Japan's fertility rate is rising | Hacker News Reader

Japan's fertility rate is rising

washingtonpost.com

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Noah Smith (Econ professor at SUNY Stony Brook with a background in Japanese) took umbrage with this article;

http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/japans-fertility-...

    Except that is not what the graph shows at all. Yes, 
    government forecasts are way off (forecasting is hard).
    But for over a decade, the Japanese government has
    been too pessimistic about the fertility rate.

    Just Look. At. The. Graph! Since 2005, the black line
    - the actual fertility rate - has been going up! It is now
    higher than the blue line representing the forecast
    from 2002. It is even higher than the blue like
    representing the forecast for 2008. The graph only
    looks like it goes through 2010, but a quick Google
    shows that the fertility rate is still over 1.4, i.e. higher
    than the 2002, 2006, or 2012 forecasts.

    In other words, Japanese fertility has been surprising on
    the upside for ten years and counting!

Thanks for this. I was confused by the title of the article when, in fact, some of the most recent predictions were below the actual fertility. Hardly the definition of "worse than anyone imagined", it seems quite the opposite.

Wow, yes, that is embarrassing.

Alright, since the title of the WaPo piece is both misleading and linkbait, we changed it to Smith's title.

Should we change the URL as well? The rebuttal seems pretty convincing.

The rebuttal seems pretty convincing if you only look at the graph between 2002 and 2008. You could lop everything off after 1985 and have the same rebuttal.

The rebuttal would be convincing if he went into detail as to why the government forecasts are wrong, but he doesn't. He just says "hey they're wrong" without delving into any of the history of the forecasts, how the forecasts are made (which would be interesting, because then he could really say why he thinks they're wrong), what his forecasts might be... But instead, he just says "hey they're wrong" without anything else.

If anything he's guilty of cherry-picking, which is something we rage against when climate change denialists do it. Why is this guy convincing while they're not?

I think you're missing some nuance..

The original article's premise was reflected by its title;

"Japan’s birth rate problem is way worse than anyone imagined"

But it's not worse than anyone imagined, at all. It's actually better than people 'imagined' (i.e. forecast) in 2002, 2008, and 2012. Japan's fertility rate might be a big issue still, but it's been beating the forecasts for 10 years now.

As for expounding on why the forecasts are wrong, or more substantive articles about fertility and gender issues in Japan, you'll have to read some of his previous posts. I'd suggest:

"Time for gaijin to take a second look at Abe's Womenomics" [1] Where he discusses how the landscape is changing for women to enter the Japanese workforce and how that might affect birth rates further.

"The Japanese tragedy, causes and consequences"[2] Where he discusses why forecasts for GDP and growth rates have been notoriously bad in Japan.

I didn't post his original article to serve as a complete and thorough treatment of the birth rate issue in Japan, but only to counter the original WaPo article that was pretty misleading.

[1] - http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2014/12/time-for-gaijin-t...

[2] - http://noahpinionblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-japanese-trag...

He could have written the same article between 1980 and 1985 though, when Japan's fertility rate was increasing.

Japan, much like the earth, has limited space and resources. So I don't really think of declining population as a problem.

It is when you have a massive aging population that requires social services which requires a young population working and contributing to that social services fund.

A massive baby surge right now would actually make the situation worse since you will drastically increase the number of dependents. Increasing young working age immigration might be an option, especially for blue collar jobs that most young Japanese do not want to do. Almost certainly won't happen in xenophobic Japan.

This isn't strictly true. It costs considerably less for the state to support a child than an elderly person. Furthermore, your plan results in a massive baby surge regardless - if you start allowing mass immigration of young workers, many of them are going to have children anyway.

>It costs considerably less for the state to support a child than an elderly person.

I would like to see the numbers on this...

In today's world, a young person is supported for at least 20 years, sometimes more. Life expectancy in Japan is 84.6 yr (the minimum Japanese retirement age is 61 yr, set to increase to 65), so older people are supported for at most 23.6 yr.

Further, older people are most often supported by their own investments and assets, which can be invested in any productive location, rather than by the earnings of a couple of related adults.

But at what point are a procreating mass of young workers considered replacing the native culture? Is it still [insert country with plummeting replacement rates] if [insert labeled high-fertility immigrating group], bringing their own genes & memes, out-populate the host population?

There is a trick to prevent this. In Britain, at first they brought in many male immigrants from Pakistan. Since they didn't have their families or female kin with them, they assimilated well. They stopped assimilating once they brought their families.

For immigrants to assimilate better, it would be a better policy to bring onky one gender. Like say a quota of 500k women from the Philippines and a 500k quota of males from another country.

It is in practical terms.

There are too many people on earth right now, it is unsustainable and growing. However in Japan if they have a lot of older people and nobody to do the actual work society needs (e.g. food, utilities, transport, etc) and or to take care of those older people, then you'll run into a problem.

The problem for Japan isn't a decline, it is too fast of a decline. If the decline happened much slower it might be a non-problem.

Japan's labour force is proportionally higher than at least that of the UK and USA, their debt crisis is much more pressing than any labour issues right now.

Yes. A debt crisis that the US is walking into almost exactly alike, but a decade behind. And nobody cares.

If Japan accumulated a sovereign wealth fund during the "boom" times, they could draw upon this fund during the absence of exports due to aging workers. The problem is in the current pay-as-you-go social security system.

I would like to see a list and calculation of the advantages of a declining population.

In today's economy, white collar workers are not productive for almost 25 years, whereas 50 years ago most people were in partial paid employment by the time they were 16 and fully employed at 18-20.

Off the top of my head I can envisage: cheaper housing, reduced cost of public services, schools, universities and medical care for children.

"Japan, much like the earth, has limited space and resources. So I don't really think of declining population as a problem."

The problem is leverage.

Why is it a disaster if GDP growth comes in at less than 1% or so ? Is it really so terrible if we don't grow in a particular year, or only grow 1% ?

The problem is the leverage. We're counting on the growth just to pay the interest.

In the current financial system there is always more debt than there is money to pay it. It's mathematically impossible to pay the interest. That is how slavery works.

Eh, we haven't even started to scratch the surface of how many people the Earth can support.

Earth is far from running out of resources. Earth had limited charcoal resources until coal was found and then the other fossil fuels. While fossil fuel is limited at an accelerating rate of consumption (maybe 100 years or more), it doesn't mean there aren't other forms of energy to pick up the demand, given economic development. Think: nuclear, solar, wind.

But really, people aren't just mouths to feed, they are also hands and brains for thinking. Collectively, they add more to each other the more there are, provided they are allowed to develop themselves. The restrictions they face are mostly ideological and political, not related to physical supply or logistics.

To extend that: there is Methane Hydrate in the ocean floor, 6X all the oil we ever discovered so far. Unfortunately that's also carbon. But we're far, far from running out of fossil fuels.

Japan is already harvesting methane hydrate in test wells.

Is there any reading material that covers WHY this is? Is it actual fertility issues (i.e. trouble having kids), people having smaller families (e.g. two people, one baby), people skipping kids entirely, or something else?

From what I understand, it's the culture. Watch VICE documentaries on Japan's sex culture. No one wants to have kids when the price of living is high, 80 hour work weeks, both male and female are the work force, and sex is viewed as a non-romantic "come and go" as you please pass time. Having kids in Japans high level business/work culture is a tremendous setback. They can't afford that kind of downtime.

I'm not an economist, but Japan has accumulated a lot of capital. If they simply invest it well, shouldn't it be able to provide enough income to the aging population to take care of their needs?

Of course, the economy cannot follow the usual template of growth: more people producing and accumulating wealth leading to continued prosperity for everyone. I don't know what the situation is with Immigration, perhaps the Japanese should consider making it more attractive for immigrants? But I believe Japanese society is very homogenous and maybe not that accepting of other cultures as, say, the US.

There are limits to savings and investment.

Ultimately, finance is just a game. A really complicated and extremely useful game, but money itself is useless. What matters is what people can produce. Finance is merely what convinces them to put effort into production, and what convinces them to hand over some of the output to other people.

For an extreme example, consider if they just stopped having babies altogether. By the time the current crop of newborns reached retirement age, it wouldn't matter how much money they had saved up. There would simply be nobody to take care of them.

Ultimately, retirement savings schemes are just a way to address the question of what proportion of future productive capacity goes towards retirees, and of how to convince future workers to hand it over. If the pool of future workers is too small, it doesn't matter how much you save in the meantime.

If Japan and other aging countries created a sovereign wealth fund funded by taxes during "boom" times, like Norway has done, then it wouldn't be as dependent on a pay-as-you-go system. This fund would be held in other currencies and could be drawn down as necessary to keep the local currency stable in the absence of exports.

True, much of the domestic economy would be providing care to older people (and few tangible exports) but distributions from the sovereign wealth fund would ensure the Japanese still have a high standard of living.

Pay-as-you-go social security systems are the real problem, not low birth rates.

I have to disagree with the article's claim that the forecasts have all been bad. Since 2002 the forecasts have been realistic, although probably not useful. The more interesting bit is what, if anything, can be made of the uptick since 2005 in actual birth rates.

> An aging population leaves the country with fewer workers and more dependents.

How does a low birth rate create more dependents? If the birth rate was zero, then there would be no dependent children in 20 years. Increases in the birthrate would create more dependents in the short-medium term, but would only create more workers in the medium-long term.

Old people are dependents too, the middle age people take care of them.

Dependent elderly who have no working-age children to support them.

Maybe "Japan's birthrate spike consequences are slowly settling down" is a less scaremongering title?

— and so is their mutation rate… ;)

KARMA from rape of Nanjing. You learned your lesson.

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No wonder why I haven't made it with my wife since I put a Miku Hatsune poster on the wall.

Can't pin down now what I researched a while ago, but do recall that a replacement rate under 1.4 is unrecoverable - the culture just isn't, and can't, reproducing fast enough to avoid a complete population implosion.

That doesn't even make sense. Any sort of replacement rate is recoverable over the short term. The replacement rate could be zero for several years and the population could still recover with vigor.

If you assume an established nation (which Japan is for the most part if you ignore WWII), the realistic maxima for replacement is about 8%. So you could sustain population loss for quite a while (which brings down that maxima) and still recover.

Could in theory, but how practical? Fertility is limited to a theoretical maximum of roughly once every 2 years for 30 years (a friend has lived it, having 15 kids), but the cultural changes to go from sub-1.4 to "recover with vigor" are drastic; couples living in high-density micro-apartments and thriving on high technology are a long way from living on a farm (as my friend had to resort to).

Obviously this isn't a binary issue, so what constitutes "unrecoverable" is subject to debate - one has to consider what constitutes "cultural collapse" and, in a highly mobile world population, what other distinct groups will move to fill the relative void.

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