Japan PM says country on the brink over falling birth rate | Hacker News Reader

Japan PM says country on the brink over falling birth rate

bbc.com

Yet another article that believes low birthrates of the Japanese nation can be solved by adding foreign people to the Japanese landmass.

While being looser on immigration won't help with their birthrate, it will help ease the effects of the birthrate. Japan really has two problems, with one spurring from the other. Problem 1 is low birthrates and an aging population, that can only be solved by Japan. The second problem that emerges from the first is all the effects of an aging population, like not having enough people to hire, work certain jobs, etc. For the second issue, bringing in foreigners will help.

I think that Japan's low birthrate can only be fixed by a shift in their culture. I'm not going to pretend I know what that looks like or how successful it will be, I only know that it will be an uphill battle for the Japanese, and I wish them the best of luck.

Yeah it's asinine. They just want to ship people around the world like they stocking shelves....

Not really, immigration is a rather natural consequence of people moving around. Japan -heavily- limits immigration and citizenship and creates an artificial issue and then clutches their pearls at the age problem. It's kind of hilarious how they unnecessarily hang on to old societal norms about foreigners in the wake of problems like this. It's hard to feel bad for them.

Ah yes, why not just cover over their deep social problems by importing people who have no better options but to work within them?

> importing people who have no better options

This is literally how America grew.

Mind, you want to actually integrate people instead of running some godawful Gastarbeiter program.

There's a reason that when most people go to Japan they are in awe of the politeness of the people, the safety felt while walking down the street, and the overall cleanliness of the place.

Contrast this to your example, America (I am assuming you mean USA). While seeing rows and rows of homeless people is nothing new, today I saw a video of a homeless person slapping human faeces in the face of another homeless man.

There is more to this problem than just trying to maximise growth.

>This is literally how America grew.

Except Japan is already "grown."

That aside, It's better to let the _overpopulation_ problem in Japan solve itself by letting birthrates fall than to continue the issue by importing more people. It's not normal to have cities with population densites of 6,158 persons per square kilometer. Yes, there will be an economic price, but it will be short lived (30 years) rather than something that will continue forever.

and end up in a situation where 80% of the country is over 70 and cannot function? how is that better or short-lived?

My father was born in 1935, he's 87 going on 88 and takes a turn on roster once a week to deliver meals on wheels to the old people that struggle to get by.

Otherwise he potters on with his meetings on the organisational side of the local bushfire brigade and looking after his 15 km section of a 1,000 kilometre long bushwalking track that runs past not too far away .. when he's not splitting wood, fixing gates, etc.

He's not altogether unusual in the area, there's a lot of still active older folk about the place.

Can you expand more on how everybody over 70 cannot function?

that a great data set of 1. In Japan, men are statistically not expected to live past 81, so it's safe to say most of them are in deep decline after 70, a few years away from death.

Also, officially after 65 they can stop working, so who is even going to work in the whole country??

Data set of at least 2,000 within the immediate district .. read more carefully and I know the local demographics.

People here 'retire' early also - those that stay active with volunter work live longer.

Japan has an aging population, it's entirely possible that those that are aged and active can contribute to the care of those that require assistance.

well, we will find out soon enough. I think it will be pretty bleak and there is no going back unless they let people in.

Short lived because the population will decline until it reaches a sustainable level. Lets say 30-40 years.

how can the population possibly reach "sustainable" level (not sure what this word means in this context, im assuming non-decreasing?), when the fertility rate today is 1.34 (need 2.1) and plummeting? It's going to get worse the more old people they have, because old people can't have children. When the whole country is old, there will be no children, because who's going to make them, even if they have an odd sudden change of heart?

The old people die. The population rerurns to 2.1. Do you really think it will continue to go down forever? Do you not see the increadible overpopulation and housing costs in Japanese cities as the cause of low fertility? Why do you think there is something inherently "wrong" with Japanese people that can only be solved by foreigners?

"It's not normal to have cities with population densites of 6,158 persons per square kilometer"

It's pretty normal for those who live in such places, and not really significantly more "unnatural" compared to sorts of social arrangements we evolved with over 100s of 1000s of years than, say, suburban style living where each nuclear family is significantly isolated from the next and there's no practical way of getting around other than by motorised vehicles.

I wonder what total % of the human population these days do live at densities over 5k/sq. km. - would be a non-negligible amount at least (China has a number of cities with significant metro areas that qualify), and if you lower the bar to 3k/sq. km, it'd quite possibly be a significant fraction, maybe even more than 10% of all humans? The only actual stat I could find is that "apartments accounted for 36.3% of all households globally in 2013".

Oh and Japan's population density overall is a bit over 300 per sq. km., so there's plenty of opportunities for those choosing to live in much denser parts of major cities to avoid it if they wanted to.

So you don't think overpopulation has anything to do with falling birth rates? Do you think Japan will just continue to have low birth rates forever?

It's possibly a contributing factor, but Japanese families are quite accustomed to the idea that their kids will grow up in what many of us in less-densely populated Western countries would consider uncomfortably small spaces. I'm not going to make any predictions about "forever", but unless they start ramping up immigration and allowing in those from cultures where having larger families is more of a priority, I doubt it's going up any time soon.

There are people who live in "apartments" in Tokyo smaller than the average American bathroom. It's not normal, there are no two ways about it.

Is that a comment about the excessive size of American bathrooms? From what I can find, 6000/sq.km2 equates to something like 45 sq.m of living space per apartment.

It's not a comment on American bathrooms. There are people in Japan literally living in drawers.[0] Not even a joke. You're plan to "start ramping up immigration and allowing in those from cultures where having larger families is more of a priority" is quite frankly insane. I can't even call it naive as it's clearly drawn from a political belief that "immigrant = good" with no exceptions, all repercussions be damned, even in severely overpopulated countries.

[0]https://earthlymission.com/capsule-homes-in-japan/

These aren't even the smallest ones. There are ones even half the size of these.

My "plan"? How on earth did you read that into my comment...

And yes some of those dwellings are pretty cramped, but is it somehow worse than the situation in many Western cities where there are those reduced to living in tents on streets or under bridges etc.? The "official" Tokyo homeless figures may be questionable (supposedly less than 800 out of a city of 15 million) but having visited a few times I can't say I recollect noticing any significant number of homeless people.

By "plan" I meant simply "a method for achieving an end,"[0] not that you actually intend to act on that plan. Feel free to replace "plan" with "idea" if that is better.

I'm really confused by your comparison to the US again here: is the homeless problem in the US because of overpopulation as opposed to drugs and mental illness, for example? If so, then if US cities are overpopulated to the extent that the homeless level has gone up so much, Japan is most certainly even more overpopulated, and it's a forgone conclusion that the population should decrease. If the homeless problem in the US is not due to overpopulation, then how is the homeless problem in the US relevant to the overpopulation problem in Japan?

In any case, the US fertility rate is also low, at 1.64. So I think it's fair to say the cost of living, the largest of which is housing, plays a crucial role in the fertility rate. A family can't live in a cupboard, no matter how "accustomed to the idea" one may be. At the very least, most people wouldn't choose to start a family in a cupboard, and that is certainly reflected in the Japanese fertility rate.

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plan

That's how the vast majority of countries solve their population crises nowadays.

The combined population of the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, and the EU is 916 million. Let's be generous and say they're all "solving" their population crises with immigration.

The combined population of China, Japan, and South Korea alone is 1586 million. They have negligible immigration.

So if "vast majority" is weighted by the number of people (the only sensible measure - Monaco and China should not have equal weight), then no, only a minority of countries are using immigration as a solution - just 37% of the countries I listed, by population.

I feel like grouping China along with Japan+South Korea is a bit disingenuous. China only recently has stopped their massive population growth and is still #1 in terms of the population count in the entire world. Japan and SK have been on the decline in terms of population for quite a while, and were never close to having a massive population of such magnitude.

Just to contrast how meaningless it feels to combine them - if you exclude Japan+SK from your count, the number becomes ~1411mil, barely a -11%.

China's fertility rate is at 1.7, same as the UK and Netherlands, and lower than the US's 1.8. Their annual growth rate has been <1% since 1994, and they've just had their first year of population decline. Meanwhile the US is still growing (or rather, being added to) at 0.5%/year.

So why should I exclude the most populous country in the world with sub-replacement fertility?

Sources:

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/popu...

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/population

> So why should I exclude the most populous country in the world with sub-replacement fertility?

Because you aren't grouping China with Netherlands or the US (which are the countries you are using to defend your rationale for including China), you are grouping China with Japan and South Korea. And the numbers there aren't even comparable.

China has just experienced it's first decline of 0.02%, while Japan's decline last year was 0.53%[0]. The factor of nearly x25 is the reason for why grouping them together seems useless at best and misleading at worst.

0. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/population

You seem to fundamentally misunderstand the grouping I used. They are countries with population crises, divided by whether they're solving them with immigration or not. That's it. So why would Japan's crisis being worse than China's make the grouping misleading?

I cited the US and Netherlands as random examples of countries with population crises (absent immigration) as proof that China is facing a similar situation that drove those countries to choose immigration.

Major apologies, and thanks for pointing out and summarizing the point of confusion I had earlier.

While I still might not necessarily agree with the conclusion you've reached, I can clearly see now why you grouped the countries the way you did, and your argument makes way more sense to me as the result.

The PM doesn't explicitly say why the population can't decline. I'm sure there are certain services, like social security in the U.S., that rely on a young tax-paying base. But, overall, the decline in population seems like a temporary problem with many possible solutions, some of which allow the population to fall gracefully. Assuming the wealth of the nation is fixed, halving the population would allow each citizen to own a slice of the pie twice as big.

The big problem is capitalism, because it only incentivizes capital growing. When population declines or stays static over many years, there is much less opportunity for businesses to grow. Growth seems to be the main way our economy works and incentivizes behavior, so it makes sense that a lot of things could break. (For example, social security won’t work in its current form if the tax base stops growing.)

social security has nothing to do with capitalism.

The entire pensioning system is dependent on growth and a young tax base. The systems you and I take for granted elsewhere are staffed by the young. And a decline in population means disproportionately your population is elderly, and this spells trouble for any physical-oriented industries and also means that the retirement age must go up.

This means you either squeeze the younger generation harder (which in turn leads to burn out, outright quitting the workforce or leaving their elderly family to die) or let the older generation die sooner by taking their pensions away.

How about instead of letting automation and AI put people out of work (the media is, after all, just as confident that this will happen) we just keep the pension age where it is?

Either that, or one of these narratives is bullshit. Perhaps both.

Having fewer kids also means lower taxes needed to support schooling but that side of the balance sheet is curiously taken absolutely for granted in the mad rush to kill off retirement.

What are you even talking about? The issues Japan faces is because as people attempt to retire there is literally no one to replacement. The retirement age is set to 70 years old and has been steadily going up. Elderly people even routinely work well beyond that because they don't have the financial ability to support themselves and their children cannot afford to support them either.

Fewer kids means a larger tax burden on everyone. If you honestly think schooling is anywhere near the expense that is elderly care then you would be crazy. Especially since part of that cost is being pushed onto the children directly to take care of their parents.

The GP’s point is that there is a media narrative that AI is about to replace all of our jobs. Put another way, productivity is about to go way up. If that’s the case, and productivity is going to jump dramatically, then you can use some of the surplus created by the productivity gains to fund the retirement system. This idea is not often mentioned, however. One possible reason is that it requires the capitalist class, i.e. the ruling class, to sacrifice some of their sweet capital.

> This idea is not often mentioned, however. One possible reason is that it requires the capitalist class, i.e. the ruling class, to sacrifice some of their sweet capital.

I think the most likely reason for this is that the people with actual major decision-making powers know that the "AI is about to replace all of our jobs" is bs (at least on the level that most people imagine) on multiple levels. It sounds cool and futuristic, and it creates lots of room for speculation and hyped up article headlines. However, my robo-taxis (that everyone had been hyping up as becoming a thing by 2020) only seem further away with each year.

ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion are both neat and impressive, and will indeed take away some labor opportunities from humans, but they are very niche in their applications.

Sure, a more practically useful AI might come into existence in the near future, but imo it will open up even more opportunities (albeit more skilled ones). But hey, go back only 200 years, and reading was considered a really advanced skill, and you wouldn't be able to imagine nearly everyone in the fairly near future being literate. And this is all just a speculation on future more practically useful AI system that doesn't even exist yet.

Tl;dr: I think deep down, the decision-makers know that AI cannot replace humans when it comes to labor dynamics on the scale of a country, and that it will not get to that state in the next decade or two (or even within our lifetimes). Which makes it pretty much a non-starter for a serious consideration in the present time in matters of labor policies and economic planning.

> Assuming the wealth of the nation is fixed, halving the population would allow each citizen to own a slice of the pie twice as big.

I don't think this holds up to scrutiny. Consumption is fixed since the population is, and as the portion of citizens producing goods and services goes down there's a shortfall of those goods and services. Accumulated wealth will be used to patch over that shortfall via imports, and the wealth will be disbursed to the countries exporting those goods and services.

The lack of production will cause inflation of goods and services, which will mean the retired won't have enough money saved. The government will either bail them out with accumulated wealth, or they won't and I'm not sure what the retired will do then.

> Consumption is fixed since the population is, and as the portion of citizens producing goods and services goes down there's a shortfall of those goods and services.

This ignores productivity gains, which allows for cheaper goods and services (i.e. more consumption per person) and for each person to produce more, thus making up the shortfall with the shrinking population.

Sure, I don't mean to imply those are the only economic forces in play. I don't think it's likely to entirely make up the shortfall, but I could be wrong.

Just doing some napkin math, ~60% of the US is employed. They need to produce ~1.3x what they consume in order for everyone to have enough. Currently, about 50% of Japan works. They need to produce ~2x what they consume for everyone to have enough. If that number drops to 40%, they need to produce 2.5x what they consume. If it hits 30%, they need to produce 3.3x what they consume.

A 10% drop in the employment rate would require a ~25% productivity increase. Even if that happens, their relative quality of life still falls because their productivity gains are cannibalized to maintain their quality of life while other nations use theirs to improve quality of life.

Japan would need a substantial increase in productivity exclusive to them to maintain parity with the rest of the world in the medium-term. It's not impossible, but it does seem unlikely in the modern global economy. Especially given that a lot of productivity gains come from economies of scale, which they're losing with a shrinking population.

Edit: dropped a word, had to re-add

I bet this thread will be full of sane comments.

> In Europe and America, right-wing movements point to it as a shining example of racial purity and social harmony.

It's throw away lines like this that make the BBC and others like it lose credibility to me.

If you're going to make such a claim, the least you can do is cite at least one example.

I've never seen or heard any conservative in the U.S. laud Japan's "racial purity".

What utter nonsense.

> If you're going to make such a claim, the least you can do is cite at least one example.

You can take a look at the process of naturalization (becoming a Japanese citizen): "Those who wish to be naturalized must either have no nationality or, in principle, lose their nationality by naturalization."

Hence you could argue that this provision forbids foreigners that integrate into Japan nationality in remembering and being connected with their past identity (that might be seen as lacking purity).

What I'm referring to is the claim that "right-wing" in the U.S. considers Japan's problems to be a "shining example" of "racial purity".

I haven't ever seen anything like this in any sort of main-stream conservative media.

I think that making claims like this discredits the reporter by exposing a clear bias in reporting.

Of course, it's possible that I just haven't seen it. In which case, it should be easy to find and cite an example - but a cursory google search doesn't turn anything up for me.

Wait, isn't this just an usual clause that forbids dual citizenship? Sounds OK to me.

But other countries (like Germany) also don't like you having double citizenship

Same. BBC needs those sweet sweet and dollars from the foreign companies looking for easy visas ..

Just read the comments at the top of this thread. It’s not like you have to go far.

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