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Comment by applfanboysbgon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not at all convinced that reasonable housing prices are a magic bullet for the economy. Housing in Japan is treated as a depreciating asset rather than an investment and is dirt cheap (outside of the most desirable parts of Tokyo, of course, but even then it's a pittance compared like-for-like with, say, desirable parts of NYC), and Japan's economic stagnation for decades is nonetheless well-known; it could be the dictionary illustration for "economic malaise". Of course, reasonable housing policy should still be pursued... just with basic human living standards being the justification rather than "it'll make our economy numbers go up" justification.

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Japan makes me feel very confused about what economic statistics actually mean. People have great housing, beautiful and safe neighborhoods, ample access to the world's best transit, tons of entertainment and cultural products to access, excellent education and one of the longest life expectancies. Sure, they maybe have some minor problems. But I suspect that if an alien came down to Earth, toured all the countries and then was asked to rank which ones it thought were the richest without looking up economic stats I'd expect it would rank Japan near the top.

High housing prices will kill a good economy but having moderate rents will not somehow jumpstart a bad economy. JP's slump isn't evidence against housing theory of everything.

I disagree. It will, it just takes a while.

There are tons of cities with burgeoning artist scenes and other movements improving that city, due to the availability of extremely inexpensive space to do things. Rochester, St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit.

Making things cheap means you can take risks or spend time on activity that's directly economically unproductive but indirectly has fringe benefits for everyone around. And as more people do it, more people try to do it, with a compounding positive effect over time.

Japan's "malaise" is fiscal, an outcome of one way to analyze the public balance sheet. Japan's standards of living remain exceptionally high.

I do agree. I'm actually of the opinion that the economy is in generally good shape and that "number go up" should not be the end goal. It is abundantly clear that real living standards on the ground are completely divorced from the obsession with infinite growth.

Japan's economic malaise is a big topic that's mostly driven now by a rapidly aging population. Why is it aging? Low fertility rates [1]. So why are fertility rates so low? It kind of started with the housing bubble in the 1980s that created a youth unemployment crisis (ie hikikomori), which has now come to the West where we now have a youth unemployment crisis (and thus NEETs). I found this [2]:

> Japan made the same discovery thirty years earlier. The hikikomori phenomenon (young men, predominantly, who withdraw from social life entirely, sometimes for decades) emerged in the 1990s, after Japan’s asset bubble burst and the lifetime employment compact dissolved. The cultural commentary at the time, both Japanese and Western, framed it as a peculiarly Japanese pathology, something about shame and conformity and the pressure-cooker school system. This was wrong. It was a structural response to the closure of the productive ladder, and it has now appeared in every developed economy that has reproduced the same structural conditions.

It's worth noting that the US fertility rate is alos below replacement levels (~1.54) but the only thing that props up our population is immigration. Japan eschews immigration as a de facto ethnostate. South Korea is further along in that crisis. China will need to find a solution too.

But there are cultural reasons here too. Japanese work culture, pay relative to work, etc.

[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/jap...

[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-sy...

While the official youth unemployment rate in Niger is something like 0.5%, that includes things that wouldn't count by western standards (e.g. sustenance farming). The youth unemployment rate there, by how we measure it, is more like 50%. To call the situation in Japan or the USA a crisis compared to that is laughable. Yet they have a fertility rate of ~6 births per woman. You've come up with a fun theory, but it clearly doesn't work.

Fertility is on the decline, particularly in the west, although increasingly spreading, quite simply because it is socially unacceptable to have children. Society says you need to focus on your career instead. It creates TV shows, like "16 and Pregnant", designed to dissuade viewers from having children. So on and so forth. Social pressure is a powerful drug.

In fact, the pocket communities where certain religions that push a 'make babies' agenda are commonly observed, where the social pressure goes in the other direction, we find many families pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow. Social pressure works both ways, but the "having kids is cool" is not the prevailing social wind.

Dismissing youth employment as a concept because some countries still plow their fields by hand isn't a good argument. You can just look at peer countries and compare them. Surely you can’t think that youth unemployment does not reflect any major difference between Spain and Germany right.

You will find no dismissal of youth employment as a concept. There would be no reasonable way to dismiss the concept as one only has to quickly look outside to see that youth are employed. What was the intended purpose of introducing this nonsensical tangent?

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