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Comment by slothtrop | Hacker News Reader

Japan is not on fire, and their GDP and population growth has been stagnant a long time. They have an aging population, but they won't live forever. Fertility rate could be trivially boosted through policy measures and we aren't seeing those, because they don't care.

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There isn't a good way to boost fertility that I know of. The Nordics with very generous maternity leave and social safety net have a lower fertility rate than the USA.

Both parents have to work, if you want to increase birth rates then you can't force everyone to be a dual income family.

You'll notice that all the high birth rates are with single income family structures.

In Sweden you get 480 days of parental leave and heavily subsidized daycare. Both parents can have jobs without issues

So a year and a half. Every large family I know ( and I know very many, very large families) are single income or the mom works at the school.

He didn't even make a point, just gave us a fact about their social support programs.

Clearly paternal leave doesn't fix the core problem since it's been there, and grown, over the entire time the birth rate has fallen.

It doesn't even make sense to do it unless both parents have exceptional careers, and most people just have mundane jobs.

Not good enough. It is not for daycare and The State to raise your children while you're echoing poetically down the halls of Coincidence Inc...

Keeping a populace dumb and uneducated works pretty well.

On the other side of the coin a society without children allows its members the freedom to be obese and mentally ill.

I don't think fertility rate is something good or bad, I think people are very conservative (beyond its political sympathy) because change opens for uncertainty. It does not matter if it is about drugs, fertility, AI or diversity. Ergo, in many societies we live thinking that we are always progressing towards positive outcomes when the long term reality is more random.

Reduce taxes. All countries with high fiscal pressure have a low birth rate. Maybe the correlation is there. Someone out there might not want to look because his whole structure (bureaucracy) depends on the status quo.

.cz has been increasing births by tweaks to public policy/spend.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CZE/czechia/fertility-...

By allowing more than one children? What a generous State.

A TLD has been increasing birth rates?!? Surprising!

Many countries have tried to boost it, so far nothing seem to work.

It’s a cultural thing and once it shift it doesn’t come back easily.

You would have to convince modern woman to stay at home and have 3+ child and you need most of them to do so.

Without return to traditional values that is not going to happen.

I'd confidently venture to guess the only times throughout history this is arrested is when either a Patriarchal foreign group conquers, or when a Patriarchal ideological minority gains influence with their population increases.

> Fertility rate could be trivially boosted through policy measures and we aren't seeing those, because they don't care.

Totally false. It can be argued that they're not doing enough, but they are definitely trying.

December 14, 2022: "The Japanese government is planning to provide an additional 80,000 yen (€556, $592) to couples who have a child as Tokyo looks for ways to halt the alarming decline in the nation's birth rate."[1]

January 24, 2023: "Japan’s prime minister issued a dire warning about the country’s population crisis on Monday, saying it was “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” due to the falling birth rate.

...The government has launched various initiatives to address the population decline over the past few decades, including new policies to enhance child care services and improve housing facilities for families with children. Some rural towns have even begun paying couples who live there to have children."[2]

June 1, 2023: "Japan is investing around 3.5 trillion yen in a push to increase the number of children. The country's acute population problem is getting worse quicker than expected.

Parents will be entitled to a monthly allowance will of some 15,000 yen —about $107 dollars — for each child from newborn to two years old. There will then be 10,000 yen for children from the age of three and older, with the coverage expanded to include children in senior high school.

The government also plans to open up nursery school or day-care center places to children, even if their parents do not have jobs.

It will raise childcare leave benefits, starting in the fiscal year 2025, so disposable family incomes remain unchanged for up to four weeks even when both parents take leave.

The measures also include increasing paid parental leave and providing subsidies for fertility treatments. "[3]

[1]: https://www.dw.com/en/will-japans-new-plan-to-boost-birth-ra...

[2]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/23/asia/japan-kishida-birth-rate...

[3]: https://www.dw.com/en/japan-to-channel-billions-of-dollars-i...

Fair enough, but the low hanging fruit I see is not a lack of money, but a lack of time. The expectations placed on workers, on top of raising a family, is ridiculous, but they won't budge. For all alarmist rhetoric, the government certainly isn't behaving as though it's an emergency.

And yet there is still widespread discrimination against immigrants. If Japan is consumed by this crisis, it will be by their own stubbornness

>discrimination against immigrants

... aka not being demographically suicidal.

I think you mean favouring their own ethnicity (which is fantastically narrowly defined, socially, in Japan. If one of your grandparents was Korean and the other three Japanese, you're mostly treated as Not A Real Japanese Person by Japanese who know. Which affects promotion prospects, for a start.)

"Favouring your own ethnicity" has a simpler name...

I think you're suggesting racist, but they seem to be more xenophobic.

Their current track is not demographically suicidal?

From what I understand the problem is discrimination in the workplace that young women, and especially mothers, suffer.

If a woman sees children as a block to her personal success then a little bit of money (and it is a little, compared to lost wages) won’t help.

Have you seen evidence that less discrimination at work leads to higher fertility?

Here's one paper about Poland; "These data reveal that discriminatory practices by employers against pregnant women and women with small children are decisive in women’s decisions to postpone or forego childbearing."

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26349356

$500 plus $100 a month is basically nothing

To be fair those numbers are tiny. The NPV to society of a new baby is probably more like $500k. I would guess if we paid $500k for a baby it would be quite effective

The problem with that approach is a simple $500k payment does not result in a productive adult. It takes years and years of hard work and sacrifice to end up with the type of adults you want.

You will get the people you least want to be parents pumping out kids for $500k.

I don’t think this is a problem solvable with cash.

Even if instead of NPV they simply paid lost wages/opportunity cost then it would be something. In Japan there is a lot of discrimination against young women because of fear they will go on maternity leave/not stick around. As a result, women don’t get promoted/hired, and if they do get pregnant are minimally accommodated. If we want to encourage women having children we need to compensate all the negative consequences they face in the workplace, and that’s tens of thousands of dollar per year.

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