Japan's working population drops further - and the number of foreigners rise
japantoday.com
japantoday.com
I for one am tired of extremely misguided and unjustified attempts at engineering everything on the planet.
The way your comment is written it is technically a straw man fallacy.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1644264/pdf/pro...
I don't disagree that the number of human beings on this planet is unsustainable, but I also wonder if there are underlying social pathologies that immigration is only temporarily masking. If we can generalize social behavior (and maybe we can't - but if so, "humans have reason" is not why) in mammals at all, Calhoun's experiments are certainly very alarming.
We are nowhere near having to worry about extinction due to not enough people.
One might as well say the two thousand rats in the article had nothing to worry about because there were so many of them - but the peak is exactly where the social collapse was irreversible.
Again, I agree that seven billion is not a sustainable number of humans. In terms of resources and environmental damage, seven billion is a catastrophe. What I’m saying is that population declines may be heralding a different kind of disaster.
Not to mention, rat society doesn't change much whether it's ten rats or a hundred. Human culture becomes very different as people aggregate together, so whose to say that the very same social conditions triggered by increasing population will not themselves be changed by decreasing population?
It turns out rat society is much more complicated than I at least thought, and it definitely changes dramatically once it reaches a critical mass.
> Is this a totally reasonable thing to say, though, comparing us to rats in this situation?
I don't know. It depends on how generalizable social behavior is. I think it's very worrying with the problems we see with socialization in the world today and behaviors that, by analogy, resemble what's going on in Calhoun's experiments. We also have some anecdata from other social animals experiencing different types of collapse, where even though there is the physical capability of reproduction, the social collapse prevents it from occurring.
> Rats have no concept of extinction or death, humans do. To me, that means a lot.
What we abstractly know, for better or for worse, generally has little do with how we act. For example, human populations that experience severe trauma have problems even generations later, despite all their knowledge that their behavior is counterproductive.
I'm very curious how they found a control group for this. Generations, plural, encompasses, among other things, both world wars, and their aftermaths.
One is the fact that there is going to be greater immigrant representation, and immigrants will have/need to have a separate voice. If a society is not well-equipped to handle this, it can face problems from that.
The other is that typically, the ratio of dependents to workers tend to get further skewed, with more dependents being supported by a single worker. This makes for hardship for the population, if not adequately addressed.
I'll tell you why you see these alarmist articles! Greedy business interests! They are programming our minds to think this is a crisis! To these misers it is a crisis because 1% of business growth every year in places like the USA comes from business sitting on its ass - just from population growth!
To clarify, fully 1% of GDP growth which is 16% of real (inflation adjusted) business growth, is from population growth. This is why our business-owned media wants us to think this is a crisis ...
I know there is the wave of elderly people who will be SOL, but to put on my cynical hat, I think the current government has already given up on them, so I see no help on the way for them anyway.
In effect, Japan's population pyramid has inverted: the dependency ratio of workers to elderly, which was historically under 20%, is currently around 50% and is projected to increase to ~90% by 2050.
Basically the government raising its hand in the air and chanting “we care about you, we’re working super hard because it’s such a huge problem” while just thinking the problem will solve itself naturally.
Top middle class and above people have no issue with current demographic problems, and the current elderly population is surprinsigly well behaved and docile given the situation they are in (hell, France has demos for 4 months now and it’s nowhere as dire)
An interview from a while ago: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/09/22/national/politi...
> “Japan may be aging. Japan may be losing its population. But these are incentives for us,” he said.
> “Why? Because we will continue to be motivated to grow our productivity,” Abe added, citing robots, wireless sensors, and artificial intelligence as among the tools to do so. “So, Japan’s demography, paradoxically, is not an onus, but a bonus.”
Of course he’s just the facade of a party, he’ll also give other speeches about how they have very solid plans to help the elderly etc. But I kinda feel the above interview was an actual genuine view of how they see the situation.
Similarly with automation, we are just ending up with more efficient means of production but not less work overall.
I think we do have less work overall and need to accept the liberation.
A lot of jobs have popped up through things like regulatory capture or monopolistic competition(1) which have debatable benefit to society.
1-https://www.athenahealth.com/insight/expert-forum-rise-and-r...
A more concise term is 'parasites'.
One way around this is to increase taxes (either directly or indirectly somehow) on companies that successfully implement automation, but that opens up a whole other can of worms.
Now, contrast to the current reactionary government of the United States, and their attitude toward immigration. The two countries are clearly moving in opposite directions.
The US is different, of course. People like it here once they've arrived. I can't say why, nor do I buy the stereotype that US culture is more open or individualistic. But the US arguable needs laws quota-based and micro-managey, since they are managing a huge amount of people from more diverse backgrounds. Japan is managing fewer potential immigrants and guests, and most of their immigrants are geographically close to Japan.
Despite the immigration laws being easier to grok and less authoritarian on paper, Japan is pretty strict in its enforcement of those laws. Put all I've said together and I don't know if one country is more reactionary than the other, but I think both countries are moving toward a more balanced, less eccentric immigration system at the moment.
(why you should listen to me: I'm an American and lived in Japan for four years and had to go through the process of getting my wife a spouse visa 2 years into my stay. I dealt with immigration a few times. I went to many different cities and vacations and such, and talked to people that don't speak English and don't have a passport, so I have a representative sample set.)
If I remember well, the visa they get is bound to a specific activity, so for most the only legal way out of that situation will to give up on Japan altogether.
You’re just making things up now. People are clamoring to get into Japan. It’s one of the safest countries on earth, with one of the highest standards of living. Not to mention inexpensive health care and a surplus of good jobs. I lived there too, and personally saw the people trying to emigrate, from all over the world. And arguing that it used to be different misses the point: they’re becoming more open, and we’re closing off. It’s an indisputable fact.
”The US is different, of course. People like it here once they've arrived. I can't say why, nor do I buy the stereotype that US culture is more open or individualistic.”
If you think US culture is any less difficult to adapt to for an immigrant, you’re incredibly naive. It’s always hard. There’s nothing special about the US, except that we’ve been traditionally willing to accept immigrants. That, itself, is changing, and reactionary douchebags are making it a damned sight more scary and less welcoming by trying to protect the “different” way of life from the scary, scary foreigners.
In (fiscal year) 2017, the US admitted 1.1 million immigrants, 1.2 million in 2016. [1] US population has been increasing at about 2.3 million per year [2].
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2017/tab...
[2] https://www.multpl.com/united-states-population/table/by-yea...
1) is life expectancy. Suppose the average life expectancy is 40, and every two people have two children at age 20. Population would be stable. However, suppose nothing changes about fertility rates or replacement rates, but the life expectancy grows to say 60. You'll find that the population for some time will grow, merely because inflow (births) don't change, but outflow (deaths) are lower as they are delayed.
As such, population growth can occur despite a below-replacement rate fertility without any immigration.
2) Immigrants tend to be more fertile. Welcoming immigrants and then chalking up the subsequent population growth from their high-birth rate as being an example of the country having sufficiently high birth rates for population growth without immigration is faulty reasoning. Births in the US would've been a lot lower if it admitted no immigrants, particularly hispanic.
Fact is total fertility rates in the US are around 1.7 children per woman now, and are even lower for people who's families have been in the US for multiple generations (non-recent immigrants). US would be declining in population size this century if it wasn't for migration, ceteris paribus.
Similar story all over Europe. Just look at fertility rates of native-born populations and the necessary replacement rate, the former is typically below the latter. [0] Most OECD countries would be shrinking without immigration.
But negative population growth can lead to deflationary systems, and economists are very afraid of those.
In short: if you think you're going to have less customers, you don't invest or hire, and you might layoff, causing further negative data and sentiment, causing further downward pressure on economic activity. 'Death Spiral'. [1]
This is also partly why we keep inflation at 2% target, and not 0%.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/deflationary-spiral.asp