Japan’s population fell by 800k last year as demographic crisis accelerates
cnn.com
cnn.com
California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated.
A managed population decline could be a good thing for Japan, its people, and its environment. They needn't fall for the "population growth at all costs" meme, and I hope they don't.
Japan is also not having any kind of managed population decline, unless they choose counterbalance old people dying with immigration. But so far it doesn't look like Japan is eager to embrace immigration. And that will result in a country with many old people and few working-age people. Hard to thrive with such an unbalanced population. That's why the article calls it a crisis.
But relatively little of Japan is actually livable: if you look at Honshu, most of the population is in plains on the coast, and most of the inland area mountainous and hardly inhabited.
For example, about a third of the population of Japan lives on the Kanto plain which represents just 4.5% of the land area.
This is good rhetoric but poor logic. The mere existence of denser-populated places has no bearing on whether a particular place is too densely populated, any more than the mere existence of more polluted places has any bearing on whether a particular place is too polluted.
> Japan is also not having any kind of managed population decline, unless they choose counterbalance old people dying with immigration.
The idea that mass immigration is the only way to manage population decline is absurd and unserious.
Get out of the cities. California is _big_.
Non-public lands you will see on there are the coastline, the desert, and the Central Valley. If you drive the northern parts of highway 1, you’ll see many parts do seem very empty in between SF and LA. Compared to the development along the US east coast it is night and day. If you drive through the Central Valley, you’ll be enveloped in farmland. And the desert is the desert, nearly uninhabited. All of these places feel very sparsely populated.
For an American comparison, the northeastern US is home to 43% more People than California and is only 17% larger. In both California and the US, the population is concentrated on the coasts.
Would it be so surprising that a nation with a large coast, mild weather, and plenty of water would have a large population?
Tell me you have never been to California, or never ventured out of SF/LA, without telling me so.
> A managed population decline could be a good thing for Japan, its people, and its environment.
Is the current decline managed? Doesn't look like it. But would be great to see any sources about their government planning this.
I read somewhere that a rather high ratio of fertile-age women there don't want children. Smartphone and abundance of cheap entertainment plus tight schedule and budget of modern world (and more other reasons) makes them prefer childless lifestyle.
Really, if _you_ want _other people_ to have children, you have to negotiate with and offer them something. That seems to be missing from so much of this demographic discourse.
And I think this is because we sort of have this assumption that society having more kids is a thing we don't have to incentivize, and so we haven't really thought about what is the actual cost/value of that incentivization.
Historically, countries got it both ways:
- Working age parents contributed the bulk of their time to the economy (historically: male, more recently: both)
- Older family members, especially grandparents, contributed free child care
Now, geographic mobility and preference have decreased the rate at which grandparents are co-located and available. And, critically, having children later in life has decreased the number of years grandparents are able to help.
If governments provided a net-zero cost, high-quality option for childcare, I feel like it'd substantially change potential family decisions.
But that's one of the substantially-more-expensive-than-current-benefits options you're talking about.
There are only 4 choices for developed countries:
1. be destitute in the old age - no one likes it
2. have children and prepare the next generation - barely happening
3. mass immigration - that changes culture and your native population may not like it. See: Italy (Meloni), France (Le Pen), UK (Brexit & immigrants), Sweden...
4. count on technology (AI, Robots) to take care of elders - it just seems dystopian if the youngest person in one's town is 17yo. Kind of like "Children of Men".
Now in mid-2023, the only countries with above replacement fertility are not "modern" societies in any sense of the word. e.g., even Bangladesh is now sub-replacement. Mass immigration from places with still-above-replacement fertility into countries like Japan and the UK is a recipe for disaster.
So #2 isn't happening, and #3 should be disfavored on ethical grounds. (Robbing Peter to pay Paul is at best ethically neutral; importing a natural underclass is to everybody's detriment and can only result in upheaval.)
#4 is the best option on the table.
Of course, there are additional ways by which the decline might be managed. Obviously pension and retirement schemes will need to be recalibrated, and older folks should be encouraged to move from the decaying periphery into large regional hubs where they can take advantage of support and medical services.
So the direct incentives that you claim that have never existed were there all the time, having a family with kids were the natural and expected thing to do. It used to go good and easy, but now all the economic incetives go against it.
I don't like to keep bringing back the old and tired trope of how the boomer discourse and worldview are completely out of touch with the reality, but when it comes to the debate about demographics it's completely impossible not to.
not only that but earlier, your kids mainly benefited yourself as your social safety net when your grew old. Now, your kids generally benefit the whole society. So the cost of kids has gone up and is privatized, while the benefits are socialized. No wonder people are opting out of having kids.
So there are two options left on the table, which are bad but not utterly unreasonable:
1. Huge cash payouts for parents of children coupled with extremely generous incentives, both far beyond anything offered today. e.g., a $100k to $200k grant per child upon birth, with all hospital fees associated with childbirth covered by the state, free access to government childcare, and extremely generous tax credits for parents.
This might result in the wrong "sort of people" giving birth to many children... but at this point it's the one thing that hasn't been tried, it would resolve the concerns you mention in your post in a totally general sense, and it could also be a way to raise underclasses from poverty.
2. Manage the decline by investing in industries that can support an aging population, in programs that aim to pull people from decaying small towns into regional hubs, and by renormalizing retirement and pension schemes.
If there's a third way that isn't crazy -- which is to say bad _and_ unreasonable -- I'd like to hear it. (Examples of crazy ideas might include buying newborns from parents and raising them in government institutions, breeding children in artificial wombs, totally unfettered mass-immigration schemes, etc.)
It isn't crazy. The system we have now is crazy. The fact that we're mentioning artificial wombs instead of destroying capitalism is worrying.
To a certain extent, it seems to me that very generous benefits for parents -- _or_ a total restructuring of retirement and pension plans, with the reinvestment of some of the gains in pro-natal policies -- is "getting rid of the aspects of capitalism which make it too difficult to have kids." Or at least side-stepping those aspects. And these policies should be not impossible to implement. "Destroying capitalism" on the other hand...
If I was to encapsulate it in one word: pressure. Or insecurity. Pressure to work, pressure to make "sound" financial decisions, of which committing to a dependent is not "sound".
There should be options available to do nothing. We have private companies extracting "stuff" from the ground and privatizing the resulting profits. This is crazy. We throw out something like 1/2 of all food, which on average comes from hundreds of miles away so that food costs money, which if you don't have you starve.
We subsidize farms, the military, all kinds of things - but we privatize the profits.
There should be no threat of homelessness or starvation in our system. You want more than baseline, you have to work and compete. But we spend all this money to prop up this shitty system, I do not understand it.
Have people forgotten that effective contraception is basically (with a few exceptions) a 20th century thing? I don't think HN really understands the sexual revolution at all.
Contraception shouldn’t change the number of people who intend to procreate.
Yes? Again, this is so obvious I'm surprised to write it out.
> Contraception shouldn’t change the number of people who intend to procreate.
And yet it clearly did, largely by giving people the option to not procreate without having to remain forever unmarried and a low-status part of their father's household.
It's also preconditioned on education for women, both in learning the mechanics and choices involved in procreation and giving them some economic options other than that.
None of this is new or surprising; it's been deliberate policy for years! Here's a discussion of the successful reduction in fertility in Bangladesh, for example https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17441730.2022.2...
Too many elderly that need to be supported by too few productive population is a dangerous situation.
A year of (mostly) maternal leave is silver, but a legal framework that normalizes working high-skill jobs part-time for several years is absolute gold to prudent young to middle aged women with aging parents but some desire to still have kids.
Aging parents: delighted to have them still with us, but on a practical level, not much lightening the child-rearing load. All the capacity for nurture, none of the capacity of chasing down a three year old who saw a dump truck drive by.
My small child’s grandparents and dear great-aunts are mid-70s to mid-80s. Two generations of having kids late will do that. My working part-time and flexibly has enabled us to promote my child’s relationships with them and makes it easier for me to help them, which they need a bit more every year.
I didn’t have to make the stark choice I see my friends back in the States making: go back to work before the baby is mobile and full time, or give up any serious job for the next several years and get to start over a decade later.
Japan for sure ranks pretty high on women freedom and rights and chances are that the track for these issues has been improving in the country over the years, not declining.
California also has some rather terrible housing density issues (exacerbated by pro-land-speculator policies like Prop 13), which is a big part of why it feels crowded despite having a fraction of the population per square mile.
It's so tiring reading this nonsense rhetoric over and over again.
Population decline resulting from decades of abysmal fertility rates is absolutely a horrible thing. There's no "meme" here to be had.
When people stop working, they stop contributing to society but they don't stop taking from it.
For as long as human society has formed, the solution was either the working population being productive enough for everyone else or the non working dying off soon after the fact.
When fertility rates are in the shitter for a long time, you guarantee that at some point, the working population will be far far lower than what is necessary to support the rest.
A demographic and societal collapse will ensue. Many benefits and safety nets for many people including the working will cease to exist simply because it can no longer be sustained.
Japan's national pension scheme is "pay as you go", meaning that benefits for retirees today are paid out of the contributions going into the scheme today.
Japan has already reached the point of having less than two workers per retiree. By 2050, that number is projected to be more like 1.5.
Paying some taxes to social security / medicare / etc works out OK when those go to cover 0.5 to 1 dependent per worker. When that 1 workers income needs to support 1.5 .. 2+ things will get ugly fast.
Once this hits in full force, it will last decades. It's that simple.
And it has nothing absolutely nothing to do with capitalism or socialism or communism or whatever -ism you might want to scapegoat. For as long as humans need to work to survive this will be a problem.
The problems Japan is having, South Korea is looking to speedrun. It's so bad that it's too late to forestall a collapse. Even if the country magically started having replenishing birth rates immediately, in at most a few decades, we'll be seeing a collapse that would last at least 20 years. This is the best case scenario. It's straight up apocalyptic.
This is what a population table looks like for a country that had a fertility rate of 6 at year 0 and then an extinction level rate of 1 for decades (SK is actually decidedly worse at 0.78 now).
(148) Year 0: 4 sixties, 11 forties, 33 twenties, 100 newborns,
(194) Year 20: 11 sixties, 33 forties, 100 twenties, 50 newborns
(208) Year 40: 33 sixties, 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
(187) Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
(93) Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
(46) Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
(23) Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
It's like climate change. You go decades with everything looking normal at first glance. By the time, everything doesn't look so normal it's to late to do anything other than save your population from extinction. (Assuming you can even do that. A lot of people seem to miss the fact that not one country that has suffered declining fertility rates has managed to reverse the trend despite trying for decades. Not one)
You yourself mention climate change. There are increasing fights over WATER among PEOPLE [1], even as "freshwater" resources are being utilized to an extent where it's estimated that 1/3 of freshwater species are endangered or at risk of becoming endangered [2], microplastics everywhere [3], OTHER species being accelerated into extinction at a continuously increasing rate in general, etc.
Also, what happened to the "promise of automation" and "promise of mass production"? I thought we were all supposed to be "chillin' on the French Riviera while machines did so much that none of us had to work more than, say, 10 hours per week?" [4] ... I.e., shouldn't we be able to make do with fewer workers?? The even bigger laugh, there, is how much everyone is freaking out about "AI" now.
Decline in fertility in a more "organic" way, now (due to economics, impact of EDCs for years, etc.) is far better (for US, even, as a species) than "keeping the accelerator mashed to the floor as we barrel towards the cliff" [5] (when it'll be "Soylent Green" time for basically everyone, one way or another).
[1] https://fortune.com/2023/04/15/colorado-river-shrinking-cali...
[2] https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-the-north-american-be...
[3] https://www.academia.edu/download/59765553/Human_Consumption...
Undoubtedly so.
> Also, what happened to the "promise of automation" and "promise of mass production"?
Those were not based in reality. Or a more generous way to put it is they were based in 1920's reality but you want a 2020's lifestyle now. eg. do you want to have food, healthcare and housing of 1920's? It will suck, especially if there are not enough young workers.
See this recent article from NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/03/health/elderly-living-alo...
But I suspect there will always be some fundamentalist religious groups who will find reasons to reproduce no matter the economic or environmental realities of the future Earth.
Always like to start the day on a high note ... where's that Addams Family comic book I like to keep handy for that extra kick I need to get the day started off right...
California: 423,970 km² [1]
You are off by roughly 9 times. Not a small mistake.
California: 163,696 sq.m.
163,696 - 10% = 147326.4
I said "10 percent" not "10 times." And it does so happen that Japan is roughly 10% smaller than California. (In fact it's closer to 11% smaller, but I rounded it out.)
I note that a lot of people seem to want new adults, as fully formed economic units, but few people seem to want children. More kids running around. Being helpful to mothers. Complimenting people who have lots of kids despite this basically making it impossible to work full or even part-time.
The reverse is true though: many couples wanting kids will bail at the price to pay without serious aids, and feel it would be a disservice to their kids to raise them in too poor conditions. Many couples won't make long term plans (including marrying/having kids) if they don't see a stable financial path down the line.
Now, the gov aids and labor laws provisions need to be significant to have a visible effect (e.g. a hundred or two bucks per child per months won't cut it). I don't know how far Germany went.
I was looking at the comments on the r/germany about wanting kids but not being sure to be able to "afford" it [0]. This is a pretty common refrain for the Japanese youth as well, even going to down to not being able to afford dating as they're expected to spend money on courting, wining and dining in general.
https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/14jhwdn/after_10_y...
I think problem will require much more sticks and state coercion, i.e. 90% inheritance tax or inheritance holds unless 2 kids. One stupid but IMO effective policy would be to ban pet licenses, the amount of single cat/dog women who use pets as relationship surrogate is absurd - pet ownership is 80% female in PRC.
Maybe the people who have kids should rake in dividends from the people who don't have kids.
Good luck passing any laws that put elderlies at a clear short term disadvantage ("the country will be better for it in 20~30 years" won't resonate much to a 70 yo couple)
Perhaps there should be a tax that starts at age 19, and increases in percentage the longer you don't have children. I am also not sure if it's better to only tax women (since they are the ultimate gatekeepers) or men as well.
If you do have children, especially 2 or above, the government should pay you dividends in some form along with other benefits.
Punitive taxes on the childless would just ensure that the ones waiting for prudential reasons (savings, home ownership) would be even less likely to take the plunge.
Hungary has already tried this and it doesn't work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary
> "The Second Orbán Government made saving the nation from the demographic abyss a key aspect and therefore has introduced generous breaks for large families and greatly increased social benefits for all families. Those with three or more children pay virtually no taxes."
S.Korea is trying regular cash payouts: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/12/south-korea-splashe...
Evidently much more is required. Or it could be that the problem isn't solely financial. In heavily urbanized countries, most people apparently prefer easy modern entertainments to the rigors and stresses of parenting.
If they’re serious then make the incentives serious, and scale.
I'm not sure if anyone cares about this anymore, but ethnically Japanese people will become nearly extinct if they don't make some radical changes. They should massively incentivize people - even financially poor Japanese - to have kids. Just because someone has a career in e.g. a Japanese bank moving spreadsheets around doesn't mean they should be favored.
If western countries with a similar birth rate problem stopped immigration, would western countries have a similar economic outlook as Japan?
/confused Germany noises
Population decline resulting from decades of abysmal fertility rates is absolutely a horrible thing.
When people stop working, they stop contributing to society but they don't stop taking from it.
For as long as human society has formed, the solution was either the working population being productive enough for everyone else or the non working dying off soon after the fact.
When fertility rates are in the shitter for a long time, you guarantee that at some point, the working population will be far far lower than what is necessary to support the rest.
A demographic and societal collapse will ensue. Many benefits and safety nets for many people including the working will cease to exist simply because it can no longer be sustained. Once this hits in full force, it will last decades. It's that simple.
And it has nothing absolutely nothing to do with capitalism or socialism or communism or whatever -ism you might want to scapegoat. For as long as humans need to work to survive this will be a problem.
The problems Japan is having, South Korea is looking to speedrun. It's so bad that it's too late to forestall a collapse. Even if the country magically started having replenishing birth rates immediately, in at most a few decades, we'll be seeing a collapse that would last at least 20 years. This is the best case scenario. It's straight up apocalyptic.
This is what a population table looks like for a country that had a fertility rate of 6 at year 0 and then an extinction level rate of 1 for decades (SK is actually decidedly worse at 0.78 now).
(148) Year 0: 4 sixties, 11 forties, 33 twenties, 100 newborns,
(194) Year 20: 11 sixties, 33 forties, 100 twenties, 50 newborns
(208) Year 40: 33 sixties, 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns
(187) Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns
(93) Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns
(46) Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns
(23) Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn
It's like climate change. You go decades with everything looking normal at first glance. By the time, everything doesn't look so normal it's to late to do anything other than save your population from extinction. (Assuming you can even do that. A lot of people seem to miss the fact that not one country that has suffered declining fertility rates has managed to reverse the trend despite trying for decades. Not one)
And the answer is that there will be something like two 80 yr olds for every 30 yr old.
And a population 'collapse' is not necessarily bad for a country or a region in the long term. Indeed it can be rejuvenating in the long term. Europe suffered a massive population 'collapse' after the Black Death pandemics. This had the long term effect of making peasants' labour more valuable which ultimately led to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of a Middle Class.
And raw population numbers are the least of the problems here. The comparison to the Black Death is rather silly.
Why? It's a very well explored and prominent example of a population 'collapse' leading to long term rejuvenation (and innovation).
I'm not pretending that some of the short term to medium term consequences of a population 'collapse' (I keep putting it in quotes because it's your word and I think it's too emotive) won't be dire. But at some point a population has to go through a period of decline. We see this all the time in the natural world. People who don't want to have any periods of decline and go all Chicken Little with emotive talk of 'collapse' and worse for any period of population decline seem to want to exist in a fantasy world, in my opinion, of endless upwards growth. Not the real world, where, to slightly belabour a point, animal populations go through cycles of growth and decline, repeatedly.
https://zeihan.com/demographics-part-7-the-northeast-asian-c...
He gets too excited sometimes, like when I saw him give a lecture and seriously say we’d have 9-10% inflation YoY last year and just as much this year IIRC.
I recommend his book to anyone who is interested, he’s not a pundit or anything and has lots to chew on!
It was a pretty fascinating (though alarmist) thesis on how a number of countries are poised for “demographic collapse” due to aging and shrinking populations and what that will ultimately mean for globalization.
If he has managed to get both of these monikers, his analysis must be fairly legitimate.
Imagine if a breed of deer living in a restricted space naturally controlled its population in relation to the resources of their living space. That would be amazing!
More close to home, but a lot less popular, is the fact that the population of Croatia has also been steadily declining ever since the massive exodus of the last civil war.
From 1990 to 2023 the population of Croatia has declined from 4.8m to 4m, that's an even greater decline than Japan viewed in percent of population. Very alarming if it's part of your culture and language disappearing.
When that stream collapses, paying for the pensioners becomes much harder.
And even if a drastic decline is the future we're looking at, there is no shortage of immigrants who are willing to take menial jobs for low pay. As far as I know Japan hasn't been an inviting immigration destination so far. There are policy changes to make that could easily inject some population to the country.
Japan's crisis is in the overlap of economics and demographics. The shrinking economically active population cannot hope to sustain the growing population of retirees.
And sadly I think they might get away with it...
Indeed. People seem to forget that the alternative to "contraception-limited" is "death-limited". In Scotland, since killing all the natural predators, we have to keep culling the deer in order to maintain the ecosystem.
On top of that, it is harder to make babies now than ever, given declining fertility rates.
There's the agency of every fertile Japanese couple deciding whether to have children and how many. That's a lot more natural than an extremist government imposed policy like China's One Child Policy.
Paying some taxes to social security / medicare / etc works out OK when those go to cover 0.5 to 1 dependent per worker. When that 1 workers income needs to support 1.5 .. 2+ things will get ugly.
“at some point, the working population will be far far lower than what is necessary to support the rest.”
That’s a completely reasonable take in, at a minimum, pre-industrial times.
There is a long dream that “increases in productivity will allow us to live lives of leisure.” This is obviously not how things have turned out, but it isn’t clear to me that we cannot choose this.
Anyway, what percentage of us actually need to work? Where is the point that we cannot cross? I am skeptical that Japan will come anywhere close.
Japan's national pension scheme is "pay as you go", meaning that benefits for retirees today are paid out of the contributions going into the scheme today.
Japan has already reached the point of having less than two workers per retiree. By 2050, that number is projected to be more like 1.5: the writing is on the wall.
Something like 80+% of America worked in agriculture in 1800 but now it’s around 10%. The information revolution has similarly made so many things incredibly more efficient. So how far does that ratio need to go before it’s actually untenable? And how much of whatever breaks do we actually need?
You're not getting it. It doesn't matter who works where. Even then, an average worker could only provide the average standard for him and two dependants. That ratio hasn't changed. Only the standard of living has.
If your "solution" is to cut back the standard of living for everyone then I'm sorry but that is absolutely a societal collapse.
People need to work to live in society. As long as that is true then this is an actual problem with at best very painful solutions.
You see this as a societal collapse, and that’s a fine take. I’m not sure it’s a collapse. I think it’s a choice.
We’ve made that choice, and hey, I like my house and my car and my pool. There are benefits. But I also work my ass off. Is it really necessary?
Anyway, there are many countries where folks live far less extravagantly than Japan…
>Anyway, there are many countries where folks live far less extravagantly than Japan…
Lol yes and they're all striving to get out of that for obvious reasons.
I just think there are possible alternatives to “everyone continues to work full time regardless of how productive we become.”
I've heard in the past that Japan has been notoriously hard to emigrate to, but I could be wrong. Either way, there is a solution.
And that is with active, prudent immigration since around the same time the problem began.
That you think immigration is a solution now just says it all.
Do you realize the scores of millions of bodies Japan will need in very short time to reach a stable population when the collapse hits ? Oh yeah let's just get 40 million immigrants in. Very realistic.
Japan could be the most immigration happy country by a mile tomorrow and a collapse will still happen. That is set in stone.
Yes I do think there's a solution, and no I don't think it's worth getting alarmed over these headlines. But I also don't feel qualified to be discussing it on any advanced level. I'm just going with my gut and personal observations here.
1. the start of the problem,
2. when the first signs start showing and
3. when the collapse hits.
Japan is at 2. 3 won't hit for a few decades more, likely around 2060 or so.
What makes this problem unintuitive unlike most problems is that once the beginning signs hit, it's too late to avoid 3 for at least some time. You can shorten the length of the collapse but it is happening.
Now let's think and simply. We're in the year 2055.
If the problem in 2055 is that there aren't enough workers then that means the necessary children consistently weren't born starting some 80 to about some 30 years ago.
Importing immigrants or suddenly giving birth back in 2023 won't change that fact. The real problem had already happened even then.You can't change the past.
Japan didn't need those children in 2023+ for the problem in 2055. They didn't need those immigrants.
If you import the immigrants or have the children in 2023, it's to shorten the duration of the collapse not to avoid it. Japan could say they brought in a million immigrants tomorrow and literally nothing changes for 2055 prospects.
But by the time they do need those workers in 2055, they will need so much more of them (because of how exponential the population decline will be. See the table)
I'd say at least 98% of nursing staff is from outside Sweden, mostly 1st generation immigrants.
So there is absolutely a solution in immigration.
No you haven't.
1. Sweden's hasn't had declining rates for either as long or as low as Japan. Japan have a bigger share of aged people already and the real problems have yet to hit.
Sweden have solved nothing lol. They're basically Year 40 on the table. The pyramid is only going to get so much worse. Immigrants taking care of the old now is the least of the myriad of problems that will hit.