Also weird to admit that no country has reversed its birth rate problem, but still insist upon massive immigration being the solution.
If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that.
(The worldometer site makes it easy to look up and compare various countries: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/japan-populat...)
From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.
The community support and available activities.
Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.
Always a bad idea to compare with the US which is known to have a terrible social net.
> The community support and available activities.
Interesting. Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children? That seems to be a huge pain point in Germany. Also child support is too low.
I agree that solutions might not be so simple that you can just "buy them". What you can buy at least is removing pain points and giving incentives.
Shinzo Abe mostly solved the daycare issues by both making it free and massively increasing availability. There are still some waiting lists but they went from a peak of nearly 30,000 in 2017 to under 3000 now.
Exactly. And I found it being obvious after having thought about it, even while not having kids and I most likely will never have any. Just from observing and talking to people with 0-2 kids (nobody I know has more...).
I know a couple with good income, living in Munich, which is one of the most costly cities in Germany, one Child. Avoidable pain points (finding daycare, you better start right after the baby was born, because they have multi-year waiting lists) and they feel the financial hit pretty hard.
Living space is quite good and affordable by Asian standards, you either live in mansion which is basically fancy apartments, or ikkodate which is single family home, albeit smaller than those in north america.
Also pretty hard with a society full of people that don't want to have children that they must pay a lot of money to people that have children. All that while also paying a lot of money to people that are too old to work.
It will only becomes worse over time, though.
So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?
Here in Australia, we tipped below replacement rate in 1976 and it has never recovered, we just increase immigration to cover the gap. Culturally this has been brilliant but economically it has made some oddities in that housing is through the roof as there is far more customers for it than their would have been otherwise. But it does provide a lot of younger workers that manage to keep the pension system going and the demand on that system is only going to grow for decades to come.
The alternative is that you restrict immigration and we end up in the Japan position. A crumbling pension system and a lack of people to keep ever maintenance up of a lot of infrastructure and sheer labor availability.
I have wondered that as this situation grows globally, what happens when a lot of nations that have typically had a lot of emigration end up shutting the tap off as yhey feel they need their people more in their country? They can starve others of immigrants and potentially become a large political tool in decades to come. Interesting times ahead.
It is the difference between a solution and a predicament. A solution fixes the issue, a predicament has only response merely that try to take the least bad path down. This looks like a predicament.
I do fear for the younger folks, the kids and a generation or two afterwards nowadays as they are going to end up lumped with this mess. But after that things should settle down into a new stable phase. This isn't the end of civilizations it is just a re-calibration, it just take generations to occur.
AFAIK the pension system is quite well invested and can continue for many decades even with current trends. Where do you get that it is crumbling? There is a silly law forcing recalculation of pension payments vs inflation to happen too infrequently causing issues right now but that is probably a different issue.
Japan and Korea(can’t remember their names at the time but pretty sure it wasn’t those two) were famously hermit kingdoms until the US showed up and threatened war if they wouldn’t trade.
The first Medal of Honors awarded for combat internationally were given to US soldiers who ended up fighting the Koreans shortly after the civil war because of their desire to keep foreigners out[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_expedition_to_Ko...
America has, it reversed below subsistence rate birth rates. More importantly despite some years of negative population growth the net long term trend is slow population growth.
So despite both issues the long term trend is slow net population growth. Thus significantly below subsistence birth rates where flipped from a massive issue to a non issue.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2023/highcharts/data/dubina-cha...
Recent policies have resulted in significant population decline, but so far they are just another blip.
Because those "floodgates" for the most part have never existed and are just fear inducing rhetoric. Immigration has always been insignificant in terms of the whole population and therefore can not solve systemic problems alone.
Not only is 13 million people not "insignificant" in my book, but clearly the trend is accelerating.
And places become more boring if the have the same migrants as every other place, not less boring.
Since the Anglo-Saxons, we've had numerous intense bursts of migration driven by the first and second Viking periods, the Normans, the Hundred Years War, Black Death, Border Wars, Plantations, Thirty Years War / Wars of the Three Kingdoms / the Huguenots, Plantations, Colonialism, Inclosure, Clearances, Industrial Revolution, Famine, New Colonialism, World Wars, and the Commonwealth.
Yes, the Brexit migration wave was particularly sharp, but the movements in the 1850s-60s were proportionately greater (albeit spread over a dozen years rather than just five).
My understanding is, the "original flood" from India, just like the turkey workforce in Germany, was desperately needed back then, "flooding a dry land" so to say.
Just as in Germany, a significant portion of doctors (30%) in the UK were born in another country. So it seems they (just as Germany) still pretty much rely on foreign workforce which is also why the numbers didn't go down after brexit even with the foreigner unfriendly political climate that caused it.
Such as? It looks like the country is doing much worse now that the border is closed.
but if you want to keep the economy functioning, you need to do something. immigration is something.
Hopefully Korea has figure out something more actionable
How exactly is this weird when you don’t want your population to decline? Like it or not, every modern economic system whether it’s capitalism or socialism relies on population growth.
I'm not very familiar with Japan's problems, but I think it's different. I think it has more to do with some kind of never growing up adults.
Their work culture actually rivals the US for toxicity.
And they dove into the modern technological society fully before anyone other than maybe Korea... Who is also having birth rate problems