Hacker News Reader

Comment by jojobas | Hacker News Reader

Whatever the answer to people having fewer kids is, it's not "cede your land to some other people who will".

Japan's population around 1900 was mere 43 million people - when most of them were required to work the fields.

Japan will be fine. Europe, on the other hand...

Around 1900 the median age of the Japanese population was somewhere in the twenties, in other words, they had a healthy and able work force relative to the population size. Today the median age is above 50, and there aren't many who can work the fields. In fact around here I see very old people doing that, and a lot of them can hardly walk normally, they're permanently bent.

What percentage of the Japanese workforce is working in the fields? Most industrial economies are in the 1-2% range for agriculture. And someone in their 50s can easily ride a tractor. Manual labor in the fields is not a productive use of labor in a first-world economy - the fact that it's still happening demonstrates slack in the system that can be absorbed.

Rice fields, around here at least. That's always been very labor intensive. They do use tractors to do some of it, but around the periphery of every field it's still done manually. Rice fields are very different from wheat production.

In my country strawberries are picked manually. There's yet no mechanical solution which can do what humans can, with respect to quality and more. And that's already a problem, without seasonal immigration there will be no strawberries on the market, simple as that. There are many other kind of work which still requires a young healthy work force.

That's the whole point of price signals though: luxury foods like strawberries will get more expensive if young, physically fit workers are in higher demand. People will shift their consumption accordingly. Maybe the strawberry pickers will end up working in nursing homes, and that's fine.

Rice in Japan apparently also benefits from extensive farm subsidies and protectionism. So it's ironic to point to those jobs as a risk for an aging workforce, when they are fundamentally just government make-work jobs. Sure food security is a concern, but it can be achieved in a much more efficient way.

If you have a way to secure rice production, please let us know. Or did you mean to abandon rice because it's too labor intensive? There's a reason for subsidies, just as there are reasons for agricultural support in my home country - without it there would be no agriculture. And, without going into details, that would be a disaster.

The subsidies are to protect Japanese rice production from countries where the same labour is done for way less. All praise free trade, where poverty is the most exported commodity.

Japanese rice is not commonly produced in other countries. And even where they do, the rice is not the same. I eat rice made inside Japan and made outside of Japan, and the latter is a poor substitute.

Yeah yeah, then there's Komachi from Akita. This doesn't change that without subsidies Japanese farmers would fold to the 3rd world cheaper rice.

The quantity of people isn't relevant, it's the quantity of people by age.

Older people, en masse, become a burden. If you add another 43 million people aged over 60 on top of your 43 million from 1900, suddenly that 86 million is less productive than the original 43 million.

Currently Japan has ~41 million people aged 0-40, ~41 million aged 40-60, and ~41 million aged 60+

> cede your land to some other people who will

This is an insane way to frame immigration reform. It isn’t “ceding” anything, it just means being OK that not every single person you know is the same race. Having some cultural exchange, growing as a person, learning about the world beyond your borders… these are virtues.

Immigration without assimilation with number as high as required to keep Japan population from falling is unequivocally ceding. Even much more approachable cultures get non-assimilating enclaves. The immigrants won't be considered as belonging by the Japanese and won't strive to become Japanese either.

This will be easy to say up until there isn’t enough money for retired folks.

that's already solved problem, just no country had balls to completely abolish PAYGO (Chile was closest, but they backpedaled a bit) and rely on IRA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_in_Chile

As an European living in Japan... no, Japan will not be fine. At least we Europeans are aware of our problems and try to look for solutions (whether we actually solve anything is another topic), the Japanese are masters of solving problems by ignoring them.

Their culture has a lot of good things, but also bad things that are leading then to the abyss, but if you watch Japanese media they never discuss any sensitive topic and always try to paint themselves as the best country in the world. Maybe they should start doing some self-criticism...

I completely agree.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com