Japan's shrinking population faces point of no return
newsweek.com
newsweek.com
Suppose they choose to "solve" it with immigration - what will happen? It will enable their current fertility-destroying system to persist, shrinking their population indefinitely, while supplementing it with immigrants.
Social-economic systems that cause below-replacement fertility are in this way much like parasites, feeding off the host nation. Without immigration, eventually this will cause enough of a crisis, or a high enough fever, to continue the analogy, that will allow the nation to shake off the parasite and change their system to something sustainable.
But immigration functions as anesthetic and immunosuppressant - keeping the host population just comfortable enough that they go gentle into that good night, and giving the parasite economic system a new host to feed on.
Perhaps this is a good example of the downside of social nationalism in a world that intercommunicates so quickly and so effectively?
I think the economic system itself is not conducive for healthy families where both parents get sufficient time to spend with kids or family.
In the past this may have been papered over with the cultural expectation that the woman takes care of the house and family and the man works, but this cultural framework has been broken and done away with without any replacement, cultural or economical.
And at least Denmark have really high taxes up to ~60%.
It’s more useful to talk about marginal tax rates, otherwise you get situations where someone can pay more state income tax in a low tax state like Alabama than California even though California has a higher top marginal tax rate.
It is common misconception that you pay > 50% tax in DK. It is progressive % just like many other countries. You end up paying high percentages only on the pay that exceeds the average pay scales. Taxes, are still higher, but consider that you get a well educated society(education is free, and you even get paid to go to university), you get a society where healthcare is high quality and free, you don’t see people in the street because they got sick.. and many many more. Having a child is so heavily incentivised in all the right ways. Example(day care for your child is right and not a privilege, and the government subsidises the cost). The social system around families help even setting up a Facebook group of willing parents in your neighbourhood that happen to have similar age group kids. Kids welfare are put to the highest standards.
Just writing here to help people overcome false assumptions.
This fact is uncomfortable to many and they will try to counter with economic arguments, in my experience, saying that it costs too much, or there's not enough money to spend on them due to paying for healthcare, rent, and so on, but when you control for these factors, you cannot get away from the fundamental fact that people simply don't want as many kids today (or any, even) than in prior times.
Now, it may even be that people in the past simply had more kids because they don't cost much more marginally to feed on the farm while in a few years they could provide labor for the family. Women also had less choice of not having kids back then, as well as having no birth control, which caused such a large population increase. But now with people learning more about the costs of kids monetarily, physically, and mentally, and having good birth control, people simply don't want as many kids.
America, for example, only keeps its population at stasis due to immigration. It's also what drives a lot of its economic output. Immigration is a proper answer to this problem.
That isn't to say that Japan doesn't need to fix it's cultural issues, especially around work-life-balance and women's rights, but for the love of god touch some grass.
I think Japanese case is very interesting because one would think they have the economy and social stability to show us how it's done.
That's great if you want to preserve Japanese paperwork and populate Japan's geography, but doesn't help the Japanese people themselves.
For the sake of discussion, say if the government "imported" Scandinavian[1] families with their traditions, etc, to Japan, probably they'll keep this culture, and you'd have "parallel societies". Maybe only if the migrant families have kids who are young enough to grow up with the Japanese culture, and for some people maybe even that's not Japanese enough, because of their migrant parents' influence on them, and maybe only the kids of these kids, who'd have assimilated even more Japanese culture while growing up, would be sufficiently Japanese.
Edit to add: the alternative, a bunch of Scandinavians living in Scandinavian neighborhoods and sending their kids to Scandinavian schools (with their own cultures/languages) would bring about a totally different community within a few generations, which one could say "not very Japanese", or "a very different Japan".
[1] I had a different origin country before I changed it to "Scandinavian", I have a feeling changing the country has an effect on how people would perceive such a migration, but hey maybe I'm projecting my own bias.
And the Japanese themselves consider Japanese-ness genetic, so who are you to tell them otherwise?
Of course people can believe that there’s a genetic component to Japanese-ness, and they are free to become extinct as a result.
I live in Japan, btw, and the people here in general don't consider immigrants to be Japanese, no matter how well said immigrants speak Japanese or contribute to society.
If you asked a Japanese person, and that person gave you a "honne" answer, he or she would most likely say "genetic." I guess the Japanese should be "careful," lest they draw your ire.
If this were to happen worldwide, and geography thankfully makes that likely impossible, I'm not sure that an entire planet blanketed with a single mass media driven culture, with the inevitable extinction of hundreds of long cultural tails ( like endangered or near endangered languages today) answers the problems that proponents of unrestricted multiculturalism seem to be profess concern about. For there to be cultural variation at all, "original" or "native" sources of variation to provide inputs for the "multi" have to be preserved somehow.
And it can't just be the cultural equivalent of farmers markets, reservations set up part time on half a city block, on land that 50 years prior was not city, but hundreds of acres of actual farmland and farmers tending it.
That's why this is not going to become a real issue. It's always a fake issue that nationalist can draw on to get people agitated. Even in the most multi-cultural places in the world, people will self-segregate to be with those that look and think like them. We simply shouldn't ostracize or shame the small minority that branch out of their genetic in-group.
In addition, the "immigrants as parasites" has a long and terrible eugenic history. Perhaps you unwittingly connected to that when making what probably seemed like a clever analogy (as my first sentence above says, I think the analogy points the wrong way).
The system is the parasite, not the immigrants themselves. They are, in fact, its victims, as they will fall under the same below-replacement-fertility trap. Again, as I wrote in my post: "giving the parasite economic system a new host to feed on" - the new host being the immigrants.
> They are, in fact, its victims, as they will fall under the same below-replacement-fertility trap.
You say “trap”, as if a below-replacement birth rate is somehow bad. Do you actually think that that is the case?
I don't see the problem with population decline, especially in advanced economies. As a bonus, reduced population in such places has a disproportionate effect on emissions.
But income is not the biggest issue. Poor countries always have higher birthrate not because it is cheap to do so, it is because life is not much besides family, there is not much you can do by yourself. In developed world, you may want to spend a lot time exploring yourself, satisfy your own need, rather than thinking about taking care of a baby.