If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points without any of that in the future, we'd appreciate it.
An attempt to justify their own decisions while still being judgemental about the decisions of others. Meat-eaters get enraged, too, when you talk about pollution and disease; and constant tourists try to minimize their individual burning of huge amounts of jet fuel by using collective statistics that elide the fact that 90% of people in the world rarely or never fly.
A lot of us are conservative about everything in the world except things that affect our own lifestyle or our loved ones, when we suddenly become permissive. Others of us are very liberal about how the world should be run, but very strict and demanding when it comes to their own things and their own families.
The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.
Your comment amounts to "you're wrong, things magically change and it's all good". Do you know nothing of their culture, or psychology in general? Conformists aren't well-known for bucking the trends their parents set and doing something wildly different than they.
> Do you know nothing of their culture, or psychology in general? Conformists..
Do you? Japan has proven highly adaptable in the past.
It would take 500-1000 years for it to actually go "extinct" (depending on what do you mean by that).
A lot of things can happen in this time frame. So claims like:
> The population never recovers. Extinction is, at some point, inevitable.
Seem pretty absurd...
As the population declines, the rate will pick up. A nearly extinct Japan will give rise to an even more profound nihilism.
> A lot of things can happen in this time frame.
Tell us the science fiction story where the Japanese learn to love life and want even more Japanese people to exist to revel in it.
Nothing happens in that time. It's extinction. Their culture isn't nearly malleable enough for anything significant to change.
Why?
> Tell us the science fiction story where the Japanese learn to love life and want even more Japanese people to exist to revel in it.
Could someone just 60 years ago easily predicted the current situation? Possibly but it would have been a contrarian opinion.
What about 100 years ago? 150? 200? Almost impossible.
See the pattern?
> Their culture isn't nearly malleable enough for anything significant to change.
Right.. I'm sure there were people who were saying this in the 1860s or 1940s. Turns out the Japanese society was one of the most malleable ones that ever existed. Of course there is no guarantee that might happen again. Who knows... I'm not the one pretending I know everything.
Because the fertility that they see expressed around them by adults acts as the ceiling, not the floor for their own future fertility. If grandpa had 3 and mom had 3, you might only have 1 or 2, you'll very rarely ever have 4 of your own.
This is just the nature of those numbers... a person with 2 kids is, theoretically, working on a third. Until they get too old, and then it's an "oops".
So, it ratchets downward. When someone waits too long and has fewer, then they become the normal that children around them see, those children internalize the new number (or at least some sort of fuzzy average of those adults around them).
One would expect that to decline ever faster. And that's in fact what we see so far... instead of a fertility rate of 1.4 that just holds steady for centuries until extinction, it drops year to year and decade to decade, and will take far less than a millennium.
> Could someone just 60 years ago easily predicted the current situation?
Probably, if they somehow could have shed their 1960s biases. The trend had already started.
> Turns out the Japanese society was one of the most malleable ones that ever existed.
It's not malleable at all. Adaptable is one thing. Adaptation is an active verb, each person individually and all collectively will themselves to change, so to speak, to overcome challenges. They do that occasionally.
Malleability suggests that some outside force can come along and change them against their will, or at least without them noticing... and they are less malleable than many other cultures. If they were malleable, then we'd expect far more results from the various programs that the government puts in place to alter their culture. And those programs have fallen flat on their faces. They don't make a dent in Japanese work culture, they won't make a dent in Japanese fertility.
We're probably only 25 years or less away from 0.3 fertility rate. By about that time, it won't be so easy to argue against those who say what I'm saying... so those who did will have moved on to "this is a good thing". Some are already hinting it in the other replies. They hate humans, they wish they never existed, and they are secretly cheering this on. (Yet, I'm the fascist somehow.)
This would make me sad, except that it's difficult to be too upset about people who wish they never existed making themselves extinct.
This is magical thinking. It like imagining that if someone diets long enough, they'll disappear. Turns out that the vast majority of people reach a comfortable weight, and stop dieting.
It's experimentally validated. Calhoun ran it multiple times. Animals don't bounce back. This isn't moose populations crashing because of overfeeding and starvation.
> Turns out that the vast majority of people reach a comfortable weight, and stop dieting.
Which is where the analogy diverges from reality. Cultured populations don't reach a comfortable weight... they become "depressed from the hunger", and decide to go for broke.