, yet still needs a lot of staff.

This post has some good data on that topic:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-jobs-automation-risk...

When's the last time you used a travel agent? How about a stock broker?

Both were ubiquitous 20 years ago and not uncommon 10 years ago. Both have now been nearly automated away.

Philip Longman explained why depopulation is a problem in this 2004 Long Now lecture[0]. One of the main issues is that infrastructure and social spending is implemented as a pyramid scheme (he didn't put it quite that way IIRC). If you don't have an expanding population, you can't pay for all the programs that have been enacted. Of course, population can not expand indefinitely and there's no political will to avoid passing financial burdens to future generations.

[0] http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/aug/13/the-depopulation-pr...

Japan has eschewed immigration in favor of population decline. It'll be interesting seeing how this plays out compared to how the rest of the world is handling an influx of Muslim immigrants.

Or skyrocketing housing prices and disappearing tax base from Chinese immigrants.

>Up to three quarters of Germany’s refugees will still be unemployed in five years’ time, according to a government minister, in a stark admission of the challenges the country faces in integrating its huge migrant population.

>Aydan Özoğuz, commissioner for immigration, refugees and integration, told the Financial Times that only a quarter to a third of the newcomers would enter the labour market over the next five years, and “for many others we will need up to 10”.

https://www.ft.com/content/022de0a4-54f4-11e7-9fed-c19e27000...

Here are a couple things I think societies struggling with birth rates should try.

1. Provide for the full costs of IVF and egg donation for non-fertile women up to age 50 and letting that fact be well known and encouraged. 2. Promote platonic co-parenting relationships for those in their 30s.

Created some sort of supervised babysitting by seniors service in old folks homes, largely free childcare (most western countries have a childcare crisis at the moment) and a MUCH happier and fulfilling retirement for seniors.

One thing I noticed here in Japan that is sort of related is the lack of reasonable access to birth control control. You need to go to a doctor/ clinic to get the pills, and they are not exactly cheap. That is hurdle 1.

Even worse is the morning after pill / emergency pill. You must go to a doctor/clinic for that as well and it costs $200 usd.

They definitely make it scarier / more difficult to have sex here.

There are other options for birth control.

What's driving this? Why is it happening in Japan, but not other places?

It is happening other places (check out lots of countries in Eastern Europe). Making it worse in Japan is their aversion to immigration (as pointed out in the article), and the cultural forces that make Japan extremely unfriendly to working mothers.

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