Japan births fall to record low as population crisis deepens

To be clear, I take offense to explaining stagnation with women’s rights. You have made an absurd claim and backed it up with a weak argument.

IMHO this is a more general problem of people making less kids as they get wealthier. It's a well known trend, the number of kids fall as the countries climb out of poverty.

I'm sure there are plenty of studies about it and proposed solutions but the world's population is doing just fine and I don't think that we should walk away from having a life in order to have "more children from our kind".

This is a theme in the "white genocide" circles and I don't believe that we should force women into being baby factories, instead we should create an equal world and embrace the high number of babies born in some places.

Eventually everything will stabilize and the population pyramid will get into a healthy shape. Obviously, as the boomer generation climbs to the top of the pyramid we will have a period of distress.

I'm sorry to offend armchair babyboomers but no, giving up rights and life to increase population and race share is something that no one is obligated to participate. If you feel like that, do it yourself.

From what I've seen, it's lack of stable employment, stable housing and decent support system for parents. Wages have been declining relative to inflation and cost of living for a very long time, and that's for the job you get after you go into debt to get a degree which you didn't used to need.

I take serious offense at the idea that it's just less interesting than other options. As if women were just content raising children before the idea of literally doing anything else crossed their minds. As if women today are being selfish by having lives outside of the home. How dare they want to live their life and establish financial stability before procreating? They should be raising 5 kids while struggling to make their hard-working husband's paycheck stretch far enough to feed the family. Because that's what my grandparents did.

I should read TFA first but it seems like the root of their birth problem is simply that the financial & social costs of having children far outweigh the (short-term) benefits.

I think the "too expensive" is part of the problem. Not the only one, but certainly a part.

Very few people here choose to have a child in their 20s, and this matches with "other things to do in life" but then, when you get into your 30s or 35 at most, I think the feeling of wanting a child is definitely there.

And, at that point, the "too expensive" and "too logistically difficult" parts start to get relevant. Even when childcare is there and you can afford it, a kid is often ill in its first three years of life, and requires a lot of attention. If both people in a family work, it's going to be a tremendous effort, and raising my two kids WAS a tremendous effort when they were very young; employers don't usually care a lot, and you don't have time to recharge.

Personally, I was able to go with two kids because all four grandparents live reasonably close, are retired and willing to help, and they had enough savings to help us buying a flat. If we were doing everything on our own, I don't know if I'd have had a second kid.

I know a few people making more money who are childless or with just one kid, because they (correctly) realize that, otherwise, it would be too difficult to go on with their career. And without their career they couldn't afford their flat/house, or a decent lifestyle for their children.

So, I think it's a mix of reasons. What it would help, btw, is getting recurrent, actual money for a child (at least for the first child), like, I don't need to think about how much it will cost me, I even get some money on top so I can pay baby sitters, travelling grandparents, et cetera. On the contrary, you need to pay for childcare out of your pocket (some regions offer reimbursements, but they depend on income limits that may make it very hard to have a kid in the first place) and even in school/pre-school you've got some expenses (meals, transports) that aren't state-paid (currently it's about 200 EUR/month for my two kids for a not-so-great refectory service).

Taxation isn't based on family size, so I get very little state contribution for my children, and I pay the same taxes as a single person, even though I do a lot of "work" - which is for me since the kids are mine, but it's for the future of my nation as well. I understand nobody forced me to have kids, but if nobody does, there's no future, nobody to pay pensions, et cetera. Kidless people expect "somebody somehow" to take care of them when they're older, because it makes sense in a large nation with a proper birth rate, but it could be not true anymore in this future.

So yeah, there's a mix of reasons, but calling the economical reasons _minor_ is just wrong IMHO. More people have no desire for kids because they've got other things to do. But quite a lot of people with desire for kids have a very difficult time in having how many kids they like. I think a better tax planning would make it possible for the state to achieve the desired replacement rate - I think it's about 1.8 - 1.9 children per couple - to lead to a slow population decrease - which is not a problem per se, it's the sharpness of the decline which will be a problem.

During communism there was nothing in the shops, big families were living in small apartment with parents sleeping on beds opening from the wall. There was no disposable diapers. In general people had not much career opportunities.

And then communism collapsed, and as people became richer trough capitalism fertility rates plummeted.

And there was no policies to convince people against having big families.

The basic pattern is the same across the world poor countries have high fertility rates. Rich countries have low fertility rates. And as poor countries become rich their fertility rates go down.

We simply haven't seen a situation yet where such a massive proportion of the population is old and economically not contributing, while being supported by a welfare state (and pension) and having disproportionate political power (and incentives) to not correct the course

Which is a crisis, but I'll get back to that.

> but it's great if you're worried (and you should be) about climate change and environmental collapse.

> Population is a major driver of those things, and reducing the population takes some pressure off.

True, less people means less pollution, simplistically looked.

However things aren't that simple. A person in a developed country today pollutes far more (and some like the US are even bigger outliers) than a developing one. Population growth in developing countries is huge though, with massive amounts of young people (was it Nigeria where more than 50% of the population are younger than 20?). So the population crisis in some countries won't have that much of an impact on pollution and climate change, because globally they're being replaced by multiple youngsters in developing countries, who will only pollute more as their countries develop more and more.

Meanwhile, where the crisis hits hard is in social services - for instance pensions, which Japan has, are based on the idea that there will be a young working population to pay for the older non-working one, otherwise the system crumbles. It absolutely is a problem because insanely complicated problems will arrise and tough choices will have to be made - with an older, dying population, some places will simply not have enough people remaining to make it worthwhile to maintain scarce services such as healthcare, fire fighting, etc. There are already problems about companies having to close in rural places because there's nobody to pass the mantle to.

Learning how to do that, and also the changes needed around evaluating everything around economic life (there will be no more growth, probably deflation, spending will have to be cut and Japan is already in massive debts, all things which are considered "bad") absolutely deserve calling it a crisis. Crisis that might have some mid-term benefits, but crisis nonetheless.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/business/global/23immigra...

This assumes that the amount of resources consumed per person is relatively constant. That's not a good assumption. Fewer people can easily hog more resources, especially energy. People spreading out and buying more and bigger cars and living in bigger homes means more energy and pollution, whereas if more people concentrate into a dense metropolis with public transit and tiny apartments, their energy needs are lower per capita.

Less Japanese means more open space and less land contention from remaining Japanese. Less people overall means less resource contention overall.