Thanks to immigration, young generations have all they need and there's plenty of optimism
We've tried that in Britain. Come see how's that worked out for us.
I just pointed out that removing the layer of population that has no other choice than working below minimum wage will not solve the economic and social stratification. The point of my comment is that immigration and low pay are two completely unrelated phenomena that some loudmouths want us to believe they're correlated. The average voter, then, goes on to believe closing borders magically means they'll finally be able afford a mortgage and a better life while doing unskilled work. Less immigration, fewer candidates, they'll have to pay us more, no? If only it were that simple.
For any hard problems, there is a clear, simple and wrong answer, which usually works quite well as a slogan for a political campaign. "Immigration" it's a classic example.
I'm an immigrant to the UK. No-one exploited me. I had a choice of lots of countries to go to (EU passport) and chose the UK voluntarily.
I was on minimum wage. I wasn't exploited, it was a means to an end.
I don't think you would really care about me as an individual. I think you just didn't want my type here.
With Brexit? The UK ended up replacing EU nationals with non EU nationals. Not much changed. Nobody is getting the kind of wages you'd get in Norway or Switzerland for picking trash off the street.
Most of society view politicians and the failed project of neo-politics responsible for this development.
What used to be something only old racists and simpletons would loudly declaim 30 years ago, now it's become a common, yet still utterly moronic, party line.
But it's so easy to blame everything on the brown and the gaijin, when thinking hard about a hard problem takes too much effort.
The implication I glean of namdnay's point is that woes could be alleviated by immigration, and the responding user suggests that it's not a silver bullet. That's different than saying "everything is going to shit because of immigration".
Also, being critical of immigration policy is not tantamount to criticizing the immigrants themselves. That's another projection.
There are surely advantages to immigration, but I think it's disingenuous to suggest it has zero potential downsides especially with higher rates as other policies and structures don't necessarily shift in tandem to accommodate it.
For example, wage suppression - it's just simple supply and demand, which should be uncontroversial. But maybe one that might speak to some people more: everyone in the West has a higher carbon footprint, and no one moves here to consume less. The things we enjoy and take for granted are what make it a better life. So any conceit of potentially lowering waste/emissions qua consumer choice is wholly undermined by the fact that it is a matter of policy to increase consumption - with more bodies - to boost the GDP. Rates of global emissions are growing not just through growing economies like China (which is probably the largest factor of the last 20 years), but immigration.
Not everything, but Paris isn’t what it used to be.
Yeah, now there are bike lines and it isn't suicidal to bike here. Or do you mean something else?
There have always been poor people in Paris, and there have always (ok, not always, but since France has been a colonial empire and since it has been the preferred destination for Portugese and Spaniards to come work here for better wages, so for multiple generations now) been immigrants.
> Stop using people who are hoping to improve their lives as a shield.
I'm taking the side of those people, and against the old racist/xenophobic canard that seems to be on the rise again, sadly.
Indeed, it seems like the drag from having an older population does a lot to keep the birth rate down.
Our best forecasts show Japan's population pyramid as still markedly inverted and still shrinking in 2100.
(I don't agree with your other point either, necessarily, but I chose to ask about this one).
Death. And there are trivial ways to keep fertility at replacement level and not negative, on par with most other 1st-world countries.
A perpetually inverted pyramid would require that fertility rate shrink even further, until it approaches 0 - do we have a reason to believe this will happen?
Notwithstanding, in 100 years the entire global population growth is projected to stagnate, which will make this a moot point. No one will be able to rely on immigration to grow perpetually.
That is incorrect.
(I'm assuming that the life expectancy does not change significantly)
Any fertility rate that's below replacement maintains an inverted pyramid, if you don't have a lot of death before old age. (Until the very last person dies, in a long long long time).
Each person in the current breeding population produces fewer people in the next breeding population; this produces an inverted pyramid.
> And there are trivial ways to keep fertility at replacement level and not negative, on par with most other 1st-world countries.
No country that has fallen into population decline has found these "trivial ways" in modern times. (Not sure what you mean here by "negative")
It’s like mandatory military service, except for women.
Because of the Dutch port at Nagasaki, there was also a steady stream of Japanese goods into Europe and informed art, fashion, pottery, and other things. Europeans found analogs with their native stories of Kings and Knights, and the militarism of the colonial period was found and reflected by the Shogunate and Meiji governments.
As Japan opened up, Europe found a country that had long been absorbing Western ideas in technology and medicine, but with an entirely different philosophical worldview -- challenging European cultural centrism that Western culture was the secret to its relative global power.
By the mid 1800s Europe was so full of Japanese cultural influence that terms like "Japonism" were formed to reflect daily fashion trends that people wore on the street, and decorated their houses with. Van Gogh famously went through a period attempting to mimic Japanese art he found in news print and posters used to wrap pottery shipped from Japan.
https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/stories/inspiration-from-jap...
At this point the West has a few hundred years of this kind of connection and reflection with Japan, and to be fully honest, Japan kind of finds the West as interesting as well.
On a similar note, this cross cultural infatuation bothers my Korean wife to no end. But I have to remind her that we've really been dealing with her people en masse for under a hundred years, while we've been trading, teaching, learning, and fighting the Japanese for almost half of a millenia. It doesn't make her any happier ;)
I've had conversations with Koreans who look with envy at the favorable attention Japanese culture gets. I was many years with Japanese and now many with Koreans, so maybe my perspective is reasonably well informed. My theory is that the main reason is the Japanese focus on the presentation of things. I don't think any other culture in the world puts as much focus on making a good impression. When you come into contact with Japanese culture, the full force of it hits you immediately. Thus, I think it's exceptionally easy for people to be impressed despite very superficial acquaintance with the culture.
This is such an American/Chinese perspective. Both countries where the growth and promising future gets people excited. You are being dazzled by the growth and bubble. Bubble era Japan indeed had that same appeal.
In 1980s Japan young families were worried about ever being able to afford homes. Land and houses had been exploding in price since the 1970s. Yes everyone felt they were getting rich, but assets went up in price faster than wages.
Japan now is indeed the anti-thesis to the bubble era you are glamourizing yes. Now homes are affordable. Jobs plentiful. Overtime has decreased massively. The 1980s had overtime common which would be illegal now. Train lines are plentiful. The bullet train network built, and paid for. You can get a taxi ride at anytime without the need to bribe drivers.
The flash and dazzle of the bubble was fake. The practical affordability and livability of Japan now is real.
Despite being illegal, it's seemingly still quite common: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_company_(Japanese_term)
It’s not as if our war on drugs has solved the problem.
Also I don't think the Shinkansen is doing that well atm… it's mostly for business trips, since it's pretty expensive to use, and those are down a lot since we all discovered Zoom calls.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WC1-sTIbDQc&
while also leading the world technologically
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AiYirZPwIs
and not to mention they are still building giant cool things, a style of monumentalism which the western world seems to have largely abandoned
The Japanese people that I follow on Japan seem pretty critical of Japan, so I'm not completely sure if Japan actually works for Japan.
One of the best examples of "Japan works for Japan, except when it doesn't" is the intersection of mental health and the Japanese way of solving problems. It's important to keep the peace with people, even if you're only pretending to, and that's a higher value than determining what's actually true in a given situation. So, whereas Western people try to get to the bottom of things and figure them out which requires ruffling some feathers, Japanese people very often simply ignore problems in the short term because it keeps the peace while accepting the long term outcome will blow up into a much bigger problem, but oh well because "there's nothing we can do about it". This kind of behavior is super perplexing as Westerner until you grok how it works on a fundamental level as you try to solve problems in a Western way and people wind up getting upset with you, though they often don't say it directly to you. The mental health situation there sucks because they don't know how to help family members who are experiencing difficulty, so the situation goes from bad to worse but of course "there's nothing we can do about it" and "there's no point talking about it" and this is the best thing to do even if it's all just to pretend everything is fine right. There's a reason they have hikikomori phenomenon. And sadly around half of those in mental hospitals could have avoided it if their family simply helped support them properly during their time of difficulty.
Source: watched my sister-in-law who was by all accounts a normal, and amazing human being, legit be driven insane by Japanese society.
It’s the ones who have never been there that talk shit the most.