Japan PM’s solution to dire birthrate has already been rejected by young
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The costs (time, money) of raising children are significantly privatised but the economic benefits once they reach adulthood tend to flow to government and society at large.
In the past, many parents expected to receive direct economic benefits from the labour of their children. Children were expected to e.g. contribute on the farm.
In countries without social safety nets, younger generations are expected to directly support older famility members.
Having kids used to be something with pretty direct economic benefits, it's now expected to be a somewhat more altruistic enterprise.
And in countries with social safety nets, workers pay to support other, retiring workers. With increasing lifespans, sharply decreasing numbers of workers, and relatively early retirement ages… the wheels are going to fall right off the train, unless robots save us.
We don't need robots, we need guillotines.
I've had a similar thought: we've made societies where nothing gets done without paying for it, and where it's financially incredibly hard to be a parent without both parents working near 100%. Yet having kids is basically an essential service to society. With most things in our economy, we don't expect things to happen without paying for it. So why do we expect parents to do free labor, taking from whatever extremely limited free time they have left to raise kids? Is it really that surprising that people aren't having kids?
When women was expected to stay at home and manage the house and raise kids, you essentially had a lot of dedicated labor to raise kids. They weren't paid, but the wages and the costs in society was such that the father could support the family on his wage alone. We need to realize that if you want someone to raise 5+ kids (which is a necessity if some people have 0 kids), that's really a full time job until all the kids are of school age, and it should be paid as such. Obviously, we shouldn't return to what we had before. We should pay the parent directly instead of it going through the husband, and in todays society it can be either mom or dad that stays home.
Is that entirely private? Are there no public child care options?
I think it's hard to appreciate just how hollowed out the UK public service has become, yet we still pay a decent amount of tax relative to other OECD countries.
State pensions in the UK are very low to start with. If they don't at least keep up with inflation many elderly will end up destitute (and cost even more to the NHS...).
People I know who started family's around the same time but were in the later 30s or early 40s seem more likely to have grown a larger family.
I suspect in five years time when the statistics for this "cohort" (30s now) stabilises we will see a significant drop multi child families.
It is interesting how birth rate ties into their whole economic picture -- after multi-decade deflation, they're still sitting at well under 3% unemployment, and a poverty rate only slightly higher than the United States. Prices may be falling, but apparently, when your population is simultaneously shrinking at such a rapid pace, it's less painful than you'd expect on the average household economically speaking.
Not at all. Almost everything is privatized today. When children reach adulthood, the economic benefits that they create also go to the private sector. 'Small government' in the West meant that the government being pushed out of every sector from education to healthcare and private profiteers taking their place. And as private players, their objective is to maximize their profit.
So even child raising became a thing that requires ever-increasing amount of effort and cost from parents as the profit margins rose. Japan got hit before other Western countries and got hit harder because it already had a 'work or die' culture that required 100% from the employees. To have children, you had to put 120%. And when the private sector's increasing fees made it require putting in 200%, the youth just stopped trying...
I use to chat with my friends and all their plans for life are literally "I'll do this when/if I have the money".
That's it.
My life (have two children and my wife was at home for 4 years) instead, the moment my first child was born has been: figure out life insurance so that your kids are safe if you die, figure out income for retirement to avoid weighting on your children, figure out savings necessary to pay for education, figure out housing because you will need 3 bedrooms and rent keeps going up.
I had to really take ownership of my finances. Amazing, I learned a lot, but government support is nowhere it should be for somebody that greatly contribute to society.
Why bother getting married when you'll functionally never see your wife, and why bother having kids when you'll basically never see them? The Japanese aren't unique in not seeing the point, as this pattern is a constant all over the world.
The only thing that seems to work is high religiosity.
My ancestors were wrongly conditioned to think life has to be rough, that one must suffer through. A great deal of those who opposed rulers profiting from this, were eliminated.
And the most critical point: Your children were also entitled to ALL of that from birth. They were going to study in state schools, they would get a job somewhere, they would work under the same conditions, they would acquire their first car and their first flat around the same age, and if they married, not only the state would help them marry but also provide more incentives.
So there was absolutely no reason to hesitate from having children - you had the money, energy, resources, and on top of that the state guaranteed that your children would be well set from the moment they born.
Hence, population boomed.
The USSR is not unique in that aspect. In every period of society, when people's and their childrens' lives are guaranteed, population boomed. The sociopathic profiteering in capitalist societies crippling everything including birth rates seems more like a case of natural selection when seen in that light - these countries have all the money and power in the world to stop the population decline and reverse it, but they just dont want to do it for the sake of profit...
Nothing was guaranteed, everything had to be fought for, even food. You were at the mercy of the local party boss, one careless word could cost you your career, not just in one company but in the whole country (goes without saying that you couldn't move to another).
Paternity leave is something new, never have heard a lie that blatant.
Also anything "free" of course wasn't, The Soviet government was the ultimate capitalist, appropriating all fruits of all labour and keeping people at "just above rioting" living standard by design, and sometimes failing even at that.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-politics-sovietuni...
Those who lived there want it back.
I grew up in a country that imitated the Yugoslavian system, mixing Soviet system with social democracy. Until the country turned capitalist, directly declaring that 'free market was the best' and the objective was to become 'little America', everybody was happy. From food to education to housing, everything just worked out thanks to the state providing most of them. Including marrying and raising children. Then the 'free market' came and everything went down the same hellhole that Japan and other countries are going down into right now.
> You were at the mercy of the local party boss, one careless word could cost you your career
Wow that's so bad and its so more different than being at the mercy of your capitalist boss.
The discussion is at a 'people dont have food to eat next month and can go homeless at any time' level. Not 'my career' level. Yeah, you could lose you career and maybe get sent to somewhere in the middle of central Asia. And yet you would still have a job, house, your children would still go to school. Beats entire family working and not being able to feed their children like its in the US or outright going homeless.
> Paternity leave is something new, never have a lie that blatant.
It says 'maternity/paternity' leave in my comment. USSR had maternity leave.
...
> "Peddle"
How about you don't peddle the cold war propaganda that's 60 years old now? I grew up in a Soviet-like system, and despite I am doing FAR better at the top percentiles of my society, I would go back to that Soviet-like system in a blink so that millions would not have to suffer and go hungry and the society would not devolve into a hellhole.
Heres a frame of reference for you: Nobody is conducting economic war against the US. The US is not in an existential war. There is not global catastrophe that has been affecting the US. There is no alien invasion. No apocalypse. And yet this is the reality there:
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...
I'd much rather 'peddle' what i 'peddled' than smear what was better.
People who want USSR back actually want their youth back, youth, not the time when their extended family of five lived in a one bedroom flat.
It was at the end. After the US got its Gulf Allies to start waging economic war against the USSR in 1980s by playing with the price of oil, while blockading it from every other angle to prevent the USSR from trading with anyone outside.
If any other country did half of that to the US, it would end up in nuclear war. The fault of the USSR was allowing its hostile enemy to strangle it step by step by avoiding confrontation.
Otherwise during 1960s Kennedy administration thought that the USSR was developing too rapidly and others would start taking it as an example, causing a 'domino effect'. Which is the basis of the 'domino theory' and the Vietnam war was its resolution - 'making example of countries who attempt to follow that model'.
Even my country in the sidelines got an economic crisis and scarcity EVERY single time it went against a US foreign policy project or US-pushed 'economic reform'. From local wars to privatizations. When those were not enough to 'persuade' the governments to do what they were told, coups did the work. The last one hanged 10,000 and the government that it put into power started privatizing the living daylights of the country. The stock market started breaking records. Whereas a lot of people started eating less, some having to eat from garbage. Therefore:
> People who want USSR back actually want their youth back, youth, not the time when their extended family of five lived in a one bedroom flat.
No people just want their better, worry-free, non-overworked lives back. In the former USSR, in East Germany, and in every other country that got US backed 'free market'. If you aren't able to get into the top 10% in such a system, you are literally hosed. Those who made it into that segment think that 'everything is better' because now they are shielded from the poverty that plagues the rest of their society. Whereas for the troubled majority, there is no comparing guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing, healthcare, childcare, education, retirement and all that to any 'freedom' that comes with the new system.
As I said, Im doing quite comfortably in this system. But, for the sake of the majority, I would happily go back to that system so that people wouldnt have to overwork and still not be able to feed their children without anyone waging an economic war or even an actual war against the country.
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he....
Childless people between 20-50, both men and women, paid an extra 6% in taxes to the state.
Psychologically, I'm not so sure. Loss aversion is a much stronger than not getting a benefit (think about not getting your bonus versus taking a pay-cut at work; even if the amounts are the same, I doubt you would feel the same about it) - so I think the explicit tax on childlessness would be more influential because of that.
I believe this is because you won't see any effect until having kids is paid just as well as working any other job.
If you can choose between a regular job paying 100%, and an incredibly hard and demanding job paying 50%, you're going to pick the first option every single time. Increasing the pay to 60% isn't going to help. You need to be around 100% or above. And like with anything else in our economy, if you're not getting enough people to take that essential job, you need to keep increasing pay until they do.
So no matter how much government intervention, you're still only getting the share of people who want to have kids as a kind of hobby. Not because government intervention doesn't work at all, but because you get very little effect until you cross that threshold where having kids is a job that pays fairly.
I think parts of Northern Europe is close to that threshold, but there's still some ways to go. Parental leave needs to be a few months longer (there's often a gap between parental leave ending and kindergarten starting), kindergarten must be free, and financial support for parents needs to be quite a bit higher.
Looking at Northern Europe seems their TFR is similar to the USA despite incentives.
Well, they've all been symbolic measures... but that's all they can realistically do.
In terms of education reform (the "give young men and women their twenties back" part), constituents of the education-managerial complex will fight hard to preserve their positions (making the education system more efficient would put many out of work), and are a significant enough cross-section of the population that threatening them will have electoral consequences that no sitting governments could survive.
And that's before you get into the tax hike/redistribution schemes (the "parents need to be compensated just as much as other economic value-creators" part), which will impact everyone else, and irrevocably screws the folks that are now too old to have kids (who, coincidentally, are approaching peak voting age).
For those reasons, proper reform is and will continue to be impossible for the forseeable future.
Top down government interventions to raise birth rates and population work pretty well in countries where the government provides vital services like healthcare, education at lowest cost and also social safety nets.
Just increase the tax burden X-times the default rate for those without Y kids. If you aren't willing to repopulate the nation then you should be subsidizing those who are.
The article touches on this, but the entire demand structure and set of expectations in society In Japan (and also at least in the US where my observational experience is) is counter to being human. The barriers to being part of a community, of interacting with others in third places / spaces, of having time to focus on family instead of the job. Society as a whole has gone crazy in a relentless quest to extract all the value it can, forgetting the very reason it sought to do that in a blind quest for numbers.
Here is a thought: If people have their basic needs met, and I don't mean "barely survive", I mean "having the same fair chance at building wealth as prior generations", then maybe people in such a society may be willing to have more children.
If, on the other hand, it becomes ever harder to build wealth, becomes ever harder to cover the cost of living, education is demanded but also becomes ever more expensive to get, and any time not spent working becomes an economic malus on the individual, well ... I don't see how people will flock to the joys of parenthood then.
Provide tax breaks, additional compensation benefits, mandatory time off work etc.
Edit: After doing some searching, learned more about what they get. https://www.ipmu.jp/en/page/dbbb4775-1008-4deb-8d7d-8766e5d8....
Overall I think the benefits are decent, however I don't think they fully support fathers.
Fathers can take 7 days while mom is on mat leave at same time.
Then later you can have nursing time, 30 min breaks from work? Can show up 30 mins late??
How about some actual time off so you can help out at early stages of life and not too be financially worried.
Canada we get 12-18 months shared between spouses, other countries get better
Leave isn't generous, and requires that you have paid into EI for at least 1 year, otherwise you get nothing.
Education definitely isn't true, though in-province rates, esp. in QC, aren't crazy. But most of my friends had student loans.
Healthcare in a hospital is free. You need dental, optical, or 3rd party specialist stuff? Good luck. The quality also varies greatly -- if you're in the nicest part of Toronto I'm sure it's great, but rural SK healthcare is basically bandaids and a bus ticket to the provincial capital.
Ontario has their own mini-Trump who just push through healthcare privatization, and Alberta has been hammering it for years. AB, despite being the richest province due to all that oil, has consistently slashed education and healthcare, most notably booting out a ton of hospital staff right before COVID hit, which lead to big protests from the AHS ("nurses strike", etc).
QC has subsidized daycare, but seats are often hard to get. In exchange taxes are the highest in Canada, and salaries are unimpressive.
Parent correct to note that Dentalcare is not part of Universal Healthcare, but even more significant than that there is no Universal Pharmacare, though there's some aids for the poor and elderly.
Two weeks vacation is pretty standard and many Canadians have very little vacation time.
Until very recently many people had no minimum sick days (though your typical tech company would have a few). Only during the pandemic has there been adgitation to try to create some minimums. The Feds brought in 10 days minimum sick days for workers under their purview, but provinces demurred from going that far.
Only just now is Canada slowly rolling out affordable universal $10/day childcare and so the next few decades will be interesting in that academics can study the impact of this on births.
The most significant thing Canada could do to encourage more births would be to make family friendly homes (ie. 1300 sqft+) dramatically more available and affordable. Right now there's a huge shortage and they're basically unaffordable without existing wealth.
Japan does not seem to have this problem so bad as they have an enormous surplus of homes and their home prices have been stagnant for a long time.
They should make the condo more soundproof, no doubt, but living in a 3 bedroom condo @ 1300sqft is pretty nice, we do so ourselves with 2 children. Plenty of space. It was super expensive for us.
I appreciate the incredible parental leave, but it's still very rough, one parent MUST go back to work or it gets really hard. If you have a mortgage is probably just impossible.
That being said, 7 days is a joke. To any father, 7 days and your baby is as big as your forearm, and you are supposed to leave that creature at home. Bah.
1 month seems the minimum, given that afterbirth complications start to settle only after that mark and medically speaking there is a big "mark" in terms of weight for that date.
Ever since I saw the news that adult diapers outsell baby diapers in Japan (2011!), it's been fun to check in on their attitudes to immigration. I wish this article delved into it a little bit more.
> This was attributed by criminologists to the subgroup consisting of men aged 16–29 is disproportionately large at 34% of the total [number of immigrants] and that young males are overrepresented as criminals in all parts of the world, rather than to their ethnic origin.
It seems pretty clear to me that the benefits of immigration outweigh this, as long as the total amount of crime stays at a low level, which subjectively seems to be the case.
Now there might be many reasons for that, poverty probably plays, etc. But the outcome is fairly obvious.
From Wikipedia. So no, not even gonna read that article.
But contrarely to what people think, crime isn't IMHO the worst of them. The worst is the feeling that the cultural norm of the country, as well as its "visual" identity has shifted from a european country to a (mostly) african one ( and please read the rest before making hasty judgments on what i'm saying).
To understand the problem, imagine going to a few remote rural areas in japan in 40 years and each time only see tall 7 feet blond and blue eyes people, speaking swedish and not finding sushis or ramen anywhere.
I like all cultures, and i believe there's great things everywhere, but that's why i'm also a bit sad to see "traditional" France (whatever that means) disappear.
This is delusional, and yes, I did read the rest of your comment.
We can't legally compile ethnics statistics in France, so all we have to rely on is our personal feeling, which is of course very subjective ( and this has been the counter argument to my type of argument for a very long time). But it has reached such a level now that nobody is contesting that diagnosis. People give it different names depending on their political orientation ( "creolisation" for the left, "grand remplacement" for the right), but it's basically the same conclusion.
This is bullshit, because even if France made it illegal (it's obviously not) other groups would definitely still do it. France is still 86% white people, mostly french. Nobody is being replaced anywhere, because immigration is tiny everywhere.
"Due to a law dating from 1872 at the start of the Third Republic, France has prohibited the collection of data on a citizens race, ethnicity or their beliefs such as religion through national censuses,[47][48] however estimates have been made of the ethnic and racial demography of the country in the present"
We're talking estimation as it is indeed illegal, no matter how crazy it may sound like. Estimation is highly dependant on who's doing the estimation, and for what purpose, and as you can see in the article itself, the topic is highly controversial among specialist.
Now, if you were living in france for the past 40 years, and had regularely travelled across the country, you would see that in that particular case, the situation is very obvious, and the only circle left still debating the issue is demographic specialists.
Politicians and media used to deny the issue and flagged anyone mentioning it as racist, but things have recently changed and we finally start talking about it like grown ups.
Your claims appear to be based on suggesting that you (and, in a laughable falsehood, the wide range of opinion in French society) knows for a fact that this situation exists, but if anyone does not agree with you, that is merely their opinion, since it is impossible to measure.
Have you ever been to any suburb, not just in Paris ( which already has some suburbs with close to 99% non-french inhabitants) but in pretty much any average sized city in the country ?
based on your saying I can only assume you only lived in the central part of paris, and went on holidays in the west coast such as bordeaux or brest. Because all the rest of the country is pretty much in transition.
This is not the political culture of Vercingetorix, nor of Charles de Gaulle ;)
I think your categories and your political reflexes prevent you from thinking straight. Everybody in the world would have a broad understanding of what "french" means (or "japanese", "americans", "italian", etc). For some reason you pretend to ignore there are some cultural norms that are associated to a nation ("cultural" in the broadest sense, which includes the way you look). I believe because this fact scares you or have been associated to a taboo.
Those taboos prevent you from addressing questions, and not addressing the issues don't make them magically disappear. Worst, you risk leaving those questions to people that have a political agenda.
I am perfectly capable of understanding and discussing what can be meant by 'Frenchness', and what I mean by it.
However this is most of the time a total waste of time, because the reason the person is arguing against the obvious is not because of intelligent caution, but rather out of scare.
So sorry if i'm not going this route with you. If you're sincerely curious i suggest you go on a bike ride in Argenteuil on a friday.
What are the words you are scared of using if you answered this question?
Why won't you use them?
It's a mix of the way you dress, your body features (yes, skin color is one of them obviously but that's far from the only one), your language, all your daily habits, the food you eat, author you've read, etc.
It's the general picture people have in their mind when they think of an archetypal "french". Doesn't mean all french are like that, obviously. Much like i'm pretty sure you could find japanese with natural blond hair who never eat raw fish.
You may also argue that this image of french people is completely outdated, and that the metropolitan french population has evolved in the past 50 years. But that's precisely my point.
The movement of people causes an interchange of culture.
For some reasons it doesn't seem to having worked that way in the last decades (and it would be really interesting to know why).
In some far distant world where people in France no longer eat baguettes or people in Japan are not synonymous with Sushi, those people still exist in French and Japanese culture. (And those ideological totems still exist as legacies in French and Japanese culture, they're just no longer practiced).
And I'm not even going to begin to address the influences that France and Japan have had on other cultures (the entirety of Africa and Asia). The cultures of the places that France and Japan have influence have not been "superseded". They are still the culture's of those lands. They just have outside influence.
This sounds to me as a bit tautological. If we move 200 millions from china in 1 month, you wouldn't say "french culture is about eating rice, and french people generally look like chinese".
Culture sometimes change intrinsically, but sometimes because of huge foreign influence or demographics ( invasion being historically the most influencial one). Doesn't mean you can't observe the change when it happens and judge it.
to me, that sounds great actually
https://en.japantravel.com/shizuoka/izu-shuzenji-british-vil...
Nothing to worry about in Rotherham
Nothing to worry about in Parisian Banlieues https://www.lepoint.fr/education/laicite-pres-d-un-enseignan...
Of course there's a difference between bringing people with a degree for example and letting any kind of migration happen (which for the most part wasn't the case during the migrations of the XXth century to the US)
This is not to say immigration doesn't have its advantages and that criminal issues are not only due to recent arrivals (quite the contrary)
There's also a cultural aspect to it. It used to be just extreme-right speech but IMO It's time to stop looking elsewhere and face the problem.
In Spain it's only insecurity, and controlled to a certain degree, but in Barcelona is noticeable, and in Madrid is beginning to bein noticed. Is nowhere the level of France but it's definitely growing. A lot of people is looking up north and wondering if we should take this more seriously, so we don't end up like our northern neighbours.
They often don't have the education that the city demands nor the language skills (It's pretty damn easy to get a job if you speak the 2 national languages perfectly but don't have a degree for example). All in all they don't really fit the niche of sustaining the social security net as is often brought up as the core advantage except for the fact that they have more children which is tied to a brand of persistent social conservatism ....which isn't really wanted either.
All in all it feels like immigration is happening too fast to avoid this group setting itself appart in various ways leading to (self)-segregation and probably persistent social strife down the line.
• Iraqi brutally rapes & tortures/torments 14yo and 21yo [1]
• 11yo children (Afghan and Syrian) raping 10yo [1b]
• Afghan Islamist stabs woman (unprovoked) -> half paralyzed [2]
• organized crime (55% suspects are non-German, 5% unidentified) [3]
• Islamist terror attack [4]
• violence in public open-air baths, mass brawl [5]
• primary school pupil threatens teacher with beheading [6] comparing it to [7]
• honor killings [8]
• > 1 billion euros fraud alone with covid test centers by submission of false claims, many operated by Turks and criminal clans (non-Germans)
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/berlin-frauen-ins-aut...
[1b] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/berlin-grundschueler-...
[2] https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2022/04/hobbygaertneri...
[3]https://www.bka.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Publikationen/Jah...
[4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anschlag_auf_den_Berliner_Weih...
[5] https://twitter.com/austausch_info/status/153881355654778880...
[6] https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/extremismus-berlin-musli...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Samuel_Paty
[8] https://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/kriminalitaet/berli...
An alternative answer to this situation, of course, is to observe that the demographic problems in question are largely overrated, and that the productivity gains of the last century will keep old people from having to live under bridges and eating cat food.
Canada is too big, land area wise for the population it has to support major infrastructure.
So we need constant stream of new souls to collect taxes and help prop up the next group
Because of the vast distance between inhabitable area, it is very Costly to support connected infrastructure without the population needs to support it
Meanwhile, 80 years ago we had no problems literally covering the entire country with brand new highways and giant dams and bridges everywhere, so many that we don't even inspect them all right now. We could build infrastructure perfectly fine when we taxed high incomes and invested heavily in infrastructure.
Canada is not a poor country and could very well afford such infrastructure as well.
Whereas Europe has a much bigger issue with the refugee crisis and illegal immigration.
Canada is not doing fine. There are major problems with wage suppression and lowering standards of living, as well as dwindling access to housing and medical services. The Canadian economy has become a bubble propped up by massive influx of immigrants to hide glaring systemic issues; it's not sustainable, and in recent years has become a growing source of controversy.
Lots of companies rely on the Temporary Foreign Worker program to fill menial minimum-wage jobs, often paying those TFWs below minimum-wage and abusing them. Similarly, the student visa program is a backdoor for lots of companies (particularly delivery & logistics). I also used to work at a government-sponsored employment centre where I met hundreds of skilled new-immigrants who gave up everything to emigrate, only to arrive in Canada and realize they'd been deceived about their prospects (e.g. the barriers to recertification).
I am not against immigration — both my spouse and I are children of immigrants — but it's important to differentiate between reasonable immigration policies and excessive ones designed to prop up a failing system by constantly injecting new bodies. Canada's immigration system is the latter; it predominantly benefits the rich and nobody else.
Canada's big businesses, protected by their political friends, and largely controlled by a few old-boys-clubs is to blame for that.
> dwindling access to housing and medical services.
Dwindling access to housing is because NIMBYs refuse to build any.
Access to medical services continues to be the same thing that Canadians have complained about for decades. Everyone bitches about it, but all-in-all, they are fine.
> The Canadian economy has become a bubble propped up by massive influx of immigrants to hide glaring systemic issues; it's not sustainable, and in recent years has become a growing source of controversy.
'It's become a controversy among the fringe-right' is not a sufficient metric for telling me that there's a problem. All sorts of normal things have a tendency to turn into controversies for those folks.
What are the actual issues? Money laundering through the Canadian real estate markets? That's not an immigration problem, that's a ML problem, and it could be fixed by not selling permanent residencies to 'investors' building sham self-dealing companies.
Ontario's health-care system is collapsing. In the past year several emergency rooms have been forced to close, and 9-11 calls have gone unanswered or faced severe delays.
People are not fine. It's a multi-faceted issue, sure, but ramping up immigration is pouring fuel on the fire.
> 'It's become a controversy among the fringe-right' is not a sufficient metric for telling me that there's a problem. All sorts of normal things have a tendency to turn into controversies for those folks.
It's disingenuous to write-off any concerns about immigration about immigration as right-wing histeria. I quite left-leaning, pro-immigration, and believe in having strong social programs; however, Canada's current immigration policy is a band-aid covering an ever-growing wound.
E.g., https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/comments/1049ykb/opinion_its...
> What are the actual issues? Money laundering through the Canadian real estate markets? That's not an immigration problem, that's a ML problem, and it could be fixed by not selling permanent residencies to 'investors' building sham self-dealing companies.
A major "actual issue" is that Canada's economy is largely predicated on real estate continously growing 20% year-over-year. Real estate is one of the, if not THE, largest sectors in several provinces. Millions of people don't have a retirement plan beyond "sell my house for 5-10x what I paid for it", and having massive levels of immigration definitely plays into that (far more than foreign home ownership does).
It's not black and white, we should stop treating every problem as such.
- https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/hardest-c...
- https://pressat.co.uk/releases/the-top-ten-toughest-immigrat...
Japan as I understand it has strong conformity drives which runs counter to both immigration-assimilation in non Asian cultures and to young women seeking independence in their life.
It’s actually worse for Asian non-Japanese cultures. You’re basically expected to stay in the circle of your culture, whether you like it or not. For non-Asians, it’s easier for them to be distinguished visually, of course, but at least Japanese people are not likely to have hostile emotions on them..
What would it take for you to have two more children starting today?
Not just one more child, but two. Not the Japanese, but you. Not sometime, but today.
I think that just limiting the horizon on this issue of childrearing is not as helpful. Thinking of the concerns of the 'other place' makes it less impactful. Thinking of just one child more is less impactful. Thinking of a future date where everything is perfect is less impactful.
Making the problem bigger, immediate, and personal may give better insights.
My personal answer is health, time, and then money. My family's health for two more children is not the best. Another pregnancy, starting today, would endanger us. Then it comes down to time. With the family we already have, we're already time strapped. A live-in-nurse would be hugely beneficial to us to have more kids. Basically, we'd need a 'wife' to get all the housework done. Then it would be money. College in the US in ~18 years is going to be very expensive. Kids are expensive. Daycare is another mortgage as is.
I'm due in less than two weeks, and I'm doing the "one and done" route. Costs, house space, time, and frankly, pregnancy wrecked me emotionally and physically. It's incredibly difficult to have a high-paced career (which I love and thrive on, to be clear!) ...when you are throwing up in the toliet constantly.
Yup, only one. One is enough.
It's strange though, after they come, the feelings change. It was important for us to give ourselves the space and permission (?) to want others.
Not saying in any way that they will for you. Please don't take this that way.
Also, best of luck in delivery! It's very very tough, but it's amazing how nature takes over and makes you tougher. For us, it felt like the deepest of magics came in and just took over.
To probe a bit deeper, if you are willing: When you say 'internal motivation' what do you mean? Can you explain more, again, if willing?
What I'm trying to get at is, if the motivation is lacking due to, I dunno, climate change, then to have 2 more kids today you'd (hypothetically here) need to have significant evidence that climate change is reversing or some such thing. That's actionable data (if nearly insurmountable).
Without this baseline internal motivation, what possible external, familial or societal, changes could occur to motivate me to have children? I can't think of any.
I also have to point out that we really liked our 2 children and would have loved to have more.
That's still not accounting for the fact that we might need a bigger home, although still doable with our 3 bedroom.
It's a dangerous trend to our entire economic system,which is based on the ever growing pool of people to consume and keep paying pensions.Political solutions probably won't work as the consumption number needs to grow to keep the economic system running.So we need to figure out robotics and automation as a whole.
Population of Japan in 1800 was 30 million. Japan in 1950 was 90 million.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066956/population-japan...
Meanwhile: [..]As of 2021, South Korea is the country with the world's lowest total fertility rate at 0.81. The TFR of the capital Seoul was 0.63 in 2021.[..]
The declining TFR is in countries with the highest population density. I am surprised that the brightest minds in the world are hand wringing over what is essentially an obvious mathematical certainty. It’s exponential growth. Across the world, population will peak and then plummet. As it should for the survival of the human species and the rest of the eco system.
To blast us continually about the environment crisis and a 'population crisis' at the same time is contradictory (or bad faith).
Regarding the economy, I think we need to shift paradigm from measuring the size of the economy overall, which indeed obviously benefits from ever more people, to focusing on figures per capita. Ultimately the whole point of economic growth is to make people better off individually and we can do that with a decreasing population, in fact perhaps a decreasing population helps achieving that by forcing companies to increase productivity as much as possible instead of relying on abundant and cheap labour.
> people who buy labor
so basically everyone unless you grow your own food etc.?
Only if productivity / price of labor is constant. Which it isn't over time historically.
Actually, compared to South Korea, Taiwan, and China, Japanese birthrate is the highest in the region. It's just Japan went earlier than the three of them in subreplacement, so they hit the major pain points earlier in time. But maybe China will hit the subreplacement pains faster than what Japan experienced....
> From 1965 to 2009, contraceptive usage has more than tripled (from 13% of married women in 1970 to 48% in 2009) and the fertility rate has more than halved (from 5.7 in 1966 to 2.4 in 2012)
> India's fertility rate has greatly decreased in recent years and is now distinctly below the global rate.
Maybe that is one of the Great Filters of the Fermi paradox.
That's what I imagine is possible and would indeed make for a better world overall.
Population decline -> decline in demand for paper products -> Dunder Mifflin sales down -> DMI market cap go down? ...no No NOOOOOO.
I work from home and I miss my daughter 30 minutes after she's in school... And I have another little toddler at home
Still, especially until the 3 years mark I wouldn't consider childcare.
Before that time they are really attached to the parents. Then around 3 they make friends, so it's easy at that point
If both parents are working, they will definitely need a caretaker in some form, and the best would still be that they worked less time and actually spent more with them (incredibly helpful to know the child well)
When the older hits 4 years old, there are a lot of games you can start playing with them but the younger one might drastically limit that (for example, they destroy board games, while the 4 years one is very into them!)
On the upside, they melt my heart when I see them playing together
Projections have Japan losing 50 million population over the next 80 years. They needed to fix this population decline about 20 years ago. Incidentally their tremendous debt and basically 100% tax makes solving their problem impossible.
You can calculate the window in which Japan may pull themselves out of their crisis. Certainly not happening in the next 30 years unless they do something dramatic. It appears 45 years or so and they'll maybe manage to solve their problem?
The reality, they are going to become crippled and stop functioning properly.
Secondly, regardless of the cause of the lowered birth rate, do you agree that freedom for women is a fundamental and inalienable right, and that the problem is how society should advance so that birth rates and family formation go back up without rolling back freedon?
Now look where the US (and parts of Europe) are heading towards, with bans on contraception being openly discussed (e.g. with the recent Supreme Court decision that hinted at a reversal of the Griswold case), or access to abortion being made difficult more and more (e.g. Germany, where you have a limited-ish right to abortion, but good luck finding a practice in rural areas such as Lower Bavaria)... it's straight back to female slavery.
If societies want children, they could and should encourage people to have them. Not leave them with no choice. And for what it's worth my s/o and I would like to have children, but rents and general expenses have been insane before covid hit, and now with the Russian war it's gone even worse.
It isn't pointed out because removing freedom is not an option. We have evolved beyond such primitive ways.
So why does Japan have such a low birth rate if women have less freedom than other western countries?