Japan firms feel 'sense of crisis' over falling birthrate
reuters.com
reuters.com
People always seem to bring up the same interventions to stabilize this, like free childcare and tax incentives. These might be good ideas but they have been tried and haven't made a difference.
Personally I think more radical reforms to modern life will be required, like no one is allowed to work full-time until >40 and mothers of >2 get a special hat that lets them skip lines at theme parks or something.
Your solution to a collapse in the supply of labor, is to further restrict the supply of labor?
If we continue to squeeze young people they are going to continue making the same decisions.
You can only eat the seed grain for so long before there's nothing to plant.
The problem with Japan (and a few other countries), is there are extremely high levels of racist and nationalistic ideology (even towards other Asians) over "purity", which aren't often openly discussed for trade and public relations. These kinds of attitudes often devolve into policies that aren't going to help the tax base. It also exacerbates the problem, as more "foreigners" discover they aren't really welcomed nor will be accepted.
So, Japan will remain "pure", as its population steadily and rapidly decreases. It's arguably a Japan problem, if they want to dwindle into irrelevancy (and some are content to do exactly that), while entertaining and indulging in various prejudices and discrimination.
So it’s your personal feelings about maybe wanting to raise a tiny version of yourself, against all the new social and economic reasons to not have children, of which there are are many.
It’s great that Japan is mitigating some of the economic costs to those who want to have children but I doubt it moves the needle.
Personal socioeconomic reasons are gone, but not societal socioeconomic reasons. We all need children because otherwise there will be no working adults to support entitlement benefits like social security pensions, or socialized healthcare like medicare
Otherwise just import a ton of people from poor countries to maintain population dynamics. This will work for atleast a few more generations it seems.
The only known way to mitigate it is through immigration. Canada is the poster child for this strategy since they haven’t been able to naturally replenish their population since the 1970s. The issue is that you’d have to count on other countries not having this problem, and you need a local populace that is educated enough to realize the ongoing need for immigration. (I am not aware of any country with a large portion of citizens who are aware why immigration is needed.)
Japan, South Korea, and Italy have been dealing with this problem for over a decade now, and they still have no solution. They have tried all sorts of socioeconomic incentives which haven’t worked because the root of the problem isn’t socioeconomic.
The real problem is that as a country industrializes, the less fertile their males become over time. We don’t know the exact cause, but it is affecting our biology when we account for socioeconomic changes like the sexual revolution. This is for all countries now with the exception for Central Africa, so immigration as a tool will no longer be able to fully stop gap the problem like it did in the 20th century.