Comment by Bran_son | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Bran_son | Hacker News Reader

> Conservative policymakers and a cautious public mean Japan is much more likely to look for internal, rather than external, solutions to the demographic crunch, despite projections pointing to the inevitability of more immigration.

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.

It's not entirely the economic system, other than women no having careers after giving birth. It's more the social system, and the fact that younger women don't want to seem to want to play anymore. Educated women pretty much anywhere in the world tend to have fewer children, fewer still if the economic costs and penalties increase. The government has to decide that children are desired, the social compact has to be rewritten to improve the position of women (from broodmare/housemother to coequal partner) and then the country needs a bit of good luck. There's still 10's of millions of them there, so they have time to piddle about "deciding and choosing" what to do.

Perhaps this is a good example of the downside of social nationalism in a world that intercommunicates so quickly and so effectively?

Aren't countries like Japan or South Korea known for gruelling work hours?

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.

In places like Denmark and Norway with good healthcare and childcare, people are still not having kids.

Both countries are still very expensive to live in.

And at least Denmark have really high taxes up to ~60%.

The taxes pay for the healthcare and childcare of course, so even with those benefits if people are still not having kids, it's not the economy but the fact that people simply don't want to.

The taxes make having kids even more expensive.

Source: lived in Denmark as an expat and had a kid while there.

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.

> 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.

Women want to postpone giving birth after they try carriers. Once they succeeds or fails they want to have children, but very often at that time they are too old. If country would give incentive that it covers cost of child rising, many women would probably decide to have children.

It's not really the economic system, even countries with good labor, healthcare and childcare laws (unlike, say, the grueling work culture of many Asian countries) are having fewer children simply because...people don't want them.

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.

These countries with good labor, healthcare and childcare laws are very expensive to have children. We don't have sample developed country where children cost is marginal, to validate it is not because of economy people have less kids.

This kind of comment is why normal people mock HN as being a place for out of touch, far-right techbros. This is very obviously anti-immigrant propaganda, and it's voted to the top of the replies.

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.

Immigrants eventually become Japanese citizens though when they themselves settle in Japan and have families there.

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.

> Immigrants eventually become Japanese citizens though when they themselves settle in Japan

That's great if you want to preserve Japanese paperwork and populate Japan's geography, but doesn't help the Japanese people themselves.

Careful, are you saying that Japanese-ness is genetic or cultural?

It's both, and it boggles my mind how so many can (claim to) be so deluded as to say it's entirely the latter. Notably, their culture has changed dramatically over the last ~300 years (as it has for most nations), yet one wouldn't claim they are no longer Japanese on that basis.

And the Japanese themselves consider Japanese-ness genetic, so who are you to tell them otherwise?

I am a human being who can tell them they’re really bigoted for linking genetics with Japanese-ness. That line of thinking isn’t new at all, and it’s responsible for tragedies like miscegenation laws, eugenics, genocides, slavery, and (clearly) the demise of the native Japanese population for fear of immigration.

Of course people can believe that there’s a genetic component to Japanese-ness, and they are free to become extinct as a result.

To be Japanese you have to look like Japanese and talk like Japanese. You need both genes and culture. If you are Japanese descendant born in US you are American. If you are not Japanese American born and raised in Japan you are not Japanese.

Then immigration is not going to prevent Japan from a population collapse, I suppose to you that’s a reasonable end to the Japanese people.

Immigration is not going to prevent Japanese people from population collapse, but it can prevent Japan as a country. These two are not synonyms. Some other nations can live in Japan. There are minorities of Koreans and Chinese living in Japan now

Exception: if you're good at sports, you're Japanese, even if you barely speak a word. See Osaka Naomi and Lars Nootbaar.

In spite of the problems this has caused, contemporary society will eventually have to accept the place genetics and tradition has in forming ethnic identities, if it intends to ever value distinct ethnicities.

I'm actually rather puzzled by what the dogmatic proponents of a multicultural population expect to be the end result, if not an inevitable convergence towards some bland, undifferentiated or trivially differentiated mean.

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.

> If this were to happen worldwide, and geography thankfully makes that likely impossible

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.

lol @ "careful," as if it's dangerous to disagree with you.

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.

I don’t care whether Japanese people agree or disagree with me, but if people in the US believe that genetics are important to nationality then there’s a problem. And yes HN is mostly a US forum.

I hope for less Americans on this forum who don't agree with other people opinions and facts.

I recommend you to stop being so close minded.

Sounds like a threat! Hahahhaa.

Well, let's have a stroll through a minefield, but reading GP's comment made me wonder if yeah, a country full of migrant Japanese should/can be considered "Japanese", or if we're only counting the population with centuries of "native Japanese blood" as "Japanese".

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.

Of course it helps them: it provides people who can do work that needs to be done!

That's only if you buy in some racist theory where you're only japanese based on your great great great great grandpa.

...and they adopt Japanese lifestyle and also go extinct in a couple generations?

Immigrants labor is the opposite of parasitism.

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).

Please read my post more carefully, I wrote (emphasis added) "Social-economic systems that cause below-replacement fertility are in this way much like parasites"

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.

Thanks.

> 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?

Not sure if it makes sense to argue around analogy.

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