Japan's Public Didn't Buy Fumio Kishida's New Capitalism

I think low/declining birth rate is a self-solving problem (assuming it is a problem) that isn't worth crying bloody murder about.

Why? Simple: The world will always be inherited by children, childless people literally have no equity in the future.

Childless people cannot affect future birth rates, people with children can and the children will. The birth rate decline will eventually level out because life selects for people who have children.

Now, my six year old could definitely handle the work of my employees making $60-80k per year, legalities aside. If we stick with the social norm of 18 years of the child being an extension of the parent, that is 12 years of gains. If I recall, the cost to support a child is $4,000 per year[1], so let's say after 12 years one child will pay out $672,000[2]. $2MM from all three children.

That's a $500,000 payday ($2MM less the $1.5MM opportunity cost) by the time your children have left the nest, or, as the universities like to calculate it, $8MM in additional lifetime earnings. I am quite certain that if you told would-be parents that they stand to gain a $8MM by having three children they would take notice!

Trouble is, in rich countries that is unquestionably considered amoral, and is no doubt illegal. Without that changing, it is, indeed, hard to realize the benefit. But, by the same token, if you forced the people into poverty without a change in those legal and social norms, they're still not going to be able to realize the benefit. It is not poverty itself that is significant.

[1] You will probably be more familiar with a figure around $13,000, but you will notice that it factors in things like the cost of housing, etc. While it is not unreasonable to include those things in certain contexts, for the sake of this discussion it would not be an additional cost. You're probably not venturing into the woods and living under the leaves if you don't have children. The housing cost is there with or without them.

[2] It is more complicated than that, I know. But, for the sake of illustration let's run with it.

Another point that should not be lost is that homemaking/homecare is a job abet not a GDP generating one. With some of our advancements; time savings(dishwashers, clothes dryers and washing machines), food logistics(grocery stores with fresh food vs growing & canning), fast fashion(cheap clothing) we have taken the job from being a full time position to part time.

This triggers a shift in labor allocation, we now(ideally) split the part time job between the family members to allow the adults to focus on profit generating activities.

The 20th century west made an all-in bet that those things might be correlated, and coaxed (and sometimes coerced) others into joining, but it's not clear that the bet is paying off or that it will.

The environment is the familiar one, but also at the expense of health safety (PFAS/lead/etc), and at the expense of our societal makeup. Perhaps the optimal distribution of labor for food production isn't 0.00001%, but would be good for growth and other intangibles if it were say 0.05%.

1. Industrial activity will continue to require nonzero human participation, even in the future.

2. Culture has no impact on the fertility rates of citizens in developed economies, they are incorrigible homo sovieticus, entirely shaped by material conditions and quality of life. Populations immigrating from other regions quickly reach the same quality of life, and follow suit.

3. There exists some level of economic contraction that would lead to present-day Western countries' inability to feed themselves. In one extreme case, if productive activity in the OECD went to zero, nobody would do anything at all, not even work knowledge-sector jobs; and therefore couldn't even afford to import fertilizer, food, etc. from other parts of the world. By a sort of intermediate-value theorem, assume the level in question exists, and lies between 0 growth and total cessation of industrial activity.

4. Starvation constitutes poor quality of life.

If the level of contraction (3) happened, I advance that one of two cases would happen.

1. People starve. The population does not stabilise. The marginal fertility response of humans in developed countries to this particular decline in living standards is zero or negative. The population continues to shrink. In the long run, if this happens again and again, the working-age population repeatedly falls below some number required to maintain successive level of industrial production, until there is fewer than 1 working-age human left. (This could take several hundred years.) By the first assumption, we need at least one person to continue all industrial production in the OECD countries, so at least one such minimum number exists; and so in that person's absence, we recover a situation with zero industrial activity. The remaining n non-working citizens cannot eat and quickly die.

2. People starve. The population does stabilise at a new equilibrium. This requires, by definition, at least replacement fertility in response to declining living standards, and constitutes a non-cultural solution as sought by the GP comment.

If at any point case (2) happens, then a level of industrial contraction of some degree solves the GP's request without requiring cultural factors. Otherwise, case (1) will happen again and again unconditionally, and we will go extinct in the long run.

It's a very unpleasant solution, but it does exist. I don't really believe that humans' behavioural responses are so non-smooth that the last two people on Earth would choose to have a single child, and then send that child off to learn the Haber-Bosch process -- it's only a limiting case.

On the whole, he's right. There are some people who can't have kids because they're too busy managing companies and employing dozens of workers, but such people are a very small fraction of the populace.

...And even that, I'd suggest, is cope. Lots of extremely successful people have children. They just hire nannies, utilize daycares, get grandparents involved, etc. It can be done.

My sister, in her late 30s with 3 children, always emphasized how she wouldn’t be successful if she didn’t have unlimited support from her partner in terms of income and career. But that’s very rare for an average family.

But to refute the actual point even though it hasn't much to do with Japan today, early industrialization was also a story of immigration. It just happened to be internal migration, i.e. urbanization. The story of getting rich in places like Manchester isn't particularly pretty, and it's a story of huge churn of uneducated rural workers and surplus labor being funneled into emerging economic centers. As it is in China or India today. For the habitual culture warrior nowadays internal migration isn't very exciting, but it is economically the exact same thing. And if you're Japan and you don't happen to have 20 million young rural folks sitting around, but you want growth, you're going to have to look for people somewhere else.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.ang...

OK: The developed country you live in — and to which your own family immigrated from the developing world.

Sure, sometimes it takes a few generations to assimilate the newcomers. But it can definitely be a good thing overall.

I'm curious why you arbitrarily limit your time frame to the last 70 years. One pair of my own grandparents, who were lower-middle-class or working-class people AFAIK, immigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans in the early 20th century. They were part of a flood of immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Back then, that part of Europe would have been regarded by many "real Americans" as part of what we now call "the developing world." My siblings and cousins, though, are quite firm that our grandparents and parents made net-positive contributions to American society, however modest those contributions might have been in those initial years.

EDIT: On another branch of my family tree, my great-grandparents came here in the late 19th century as part of a continuing Irish diaspora that had started in response to the Great Famine. In that era, the Irish were viewed with disdain by many of the same "real Americans." (My late grandmother used to tell of seeing signs in the early 20th century: No Irish need apply.) Today, anyone who claimed that all those Irish should never have come here would be regarded as totally out of touch with reality.

As I just said, Japan suffered a brutal defeat in a World War, with two atomic bombs, losing sovereignty for ~7 years, military leaders getting executed for war crimes, foreign military bases sprouting everywhere (which still exist), and the monarch reduced to a symbolic role.

And arguably Japan is better for that and I doubt most Japanese people would want to go back to the glorious days of Japanese Empire even if they could.

So I don't really get this phobia of how Japan allowing a few million immigrant workers at almost the lowest level of the societal ladder would ruin its culture. Like, exactly what concrete part of Japanese culture do you expect to be ruined? Light novels?