Japan’s sexual apathy is endangering the global economy

A simple (though far from easy, and likely complex in political reality) solution to this sort of problem is to import workers.

Japan, as a high productivity nation, would be a very desirable destination for workers willing to relocate. The practical issues stem from xenophobia and (based on my naive understanding) higher cost of integrating with such a foreign culture (for much of the world).

This problem has been known for quite a while. For the past three years or so I see articles popping up discussing this trend with some stats, graphs, and reasoning, but most of them fail to mention whether the Japanese government a) acknowledges the problem and b) is taking steps to fix it (I'm thinking measures such as a subsidy-per-child).

Anyone have more info on this?

I'm not entirely convinced that population "graying" is as bad as it's made out to be. If the society needs work to be done, it will pay for the work to be done. The people most screwed will be non-working old people who thought that they were retired, but face high inflation due to a lack of young workers, and who can't easily get back into the workforce. That's not a good thing, but that itself is unlikely to damage the global economy.

From a US perspective and a member of the 2nd in a series of Screwed Generations (Millennials, after Xers) I'm actually OK with this. No one wants Weimar inflation, but wage-driven inflation is often a good thing. Besides, the reason why Japanese young people aren't having sex is because they can't start their careers. The Japanese economy has been fucked for 25 years and the situation for education young people over there is far worse than in the US. We can't buy houses, but many of them can't even get stable jobs. I'm not an expert on Japan at all, but an increased demand for the work that young people can provide seems to be exactly what that economy needs.

In other words, the "sexual apathy" was caused by Japan's lost quarter-century and, while Japan's economic state (and especially its debt) is a threat to the global economy, I don't buy the headline because I think the sexual apathy is, quite obviously, a symptom of Japan's economic problems and not a cause.

On the age pyramid, I do wonder if societies should get rid of the concept of "retirement" (as an entitlement or expectation) wholesale and replace it with a basic income... and I think we should also oppose the need for retirement by more aggressively enforcing anti-ageism policies in the workplace so that people in their 60s and 70s who are able to work and want to do so, can. (I may move to something less remunerative or even unpaid, but I plan on remaining active until I die.) Much of "retirement", sadly, is involuntary and I'd like to see that change... but with a Japan-style age pyramid, one might think that societies would be less ageist against the capable older people. When there is a labor surplus, society peels off the young and the old (by forcing the young into unpaid schooling and internships for longer, and becoming ageist against the old as in Hollywood and, more recently, the Valley). When there's a shortage, those attitudes change pretty quickly.

In sum, I'd argue that the "sexual apathy" is a symptom of a bad economy. It would be a danger if one believed it to be causative of a positive-feedback loop, but I don't think that's so. When there are jobless young people, the economic signal is that the society has a surplus of young people... and the producers of 30-years-younger-people (out of self-preservation) hold back. Over the decades, we can expect that (unless there is a collapse of demand in labor, which I find unlikely) to increase wages and eventually normalize. It's shitty for a generation of people who don't get to start adulthood until their eggs and tadpoles are stale, but it does stabilize.