Will Japan see more marriages with Tokyo's taxpayer-funded AI-driven dating app?
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If you reduce housing to affordable prices, for example by building lots of government-owned rental units like in Singapore, then the old generation who invested into housing is upset that you destroyed their assets.
If you keep housing an appreciating asset, then young people are too poor to raise kids on their parents' level, so they might delay/abandon having kids.
Japanese houses are pulled down and rebuilt from scratch every 20-30 years, and concrete buildings last 40-50 years before being torn down, which provides a deterrent from the housing being used as a nest egg. Then there are also cultural nuances where the Japanese people prefer new over old, hence holding on to an old house is uncommon. Property inheritance taxes are also substantial or sky high and make it unpallatable for most people to financially commit to a house long term to pass it on to an family member.
like avoiding obvious chronic health problems related to living in old, moldy wooden structures (as a good portion of the US does).
"Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world. It made the number 10 spot on Deutsche Bank’s annual Mapping the World’s Prices report in 2019 and is the third most expensive city for expatriates on Mercer’s 2020 Cost of Living Survey."
https://blog.gaijinpot.com/how-much-is-the-average-rent-in-t...
> «However, you’ll often hear from people that Tokyo isn’t “that expensive,” which isn’t false, depending on your location and lifestyle. Indeed, the Deutsche Bank report lists the average price for a “typical” Tokyo two-bedroom apartment as US$1,903 (¥203,730)».
A random look through apartments in Shibuya-ku (https://apartments.gaijinpot.com/en/rent/tokyo/shibuya-ku), one of the most expensive wards in Tokyo, has turned up a 3 bedroom apartment for JPY 441,000 (~ USD3k) a month. This is less than the cost of a 2 bedroom apartment in the Sydney CBD today.
Most importantly, these are rental prices. My point remains – house prices in Japan are low, and the cost of living for an expat does not translate into local housing costs.
Also, you're not wrong with your comparison against Sydney. But are young families in Sydney having more kids? Or is it maybe just bad in both cases?
Yes, young families in Sydney are procreating, and quite successfully so. Two children are nearly a norm, three children is also common, and even four children is not that uncommon. Preschool enrollments are at an all time high.
Birth rates in the inner city areas and expensive suburbs is low.
Will Australia suffer if high priced lawyers and real estate moguls are not replaced?
> One of the most frequently cited reasons why Japanese prefer to remain single and thus contribute to the country’s population decline is the lack of finances to marry and raise children.
and...
> More worryingly for some, the app will require users to provide documents that confirm their annual incomes
So... that looks kida backwards, right?
Sounds like Japan suffers from the same issues as the western world. Raising kids is extremely difficult when hosing is unaffordable and people are required to sit in offices.
The Japanese government tries everything with out willing to admit they are they are the actual problem.
Jgov very weird ideas about apps. Someone tells them an app could solve their population decline crisis and they buy it. This isn’t the first time. Covid was all sorts of stupid with “apps” too.
They had an “AI” app that would call you each day you were supposed to be in quarantine, you were supposed to let the app see you and your background and the AI would detect if you were in the same location or not combined with location data on your phone. It was so stupid, dystopian and flawed.
https://youtu.be/BHf0L8dZJbE?si=_WJWakj9-cSmxQe2
[nevertheless - if you you have a demographic crisis - trying new, informed and creative approaches makes perfect sense.]
Speaker: Dr. K, Psychiatrist
Introduction
Dr. K discusses how red flags in relationships can lead to success, while green flags might sabotage them. He observed this phenomenon in his patients' long-term, successful relationships and in his own marriage.
The Role of Red Flags
Red Flags as Opportunities: Red flags in early relationships can be stress tests for problem-solving abilities, crucial for long-term success. Personal Example: Dr. K shares his own experience of overcoming red flags in his relationship. Key Insight: Addressing red flags early on reveals a couple's capacity to navigate problems together.
The Paradox of Green Flags
Green Flags and Perfectionism: Seeking a 'perfect' partner often leads to overlooking important relationship aspects like conflict resolution. Standards and Conflicts: High standards can delay conflict, leading to problems later in the relationship. Unrealistic Expectations: Pursuit of perfection can result in adding more criteria to the 'perfect partner' list, continuing a problematic cycle.
The Risks of Seeking Perfection
Dependency on Partner: Seeking a partner to fix personal issues can doom the relationship. Emotional Turbulence: Emotional instability, like in red flag relationships, can paradoxically strengthen bonds and attraction. Trauma Bonding: Intense early struggles can lead to strong long-term relationships.
Conclusion:
Rethinking Relationship Standards: Dr. K urges reevaluation of the impact of both red and green flags. The Value of Compromise: Emphasizes the importance of finding a partner willing to change and compromise. Disclaimer: Clarifies not to pursue abusive relationships or ignore red flags, but to balance understanding of relationship dynamics.
Additional Resources:
Dr. K mentions resources on communication in relationships and related YouTube videos.
"Clarifies not to pursue abusive relationships or ignore red flags, but to balance understanding of relationship dynamics" - aka: move away from Rigid Thinking patterns.
Firstly, to get this out of the way, it's complete nonsense. You only need a quick glace at global fertility and income statistics to know that lower incomes mean more kids.
But the psychology behind this statement indicates the true problem. They're picking this false argument because it's an easy way to say the problem is too difficult and slow to fix, so they can leave the debate at that.
Because the truth is simple: they don't really want kids that much.
My two cents on the solution is that it's quite simple: Japan once had far higher birth rates, and people from back then are still alive. So just ask them: "why did people want to have lots of kids back then?". The solutions would lie in those answers.
But the reason it's not being approached that way is because they don't really want more kids. They want to enjoy what little spare time and freedom and money they have for themselves instead.
People have been mostly replaced with machines and bombs.
edit with some links from a quick search :
Here an article about this starting to happen in Sweden : https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/income-and...
A counter example from the US with fertility going down by income with no upturn at the top: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
And a study about Japan showing richer men having more children in the past: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9045600/
What they lack is the will. That's not a judgement: if everyone's privately ok with the situation, e.g. letting the population steadily decline in hope a natural equilibrium point will be reached, that's one thing.
But collectively lying about the situation and its causes is another.
Otherwise, prioritisation (e.g. having hours of unnecessary meetings versus just go home) would fix the problem automatically steadily over time.
Is that true? People still needed to cook and buy (or make) clothes in the 18th century. Are 18th century standards of clothing and food lower than they are today, or did it just take a whole hell of a lot more effort for a similar outcome?
One reason is child labor. Kids started to work as soon as they could, from ages 7-10. Modern kids are useless until adulthood.
Another reason is lack of social security, childfree people would die of hunger once unable to work and people knew it.
Finally, people who had kids back then didn’t necessarily want them. Reliable birth control is a modern invention.
> The solutions would lie in those answers.
I’m not sure how these answers gonna lead to solutions.
I've heard the argument made that no-one has kids just to exploit them, but sadly I've repeatedly witnessed otherwise, so unsure what the fraction is on this.
I'd say the childfree argument is an exaggeration given the timeframe we're talking about. Japan had fertility rates of 4 as recent as the 1950s. It doesn't sound realistic at that time they expected to starve to death in old age once they couldn't work.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-j...
Cheap birth control is definitely a factor everywhere, but it poses an interesting question: does it mean all these surplus kids has always just been about a lack of restraint? This seems unlikely. The "original birth control" has been around (and still widely used) since where-babies-come-from was first understood.
Modern 10 year olds are only useless due to culture and laws. Technically they’re rather capable already, both physically and mentally.
> fertility rates of 4
If you wonder why so many kids, it’s mostly due to their mortality. Infant mortality rate plummeted by more than 2 orders of magnitude since 1950: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/infant-morta... I’m not sure they should solve depopulation by re-introducing high mortality.
And I'd say they're "unused" not "useless". The question would be for instance on a subsidence farm, how much more crops can the work of a 10 year old create, vs how much resources they consume. My guess is that they're still a net cost.
The data I have linked above shows infant mortality rate. I believe infant mortality is defined as “deaths during the first year of life”. I was unable to find data for child mortality in Japan. Still, I would expect it to be rather high in the 50-s Japan, and follow a similar trajectory.
Here’s some chart which shows worldwide death rate for ages ≤ 5 years: https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/global-chi... The figure was 36% in 1900, over 20% in 1950, and only 4% in modern world.
It's not complete nonsense, but for the wrong edge case.
Japan still discriminates against women quite strongly. This means that the woman is expected to quit working and handle the entire household for the husband. That means both sets of elderly parents.
ALL the major countries are grappling with the fact that elder care is making people--especially women--VERY unhappy. If a woman puts off children until her 30s, she's basically a caretaker for the rest of her life (children until 50s--parents after that). To top it off, medical caretaking is far more draining than child-rearing and has no defined end date.
A whole lotta women are simply going NOPE when faced with those prospects.
If there's any oppression in Japan, it's the old oppressing the young.
This is everywhere, not just Japan.
I’m not Japanese, and don’t claim to be an expert, but from the outside Japan’s problem seems to be a deeply engrained and very strange gender dynamic. There appears to be no expectation of care and affection in marriage. No sense of two complete people embarking on a journey together. Japanese men seem weirdly incapable of connecting with women. Japanese women seem weirdly alienated and starved for affection. (Just look at the prevalence of host and hostess bars).
Western men in Japan report women flocking to them in part because Japanese women don’t get much at all from Japanese men. I don’t think an app is going to dent the surface of this weird quandary. What might make a difference? Train regular men in the tactics of host bars. “Listen, make her feel welcome, show affection, make her feel that you see and appreciate her, because that makes her feel good” sort of regular shit western people do when courting. And of course the same training could apply on the female side.
> ... the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.