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Comment by FirmwareBurner | Hacker News Reader

Fertility rate is a problem for the future, that you can also solve via better polices and incentives if you want to, meanwhile dying or being enslaved in a war is a problem for right now that you can't escape via policies.

Which one you think is worse?

Also, most wealthy industrialized western nations have the same fertility issues, some are only compensating by huge legal and ilegal immigration which can be causing bigger domestic economic and societal issues than being involved in a war abroad. The west and its values, as we used to know it, is also dying.

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>that you can also solve via better polices and incentives if you want to

Nobody can. And it's not like they don't want to. Neither the very traditional and religious Arabic countries like Saudi Arabia (2.14, barely above replacement, and trending down), nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world. All have fertility troubles. Urban lifestyle just does fertility in.

>Nobody can.

Yeah you can, they just don't want to because it will be at the cost of short term corporate economic growth.

>And it's not like they don't want to.

They don't want to compromise short term corporate profits. They want to have their cake and eat it too.

>nor a country like Norway, which can afford the best social program in the world

Social programs don't mean shit if nobody can afford to buy urban real estate in the big cities where the jobs are. Norway has different issues than Japan. Every country has different issues.

>Yeah you can

Really? Can you name one developed country besides Israel that has succeeded?

>Social programs don't mean shit if nobody can afford to buy urban real estate in the big cities where the jobs are

The Government Pension Fund Global (Statens pensjonsfond utland), also known as the Oil Fund (Oljefondet), was established in 1990 to invest the surplus revenues of the Norwegian petroleum sector. As of June 2025, it had over US$1.9 trillion in assets.

Price of a 3 bedroom house in Oslo: $1.5M

$1.9T / $1.5M = 1.266M houses

Population of Norway is 5.6M

Do you have a better argument than housing affordability?

>Really? Can you name one developed country besides Israel that has succeeded?

How would they succed when they're not doing anything to succeed?

>Do you have a better argument than housing affordability?

How many families in Oslo can easily afford a 1.5 M apartment?

Fertility rate in China has been less than one for decades. They have a lot of people, but they are heavily weighted to old.

in japan it was even for many decades and its a problem but not tragedy, japan today still doing strong. Even if population in china shrink by 50% they will still have more pole than europe or us. And lets face it shrinking 50% this will really take decades and unlikely to happen since this will correct itself eventually.

How is Japan still going strong? Have you been there? Real estate just sitting empty, villages deserted, (young) people with no hope for the future, (hidden) poverty, the government and central bank basically bankrupt long-term.

Japan is stuck in the 90's with no hope for the future and they will be even less relevant then they are now within 1 generation.

Japan is absolutely not "doing strong" for the next 50 years or so and the same will happen to China. If you have no people, you have no future. As simple as that.

And how does the fact that it "will still take decades" suddenly make it OK for the country? Also if you shrink a population by 50% within decades it will completely destroy the economy (and military and culture). You can't just half the population that fast and expect things to just carry on as normal or magically recover.

I think people consider Japan to be doing strong because it's still a safe peaceful society to live in, despite the economic issues. Compared that to living in LA in the world's strongest economy, where it's like you're in a PvP server. So what's the point of having a strong economy if nobody can afford to live and the streets full of shit from homeless people.

I agreed with a lot of your posts above but not the extreme characterization of living in LA.

I do expect the crime rate is higher than most Japanese cities - culturally it's very very different. I don't feel like it's a "pvp" situation though (from a violence perspective; rampant, unbridled capitalism +consumerism in the US gives me pvp vibes for general living) and the streets aren't full of shit.

I like LA, especially the beach and other very nice areas (obviously). I also think I'd probably prefer living in a Japanese city though so maybe you're right in the end.

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