Japan's 18-year-olds at record-low 1.06 million
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
i.e. readers will only care to remember the most notable/unique/etc... fraction of comments.
And everything else will just meld together into one big mental blob.
Maybe that is why there's been a flight to smaller online communities?, even 'Joe Average' has realistic prospects of writing something memorable if there's only a few hundred folks to compare against.
Over-population would be a much more difficult problem to manage, I am not sure about the optimal human population for this planet, but I am fairly certain that a stable population is much better than a quickly growing one.
Quick decline can also be an issue at some point, but in my opinion there is a tight relationship between population density and the housing market, the latter acting as a bottleneck, and if I am right the whole thing should be self-correcting.
The next generations will have more space than they need for themselves, that will naturally lower the barrier to have multiple Childs.
So yes, the planet can theoretically sustain billions more people but only if you look at planetary free square footage per capita, but at the cost of either them living in absolute poverty, or insane environmental damage and climate change which will also create poverty from the issues climate change will cause to agriculture and food prices, so we're back to millions living or dying in poverty.
Canada and Australia are huge countries but the livable parts are quite small. You can't have infinite growth on a planet of finite resources.
Lithuania isn't overpopulated. Japan sort-of is, most inhabitable territory is already built over. Egypt is definitely overpopulated, with 100 million people packed into inhabitable territory the size of Florida. Etc. etc.
Edit: to the downvoters, can you provide counterarguments? I would say that a good measure of overpopulation is that the country in question cannot possibly feed all of its population even if it tried very hard, and is inevitably dependent on imports.
Accounting overpopulation on food alone is just plain stupid.
Hunter-gatherers had better diet than most of us. But their lifestyle would not even be possible for a few millions of humans.
Is it possible to feed more people? Yes, clearly, but mostly with highly processed junk food.
At the current population it would simply not be possible to feed everyone with a healthy diet. From my point of view, we've been past overpopulation for decades.
Who pollutes the most? It's not poor country, but rich countries like the US.
The issue is really about our ecology and the effect of pollution have on our life support system.
We can even choose to create more ecological systems, if we choose, but don't.
Ultimately in the end, human population on this planet may be limited about the amount of heat that Earth can dissipate, once we solve pollution.
Easily exploitable resources are also finite. We are consuming non-renewables and haven't even built a renewable pipeline for the renewable sources, like solar panel or wind turbine construction.
The environment isn't affected by "over-population" it's affected by environmental destruction and carbon emissions.
A lot of the developed countries where the populations are stabilizing or decreasing are already causing disproportionate environmental destruction and carbon emissions, especially if you factor in the effects in other countries caused by producing products that people in the developed countries are consuming.
> Quick decline can also be an issue at some point, but in my opinion there is a tight relationship between population density and the housing market, the latter acting as a bottleneck, and if I am right the whole thing should be self-correcting.
It may be counterintuitive, but having people concentrated in denser urban areas actually reduces the environmental impact overall. If the housing market leads to more people moving out of cities, that will actually increase the environmental damage.
there are entire towns in Japan with empty houses, the problem is globalization which resulted in jobs being centralized in a handful of cities in developed nations and everything else getting outsourced. Governments embracing and encouraging remote work to help spread people out would be a better solution to housing problems
Eventually the age bell curve is going to start trending up for the older folks and were are going to have vastly more people taking out of the system than folks putting into the system.
Yes the population decline is alarming but does slowing growth really matter when you have a strong culture?
I don’t believe the solution to their problem is importing random people who share nothing in common with their culture.
The Japanese should be able to maintain their culture and I am sure they will bounce back. They owe it to nobody to radically change their culture to appease some number crunchers.
And I say this as an immigrant to US. I’ve been to Japan and it’s just quite amazing.
Wtf is "strong culture"? I guarantee your answer would be different than Tucker Carlson's because he never intended it to be defined. It's just a fake term he made up because, in the heads of his mindless listeners, it invokes the idea that some cultures are superior, but deliberately with no criteria to define it.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.25.3.83
People said the same thing about the Irish and the Italians in the US. It was wrong & racist then and it is wrong & racist now.
Also, the vast majority of immigrants to Japan will always be from other Asian countries. It seems like a stretch to assume none of their neighbors (from whom Japan adapted much of their own culture) share anything in common with them.
But of course, this isn't about Japan. It never is. This argument is always an orientalist proxy for Western xenophobia and racial prejudice. A polite way to say "I don't like the brown people in my country who speak a different language and worship strange gods, wouldn't it be nice if we could be more like the noble Japanese, who are willing to fall on their katanas and go extinct rather than suffer the impurity of foreign blood?"
This is why
The US is a little over double Japan’s population and has 4x the number of 18 year olds.
At some point society will either reckon with its values and value raising children more highly, or generations of highly educated non radical people will keep wiping themselves from the gene pool until things balance themselves out.
This is an extremely bad idea.
It's hard to imagine two cultures less compatible. Indians would have a very rough time in Japan -- imagine being effectively ostracized and forever unable to integrate into society (and not only yourself, but also your descendants!) -- and the average Japanese won't last 10 minutes in India without having a nervous breakdown on account of unsanitary conditions, lack of personal space, interpersonal aggression, etc.
Color me skeptical.
People often blame the cost of living. Whilst it doesn't help, it's not the root cause. The root cause is straightforward: people simply do not WANT more children.
Those that want children, will often have 2. There's very little reason to have 3, 4, 5 or more once you have 2. Two children already dominate your life so there's little incentive to just let the number grow arbitrarily. And having more than 2 children has very real consequences. For your home, your car, your schedule, your sanity. Even most millionaires will not have a huge amount of children.
Bottom line: most people still want children and will have 2. Which is not enough to cover the replacement rate. No policy, monetary or otherwise, will significantly move the needle.
Japan's issue is the above universal behavior combined with additional local constraints. As also seen in South Korea and China, the "work yourself to death culture whilst also financially supporting your ageing parents" means your culture as a whole ultimately goes extinct. It makes family formation near-impossible.
Instead of working more we should work less if we're interested in continued existence. The world won't move in that direction though it's "all hands on board" to deal with the current ageing society.
Mass immigration doesn't solve this. It's a brain drain for those countries, but also consider that a giant population of young people will turn into a giant population of old people, requiring even more young people. Which won't happen because also in developing countries the birth rate is in decline.
A very dark conclusion you could make is that people get too old.
We're no different.
We've been able to change our ecosystem with technology and thus greatly expand our population. But there are limits, always. And we're lucky that this self-regulation is still operating (I think that the housing market is acting as the signal for us) otherwise we would have to endure an ecosystem collapse at some point.
We need to remove as many impediments as we can to child birth and rearing - for example changing how we work so that children are compatible with productive and fulfilling careers (and indeed lives as a whole).
But it makes landlords and housing business owners great profits.
Look at Germany, Italy, Balkans, etc. all have declining demographics ranging from slight to severe yet housing in their cities has gone up from slight to severe. Like everything in real estate, it's all about the location location location, so everything is localized not extrapolated to the whole country it's why demographics can be steeply declining but prices steeply going up in cities.
Unless you want to live in desolate villages with no infrastructure or jobs, urban housing prices isn't tracking demographics.
Edit: to downvoters, check the numbers please
Like another reply said, it's more likely that general movement from rural to urban is what's causing that, and that if their population growth was higher, those cities would've just gotten even more expensive than they're getting now.
Germany: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1150526/annual-house-pri... Italy: https://www.immobiliare.it/en/mercato-immobiliare/
Arguably it’s exactly the opposite of what you say: the sustainability of life on this planet depends on human population decreasing.
There’s nothing particularly scary about having an older population curve, it just means that society has to adjust by having higher savings rates for individuals and government retirement programs.
Considering that AI is projected to eliminate 300 million jobs globally it sounds like we don’t need to all procreate like rabbits.
I'm serious. One thing I often see is complaints that the younger generation (typically millenials) are not pulling up their end of the bargain. However, neither are their parents. Typically, one would expect to become a grandparent that cares for their grandchildren. In return, your children take care of you. This is how humans have lived for generations. Yet, today, seniorhood is treated as a second adolescence. Grandparents neglect their grandchildren while parents are forced to do it all, so to speak. It's no wonder they have no time for kids.
Human childbearing is exceptionally hard. It's why human males take part in the child-raising typically (women with committed men have more children on average and shorter spacing between pregnancies). Moreover, it's why natural selection has typically brought about kin groups that care for children. Social security is an affront to this entire arrangement. There's a balance to be struct between guaranteeing no one is destitute and not shifting expectations of the elderly to the point where living purely for themselves is actually considered acceptable.
The grandparents barely being kept out of elderly poverty by Social Security aren't the same as the second-adolescence grandparents spending down their 401ks (based on wealth disparity, the former group outweighs the second group).
It's true that grandparents don't help raise grandkids anymore, but the rise of hyper-individualism in the 1950s with the death of multi-generational households is the most obvious root cause of this.
Back in the day a well off family could buy a duplex where a young family could live in one unit while the elderly parents live in the other (allowing both sides to keep their privacy), but the rise of suburbanization and the lack of sensible housing stock make this hard to pull off.
Also this is not 'fascist'. Fascists support these sorts of programs for the racially pure class. I don't support them for anyone. Fascism is not a libertarian ideology. It's a collectivist/socialist one.
The concern is that there is no obvious natural mechanism that would reverse the decrease. Our civilization would simply evaporate.
Savings are meaningless if the saved money can't buy the work of young, able workers. Elderly people would just waste their savings outbidding each other for the services of the few younger people left. Numbers in your bank account can't do a hip replacement and change your saline solution. People do.
The most common profession in every state, truck driving, is probably going to be completely automated in the lifetime of the millennial.
This is a very interesting point. Arguably the last century was an anomaly with constant growth afforded by scientific progress and post-war reconstruction, so it's possible we don't know what modern steady state looks like yet. I really hope it doesn't look like the pre-renaissance steady state.
Even if models predict the population growth will slow down and may turn to a decline after peaking 50 years from now, it feels quite rash to over-extrapolate and panic now about a potential eventual decline from the 15 billion peak to a genetic population bottleneck (1000-ish). The population would have to halve ~25 times which would take ~1000 years if it declined at a similar speed as it's been growing now.
And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision.
This means our current social structures need to change. We can’t have exponential growth forever. It’s literally not possible on a planet with finite resources.
> And that is before we consider the effects of the second order transition (i.e. going from a growing population to a shrinking population). That in itself wrecks things like pension provision.
Pension provisioning will suck yes. But it’s not an “existential threat to our civilization, if not our species. As much as climate change.” You are drastically overstating the drawbacks to population decline, as evidenced by your immediate moving of the goalposts when probed.
This is probably not as difficult as it seems. We talk a lot about the proportion of active / inactive, but we often forget that most population under 20 is inactive and also supported by the active population.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seneca_effect
Look at how easily supply chains collapsed due to lockdowns, complex systems are hard to sustain and the focus on efficiency above all else has resulted in reduced redundancy. With less people around it will be hard to even maintain things, let alone improve them
Say we're below replacement rate and the first "halving" has occurred. The replacement rate now no longer is 2.1 (as it currently is), it would be perhaps 3-4. Which won't happen, so then it becomes 5. Which won't happen so then it becomes 6. And so on.
Once the serious decline sets in, it cannot be stopped.
If something cannot continue forever, then it won't. Population decrease may be inevitable and if so then handling it with less panic is smart.
Even the brightest minds don’t seem to be able to extrapolate their beliefs out to the logical conclusion that they’re describing a Ponzi scheme that will collapse eventually by definition.
However such a balance might be hard, it is difficult to see that interest in having children in advanced economies would recover as populations crash. In fact likely as there are less people around (and a greater proportion being old), child rearing becomes more expensive to the individual.
Note that economic growth is not necessarily predicated on population growth, it can also measure better use of the people we do have (hopefully in an actualization, more than an extractive, sense). People should be understood as a (in fact the most) valuable resource, not as a costly burden.
Explain why.
Old people go
Young people take job
No young people bad
No young people no job
Most European countries already support this but their birth rates are as bad or worse than Japan when excluding migrants. The only groups reproducing above replacement level are traditional Christians and Muslims, groups with an ideology that is proven by 2000+ year Lindy effect.
only other alternative is a massive propaganda campaign to raise the social value of being a mother to how it used to be, where motherhood was socially seen as being far higher status than having a job for women. That's the current problem, years of women being told that "freedom" and having a job is way better than having kids. It's really not a money/stability issue, because the poorest people in Western countries have the most kids
Artificial wombs are straight out of Huxley's 'Brave New World' - scary how prescient that work is.
Not only are the financial and opportunity costs huge, but so are missed experiences – with the age of retirement skyrocketing, choosing to be a parent can mean essentially trading away the remainder of one’s finite lifetime.
If birthrates are to recover, society must restructure such that we do not live to work and families within a community support each other so parents don’t have to forfeit the people they were prior to parenthood and can have lives beyond their job and kids.
We had a system that optimized for male attachment to children and it was the societal expectation to marry and for marriage to really be til death do you part.
Source on this?
For example, overturning Roe v Wade
I'm kind of curious what the Clarence Thomas has cooking next
Still I generally am glad Japan is going though this process as population decline is inevitable and immigration only delays it.