Japan’s population drops by nearly 800k | Hacker News Reader

Japan’s population drops by nearly 800k

theguardian.com

One thing that people don't realise about economic collapse is that immigration is a band-aid that will stop working soon. In fact a lot of middle-income countries are faring much worse than western countries, for example some cherry-picked births per woman numbers:

Brazil: 1.63 US: 1.66 France: 1.83 Sweden: 1.67 India: 2.03 China: 1.16 Thailand: 1.33

People in rich countries are having more children on average than middle-income countries. A lot of people are saying that subsiding children (free daycare, free schools, free healthcare, stipends, etc) is not working, but the data seems clear to me. It does work, but it is not enough to keep replacement births going . Especially when you look at the trends of births per woman in those countries).

Within our lifetimes I think we will see reverse immigration, rich-country people moving to middle-income countries for jobs in order to exploit natural resources because there are too little locals to do it. And rich countries removing barriers for immigration and still have trouble getting people to move in.

How do people game this out, not just for Japan but for South Korea as well? With terminal or near terminal demographic collapse, I'm not sure what kind of nation will be left. I always assumed that international rules and the inertia of current policies would get them into an Alaska like state, where the people and the government have continuity from the current situation, but with not very many people. I think that might be too optimistic though.

It appears the thought process is an increasingly smaller unchanging bubble containing "pure bloods" will be maintained, as the country slowly dwindles towards irrelevance or economic collapse. And apparently, some prefer to go out that way.

Japan is a frustratingly backwards country (policy wise) in 2023:

Even an all-time high increase in foreign residents of more than 10%, to 2.99 million, couldn’t halt a slide in the total population, which has declined for 14 years in a row to 122.42 million in 2022.

Japanese naturlization laws:

(Acquisition of nationality by birth) Article 2.

A child shall, in any of the following cases, be a Japanese national: (1) When, at the time of its birth, the father or the mother is a Japanese national; (2) When the father who died prior to the birth of the child was a Japanese national at the time of his death; (3) When both parents are unknown or have no nationality in a case where the child is born in Japan.

It's a funny place in this way. They seem to prefer extinction level population decline rather than accepting children of foreigners who were born there.

I know it's not the only country who doesn't do naturlization from birth, but seems short sighted considering. You think they could get past it at some stage, but no.

There are apparently millions of illegal immigrants working in Japan who don't gt any type of residency status.

IMO have to weather through cohorts of increased life expectancy due to modernity until their property/wealth transfers (especially in urban areas) gives newer gens more space to family plan. Older I get, the more people who previously didn't want kids due to material conditions lament wanting kids but still not having said conditions. Gut feeling is once enough density in East Asian countries drops from insufferable levels, TFR will pickup. Though might still not enough for replacement TFR, but perhaps settle at a more sustainable equilibrium.

e: over post limit

Equilbirium doesn't have to be current population level. maybe japan with 60m population and lower urban density to enable average house size increase from 1000 sqft to 2000 sqft + other interventions will get TFR closer to replacement @ 60M. Govs still going to have to pile on lots of carrots and sticks on top to make decisions swing towards 2 kid+ households. But it seems like most of Asia/Europe pop density + limited housing is one impediment to raising families.

> Though might still not enough for replacement TFR, but perhaps settle at a more sustainable equilibrium.

Sustainable equilibrium is replacement TFR.

The whole world is going this way: Japan is just an early adopter. It’ll be good for the planet to have fewer people: our challenge is to run a flourishing society that isn’t based on continual growth.

Citation needed. The earth has tons of resources and can easily support several times the number of current humans.

It is bad for the species to have fewer people. It's also bad for the production of novel art.

How is it bad for the species?

How do you define "easily"?

Sorry, I'm asking two questions that each deserve comprehensive answers.

Population decline is bad for the species because the endgame of population decline is population == 0.

That's a slippery slope argument which doesn't hold up. There are many endgames and goals. Managed properly, the human population will equal 0 someday because we will have further evolved into something else.

> the human population will equal 0 someday because we will have further evolved into something else.

Ah, there are other possible paths. 1) Extinction (which has happened to many species) without any evolutionary successors. 2) Artificial life (it evolves without us). 3) Something else evolves (long after we are gone) and becomes the dominant species on the planet.

Humanity has limited options, but nature doesn't and we can't count on it doing us any favors.

"...there are other possible paths..."

Hence @quantified's "managed properly" caveat.

I don't want that. I'm a Human supremacist and I don't want to be an em.

> Managed properly

What makes you think it's being managed properly? Fertility rate 0.78 in Korea signals uncontrollable plummet to 0. TFA: 1.2 million small businesses have owners aged about 70 with no successor, prime minister Fumio Kishida: "Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions" - sounds anything but managed properly

The fact that people enjoy sex means we will never hit zero. Plenty of people will always remain.

Hmm, is population decline inevitable? With sufficiently large time scale. If it is, would it be better for species to exist longer time or peak at larger numbers. Or maybe some per specime x time total?

I would argue peaking hard and crashing hard by overshooting is worse than peaking slower and then steady very long decline.

Citation needed - tons of resources are finite while consumption growth through population is exponential.

The other planets, moons, and the rest of the solar system has tons of resources too.

That’s a classic tech will fix it narrative. The likelihood of us making it off the planet at a scale that matters to common people is basically zero.

It’s arguing on faith that we will move of the planet to defer living sustainably on the one we have which is a classic ruse to e able people to rationalize not changing lifestyles.

How much biomass and quality of life do they support? Moving metals onto the earth is "resources" but not the ones that sustain human populations.

Exponential does not mean infinite?

Resources and population will both remain finite, fear not.

Even here on only Earth, there are more than enough resources for several times more human beings, and more resources are produced on a regular basis thanks to the sun.

> more resources are produced on a regular basis thanks to the sun.

The biomass resources that our growing population is shrinking?

We have burned through approximately 70 million years' worth of carbon and hydrocarbon resource [1] in less than 200 years, certainly enough that any anthropologist will tell you the rebuilding of our civilisation would be impossible. We have additionally created a mass extinction [2], and already drastically changed the climate of, for example, Europe, created unprecedented wildfires [3] - a Europe which is also, coincidentally, rapidly deindustrialising now Vlad's turned off the spigot [4]. Living standards have already declined [5], with the obvious answer: we no longer have the abundance of resource per person. That,not money, as every economist on the planet is supposed to know, is wealth.

No, we are not being supported. You are coping.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carboniferous [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction [3] https://greekreporter.com/2022/07/20/greece-wildfires-2022/ [4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2022/09/11/europe-is-... [5] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/there-s-a-generation-...

Petrochemical resources, I believe, will turn out to be some of the least important ones, all told.

Solar and fusion will, in the long run, be vastly more important. Talking about the how and the what of oil in terms of human advancement is sort of talking about printing ink production in 2023.

Belief is a powerful drug. What do you think goes into making solar cells?

Nothing, absolutely nothing in the modern world works without fossil fuels being part of the production chain.

A future where fusion and solar are the main energy sources we tap into would be beautiful, but to get to that point we are still going to burn a lot of fossil fuels to sustain the current modern amenities we got used to. The question is: how much longer do we have to completely shift our energy dependency? The clock is ticking at a very fast rate, we are not doing enough to be independent from our energy needs supplied from fossil fuels.

Believing that "someone will eventually figure it out" is a form of illusion of continuity, there's nothing in the Universe guaranteeing we will continue human advancement, there's no continuity if we don't work for it. Working for it means: facing that we are in very uncharted territory, which as far as we can predict seems to be leading to a catastrophic outcome.

The "long run" part depends on changes to be done right now to allow a "long run" to exist, if we continue the path we are there's absolutely no guarantee there will be a long run where solar and fusion are powering civilisation...

We can still have growth but the growth that matters most, growth per capita. Fewer people but who can be better off individually than we are now.

Growth per capita has some headroom worldwide, but in developed economies is progressively harder to find. Getting to a stable state that requires no growth except managing inevitable fluctuations would be best.

We need a game-theoretic model of what such an economy would look like and some levers to arrive at it.

One thing in developed countries is that instead on focusing on increasing productivity we're importing cheap labour through immigration.

And automation is still seen as a bad thing by most laypeople

Why stop at "fewer", with zero, there will be no problems to worry about at all. Besides, humanity is "90 seconds from midnight"[1] as it is. A little more hubris and just the "right kind" of attitude towards each other, and it will achieve the amazingly intelligent and glorious realization of zero population and zero diversity.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/science/what-is-doomsday-c...

Hilarious, but utterly pigheaded.

Unsustainable doesn't mean "Great thunberg is sad". It means our way of life stops, with an iron certainty. What tf do you think rising food prices are? They are a crisis of not enough resource. Using less of one resource (gas for fertilizer) necessarily means more of another (land). Same for housing. Same for electricity. There's not enough of anything.

The more "reasonable" people fail to acknowledge that, the more likely your midnight scenario ACTUALLY HAPPENS, because the people who will acknowledge it aren't reasonable, they're looking for targets, and History is just as certain they'll find some. Pretty much every European country has seen a big alt-right swing, and blaming Twitter for that is weak.

Economists need to acknowledge reality, magic beans will not always save us. We escaped once, by burning a hundred million years' of resource in one hundred and eating 70% of the land area of the planet on the way. There is no planet B.

> a flourishing society that isn’t based on continual growth.

How will a society without growth be flourishing?

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that economic growth requires an increase in natural resource use, pollution and waste, when a lot of economic growth in recent decades has come from increased efficiency and services that have not led to more natural resource extraction.

The idea of humanity without a desire for progress and growth is romanticized by environmentalists and parts of an "intellectual elite", when in reality it will lead to a complete collapse of society and standards of living.

We're talking specifically about population growth. Infinite economic growth sounds great. Infinite population growth sounds like a paperclip maximizer but with humans.

Funny how you are getting downvoted, people really misunderstand WHAT economic growth is...

I like the coca cola aluminium can example - if coca cola can reduce the aluminium used in it's cans, that means less natural resources used. But it also means more profit for them, as a better design means less material but they can sell it for the same amount.

This actually translates into better productivity and economic growth. Multiply this by a million, and you get economic growth from a more efficient economy.

Economic growth != more natural resources used. It means more wealth for humans, which is a complex thing. it can both mean more natural resources used, or it can mean more efficient usage of existing materials.

I agree. I’m not sure what people’s preoccupation with increased population growth is. And how more people is inherently a good thing.

Sure, the Earth has resources that if distributed more efficiently, could support more people (some say by a magnitude). But are governments and companies incentivized to extract and distribute things more efficiently? Will they ever be? What is the cost to other species and the biodiversity of the planet? We’re already in the midst of a mass extinction event, and it’s sobering to realize that future children will only think of some animal species barely hanging on today as “dodos”.

Reproducing is the easiest way to spread your culture/country/ideology. If your population stagnates your tribe may vanish.

> "Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions"

Because they are headed for societal collapse, perhaps? Unless you think their prime minister is lying.

The world economy is a pyramid scheme:

"Increased economic prosperity and all economic models supported by governments and global competitors are based on having more young people, workers, than older people," Chu said. "Two schemes come to mind. One is the pyramid scheme. The other is the Ponzi scheme. I’m not going to explain them both to you, you can look it up. But it’s based on growth, in various forms." - Steven Chu

Healthy young workers pay the health care costs for aging workers and retirees, the former energy secretary said, a scheme that requires increasing numbers of young workers.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-worl...

This is why so much effort is going into AI and automation. If it doesn't pan out, the economy is probably in for a major shock within 10 years.

> The whole world is going this way

No. The world population is projected to increase till the end of this century.

> It’ll be good for the planet to have fewer people

Good luck hoping for population decline before irreversible changes in climate. Only hope is advancements in policy, research and tech.

The endgame isn't the Japanese population reaching zero. Eventually, real estate prices will go down and, with increasing automation, having many children will again become affordable. There will be pain on the way there, as the infrastructure will degrade and many elder people will lack caretakers. But I believe the market will slowly adapt to the situation and create incentives for a new population equilibrium.

Birth rates don't appear to be reacting to that sort of economic incentive so far, as tried in other countries. Possibly it's just not enough or being done wrong, but that's not something you want to bet your country on.

I agree you won't bet your country on this hypothesis. At the same time, I'd expect the reaction to take a while, perhaps over a couple of generations. We need a generation where having kids is cool again, but the incentives need to be well in place for that.

Singapore, Germany on the same trajectory.

Recently learned this:

"As of 2021, South Korea is the country with the world's lowest total fertility rate at 0.81. The TFR of the capital Seoul was 0.63 in 2021." -- WP

Shrinking population (slowly) is cool with me and all but not like that.

Much more important is the change in the age pyramid. A small society composed of many young and a few elderly can be a very happy one.

It's the opposite. Many/increasingly old and fewer young. With a strong anti-immigration and persistent anti-foreigner/xenophobic mindset.

How does immigration solve the issue. Once they become wealthier, their birth rate is going to drop, so you have to keep importing poor people from overseas to keep your GDP rising. Why not address the issue itself instead of trying to bandaid it.

Because Japan's population problem isn't a wealthy nation problem it's a population collapse problem. It's not just that birth rates have gone down because the average Japanese person has become wealthier or more educated. It's also that the lost decades made raising more kids unfeasible for a generation and because of that there's now a large elder population that must be taken care of by a smaler population. Immigration at least ameliorates some of that problem, plus the economy is doing better which means people will have more time and wealth to raise kids.

Even if you can't reverse the population decline you can at least not make it a dramatic collapse and go through all the human suffering that entails.

Now do the same narrative for Germany and Singapore and Korea who are on the same slope

All developed countries have falling fertility rates, most below the replacement rate. Japan used to be the poster child for the issue, now they're not even the worst example. How many tens of millions of migrants would be needed to offset the unbalanced age pyramids in Japan, China, South Korea and all the Western countries beginning to experience the same problem? How could such a massive number of people integrate into a country?

The reason people don't have kids is not just the cost of doing so but the massive commitment it entails. People have more agency and mobility than they did before and they don't want to give that up. Importing people and ignoring that is printing more money to pay off current debts.

And how would you solve the issue?

You have to let it happen. There will probably be a lot of suffering but rising labor costs will force solutions like automation. Most social issues in developed countries, like people having less and less relationships, are due to urbanization and technology which is more difficult to solve, but immigration is not going to fix that anyway. People recognize that endless growth is not sustainable but are too terrified of the alternative, as soon as it shows signs of slowing they want to keep it going by any means necessary.

Happy and aggresive...

This can only happen if population is exploding or life expectancy is low. Neither is the case.

Increasing life expectancy is a population and economic problem, as it's expensive to keep people on past their ability to produce. Not that anyone is going to willingly give up their gains.

How do you plan to eliminate old people?

Often people don't appreciate grandparents until they pass away.

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