The problem with an export led growth model for a large country is that eventually workers make too much money to be reasonably supported by only exports. There’s a ceiling to this model because exporters need willing purchasers.
This. By definition, you can't outgrow your customers and yet we continue to see exporting countries try to outgrow their consumer counterparts simply by doubling down on exports rather than transitioning to consumer economies (or worse - trying to supplement exports with bad investments).
I think Japan has grown considerably beyond this by exporting their Yen through extremely low interest rates. But even that too has a ceiling. Stretching to the obscene in 100 years, the Japanese people may go extinct, but the Yen will live on continuing to prop up financial markets across the world. The way the US dollar was taken off the gold standard, the Yen has been taken off the Japanese people standard...
Just about every developed nation has this problem today and no one has an answer. It seems no amount of money can be thrown at the problem as people just don't want as many kids as they used to. And I'm not sure they wanted so many of them back then either but rather lived with the consequences of their actions as birth control wasn't nearly as available.
To face the problem we need to really consider how to make people far more productive in the fields where it really matters and we face a logjam. That's healthcare and hospitality/services for aging and end of life people. Today's methods and approaches will obviously not work down the road since the human capital simply won't be there.
The current solution of desperately importing human capital, almost exclusively low value human capital, in the hopes that enough of them and/or their offspring will be able to and willing to change adult diapers, go shopping, and cook meals for the resident elderly is clearly causing social issues of their own right now and appears destabilizing and unsustainable.
Governments need to open up innovation in the healthcare industry especially as it pertains to elderly and aging people. We need automation in the elderly care industries.
with Japan the problem is well known; women can have career progression or kids but rarely both, due to both cultural factors like sexism as well as the general long working hours. Spreading the parental burden is not popular; the environment minister a few years ago got in controversy for taking his paternal leave for two weeks, despite the fact that on paper he is legally entitled to an entire year. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/world/asia/japan-koizumi-...
The "women can have career progression or kids but rarely both" problem is not just a problem in Japan. It is probably unavoidable if all real work is done in offices or factories. Things are getting better with work from home; and it may be that progressively more advanced virtual office technologies are what can actually help us turn the corner here.
In countries where this does not happen, the TFR has nevertheless fallen. I believe this is a case where people are overindexing on something specific to Japan in order to explain an effect that is far more general.
While the absolute difference in rank of course occurs in steps of 1, the difference in TFR between the ranks is much smaller.
Replacement is a TFR of about 2.1 and few modernized countries reach that. France has a relatively high value for a modernized country -- its TFR for 2022 is listed as 1.79 (rank 124) at the source you cite. Japan's TFR in 2022 is listed as 1.26 (rank 199), while we have 1.46 for Germany (rank 172), 1.41 for Norway, 1.33 for Canada and 1.32 for Finland. If progressive policy in the area of women's employment were a significant factor in TFR, the relatively large difference between France and Finland or Canada (both quite progressive countries) and the relatively small difference between Japan and Finland are both hard to explain.
If we look at the 2024 figures, which seem to be what you pulled for the ranking (Japan's ranking is higher in 2024 than in 2022, interestingly), then we have 1.8 for France, 1.6 for the UK, 1.5 for Germany, 1.5 for Canada, 1.5 for Norway, 1.4 for Finland and 1.3 for Japan. These seem to be provisional figures, though -- 2024 is not over -- I'm not sure we should take them as the basis for our discussion.
We all know what the answer is, we just don't want to admit it: Poverty.
It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to see that the poorer countries have higher birth rates. The richer you become the less babies you will have; Japan is the 4th largest economy in the world and they have the cratering birth rate to match.
The problem is rightfully nobody wants to live in poverty.
The problem isn't poverty but hyper competition. Everyone can see the cost/benefit of everything needed to give their child the best shot. They compare their resources to the resources needed to compete in the top~5%. In Asia it's tutors, after school school etc. In America it's funding the kind of hobby that looks good on a college application.
A century of propaganda is that there is no place for average people anymore, which is statistically ignorant at best.
> We all know what the answer is, we just don't want to admit it: Poverty.
So close, yet so far. The actual solution is to allow children to be a tangible benefit to parents.
Those in impoverished countries have more children, not because of poverty itself, but because poverty means they have strong incentive to put the children to work and reap the benefits of that labour. Children make them richer (not rich, but richer than they would be without children). In our society, children generally make the parents poorer. To the point that "think tanks" love to make it known exactly how much poorer a family can expect to be.
Forcing the first world into poverty, but without changing laws and other social norms, wouldn't make much difference as the children would still be left to be useless lumps who do nothing but sit around in a school all day. Who wants to produce a useless lump? And if you do for some reason, your backyard woodworking shop is just as good at producing useless lumps at a fraction of the cost.
I agree about making children to be a net benefit for parents, but at the same time it’s hard to make it net benefit.
It’s a biological problem - limited time window when you can have children and socially accepted (let’s randomly say 20-35). If you want above replacement level, a couple needs to have 3 children, so have to sacrifice 6 years (pregnancy + 1st year). I’m just spitballing numbers here, so that’s about 40% of your younger years that are gone. In every single rich country, you have so many more opportunities to find fulfilment.
To make it a net benefit you have to convince people having 3 children is better than 0, 1, or 2. And it’s very tough when you know the amount of sacrifices one has to make. In our countries we obviously don’t have the cultural or religious push to have my kids anymore. And younger generation wants it even less. The easiest way is to switch to “you have to have” children society, which sucks, and I wouldn’t want that either.
I do think this problem will escalate in the next 10 years and people will take it more seriously since it’s starting to impact everyone economically.
>I do think this problem will escalate in the next 10 years
I think low/declining birth rate is a self-solving problem (assuming it is a problem) that isn't worth crying bloody murder about.
Why? Simple: The world will always be inherited by children, childless people literally have no equity in the future.
Childless people cannot affect future birth rates, people with children can and the children will. The birth rate decline will eventually level out because life selects for people who have children.
> Childless people cannot affect future birth rates
That's not true. Maybe in a vacuum it's true, but those children don't exist in a vacuum, and as such, are human beings with agency which is influenced by people around them, including the childless people. If a childless person convinces the child to also not have kids, the child won't have kids, affecting future birth rates.
If childless people make the world a bleak place, with climate change and politics, such that children who have grown into adults don't want to bring a child into the world, then they've affected future birth rates.
Again, if every couple only had one child, we still would be having this issue, albeit slower. There’s no point in time we’ve had disproportionately high percentage older people either.
Theoretically the issue might be resolved by itself, but it would be an incredibly tough road for everyone involved.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who don’t want children right now. They don’t want it, again, because given current paradigm, it’s just a net negative for a young couple to have a kid. We can preach “no equity in the future” as much as we want, but in the real world, you don’t need it unless you’re subscribed to a specific cultural or moral belief.
Also, the more childless people live through their lives and pave the way to emotional fulfilment, the more likely for others to follow.
> it’s just a net negative for a young couple to have a kid.
Funnily enough, that fact alone might be enough to reverse course!
What we see over and over and over and over again throughout history is that the rich will do something that stands out and then the poor will try their best to emulate it; seemingly stemming from a subconscious (and perhaps sometimes conscious) "That must be why they are rich. If I do the same, I will become rich too!"
In fact, I would argue that the fertility situation is just another example of that. When the rich were able to start choosing to not have children, they did, and the poor have been trying to do the same ever since. As suggested in earlier comments, it is quite clear that the no children/few children movement started with the rich, and now is working its way through the entire population. Like you imply, perhaps unintentionally, it has become assumed in our culture that the rich are rich because they don't have children. To the point that we see a lot of messaging towards our youth along the lines of "What about your education? Having children is throwing your future away."
However, as we reach the long tail of the poor no longer having children, there is a pretty good chance that the rich will start having children again because they can – as a display of their opulence. Should that take hold, the poor will try everything they can to follow suit. They always do. And then... Problem solved.
Well, what's six years worth? Universities love to claim that a four year degree is worth around $1MM, so can we fairly say $1.5MM?
Now, my six year old could definitely handle the work of my employees making $60-80k per year, legalities aside. If we stick with the social norm of 18 years of the child being an extension of the parent, that is 12 years of gains. If I recall, the cost to support a child is $4,000 per year[1], so let's say after 12 years one child will pay out $672,000[2]. $2MM from all three children.
That's a $500,000 payday ($2MM less the $1.5MM opportunity cost) by the time your children have left the nest, or, as the universities like to calculate it, $8MM in additional lifetime earnings. I am quite certain that if you told would-be parents that they stand to gain a $8MM by having three children they would take notice!
Trouble is, in rich countries that is unquestionably considered amoral, and is no doubt illegal. Without that changing, it is, indeed, hard to realize the benefit. But, by the same token, if you forced the people into poverty without a change in those legal and social norms, they're still not going to be able to realize the benefit. It is not poverty itself that is significant.
[1] You will probably be more familiar with a figure around $13,000, but you will notice that it factors in things like the cost of housing, etc. While it is not unreasonable to include those things in certain contexts, for the sake of this discussion it would not be an additional cost. You're probably not venturing into the woods and living under the leaves if you don't have children. The housing cost is there with or without them.
[2] It is more complicated than that, I know. But, for the sake of illustration let's run with it.
In addition to children making you poorer, our workplaces are filled with people who deeply and visibly detest people who have children for their distraction from Everimportant Work. Everyone sees that, and it shapes their life choices.
I find it VERY amusing when I see high profile elites who create these workaholic atmospheres bemoan the dropping birth rate.
I don't think the available data actually shows that. In a wide array of simple societies -- whether the people's primary mode of production is agriculture, hunting, gathering nuts or shaking trees for breadfruit -- it turns out most people are not break even on calorie production until they are about 20! Children probably didn't ever -- or didn't often -- make anyone richer.
Define “poverty.” France and the U.S. were not impoverished countries in the early 2000s, but both had something approaching sustainable birth rates.
In 2008, 26 states had above-replacement birth rates. And it wasn’t just impoverished immigrants propping up the rate: states like Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, the Dakotas, Alaska, Iowa, Idaho, Minnesota, etc., which are predominantly native-born people also had above-replacement birth rates.
Why would countries that have higher poverty have more children when children take up resources? Parents from wealthier countries should be having more kids, instead we see the opposite?
In countries where agriculture is the main economy, more children equals more labor to run the farm. These countries tend to be poorer but we can look at the Amish and Mennonite communities in the US, they are not that poor but they often have large families.
If we look at the factors in a post-industrial economy, are both parents working away from home? What education is expected for the children(parents pay for collage? Agriculture doesn't require that)? Think about the time and money sink for children activities that society put on the parents, need to have kids in sports, band, summer camp.
We in the west have pushed for having both parents work, which make it very difficult for those who only want to have a single working parent household due to societal pressure and also economic pressure as well.
In simple agricultural societies, primitive hunter-gatherer societies, feudal societies, &c, both parents generally work (or worked). It's just that they both worked in or near the home. Having a single-working-parent household has probably never been sustainable for any length of time, in any kind of society.
Women generally contribute considerably to factors in the economy, whether it's stuff like nets and rush mats or ballpoint pens and machine-sewn shirts. What is different about industrial society is that parents can do basically no meaningful work around their children, and so they can't be available for their children, because not working is not an option.
Correct and that is why I talked about both parents working away from home in an (post) industrialized society.
Another point that should not be lost is that homemaking/homecare is a job abet not a GDP generating one. With some of our advancements; time savings(dishwashers, clothes dryers and washing machines), food logistics(grocery stores with fresh food vs growing & canning), fast fashion(cheap clothing) we have taken the job from being a full time position to part time.
This triggers a shift in labor allocation, we now(ideally) split the part time job between the family members to allow the adults to focus on profit generating activities.
Structuring the economy to depend on an ever increasing birthrate feels like a ponzi scheme to me. Obviously there is an upper limit. We don't know what it is, but someday we'll hit it and the scheme will come crashing down.
It's painful in the short term, but in the long term maybe it makes more sense to let the population level off to a stable point that's somewhat short of the maximum number of humans we can squeeze onto Earth.
We don’t need an “ever increasing birth rate.” But definitionally any sustainable society needs a birth rate that is, on average, around 2.1. Which is a figure that no developed society is currently attaining. It would be one thing if societies were trying to temporarily reduce birth rates to shrink the population, but that’s not what’s happening. There’s no reason to believe the rates will just bounce back once the population hits whatever you think is a sustainable number.
> Just about every developed nation has this problem today and no one has an answer.
Perhaps no developed nation has the problem to a degree extremely urgent to fix. Certainly some people think it's urgent. Certainly also I don't see it as top priority anywhere. Certainly the third, some people are gleeful about what they see as a necessary anti-growth factor.
I suspect that what will really make the difference is work-from-home. We know it's not resources -- we are much better off than preceding generations. It may be that without a sense of a home and being in the home, it's hard for people to feel like taking the next step of having children, so they don't.
People who have children today are looking at a deal along these lines:
- Send your kids away early in the morning to be looked after by strangers.
- Go somewhere else to be looked after by strangers yourself.
- After 10 hours (including commuting), come home to talk to your kids.
- Wonder about what's really going on in their lives.
- Do this for 20 or so years for each kid; maybe thirty years in total.
I can see why people who consider this reflectively -- whose parents did this and whose grandparents did this -- might simply opt out.
Kishida's problem is that he isn't a leader, it really is as simple as that. He says nice things but doesn't do anything. Great way to handle diplomacy (Kishida was once Japan's Foreign Minister), not so much leading an entire country.
He doesn't put the leader in leadership. That's why his politics have been stagnant, it's a leaderless ship.
The recent LDP financial scandals merely finally broke the back of a camel who was already suffering arthritis.
None of this is to say the LDP will lose governmental power, though. The opposition parties are somehow even worse.
Japan is an enigma in the sense that they have an extremely talented labor force. They also do not have to deal with brain drain. They’d benefit if they open up to more lax immigration policies. Contrast Japan to S.Korea where they have been more receptive to addressing labor shortage with seasonal and permanent migrant workers.
Immigrants would not be able to assimilate into Japan and mass immigration would effectively mean the end of Japanese society.
Nearly the whole developed world, from Sweden to Japan, countries became rich in the first place without immigrants. What’s changed that they need immigrants now?
For one the premise is shaky, a lot of developed countries depended strongly on migrant labor, German Gastarbeiters, the Anglosphere in general etc, but what's actually changed is that the average Japanese person is 50 years old.
If you have any interest in maintaining a growing economy you need more capital flowing to the young rather than the young paying for the old, in particular in a democracy where a geriatric population threatens to just vote in more benefits for itself. This is pretty much the sole reason for America's absurd economic strength among developed countries.
In 1990 Japan's GDP was 60% of Americas. Today it's 20%. The astonishing thing is when you adjust for working age population and purchasing power, real productivity grew at similar rates, it's not as often assumed the fax machines. The demographics have simply obliterated Japan.
Gastarbeiters were introduced after 1945 when Germany was already rich, so mentioning them is not a refutation of grandparent's "Nearly the whole developed world . . . became rich in the first place without immigrants".
It wasn't intended as a refutation but a qualification, the Gastarbeiters contributed significantly to accelerate the enormous reconstruction and the Wirtschafswunder of the 60s and 70s, so the story is more complicated in a lot of places.
But to refute the actual point even though it hasn't much to do with Japan today, early industrialization was also a story of immigration. It just happened to be internal migration, i.e. urbanization. The story of getting rich in places like Manchester isn't particularly pretty, and it's a story of huge churn of uneducated rural workers and surplus labor being funneled into emerging economic centers. As it is in China or India today. For the habitual culture warrior nowadays internal migration isn't very exciting, but it is economically the exact same thing. And if you're Japan and you don't happen to have 20 million young rural folks sitting around, but you want growth, you're going to have to look for people somewhere else.
Sometimes I wonder who wants growth (leadership obviously). I feel like most east asian cultures would gladly take less ridiculous/involuted work culture where you waste half your waking like appeasing to hierarchy. How many would take slightly less growth for much more free time. Assuming that's how that scales, and it does feel that's how it scales with how many people doing shit all in the office or doing work activities just to keep up face time. There are some strategic industries where I understand the need to grind people to work 200% harder to have 10% competitive advantage, but there are tons of less essential work where salary man culture does returns relative ot effort.
>It wasn't intended as a refutation but a qualification
I don't know what animates you in the conversation, but for me it is question of whether immigration of people with very different cultural backgrounds into a country has harmful effect that in the long term might cancel out the positive economic effects.
You have not explained (and I have failed to guess) how your "was also a story of immigration" sheds any light on that question.
> mass immigration would effectively mean the end of Japanese society.
Meh, in the same sense the country being forced to open up to European merchants, the Meiji Restoration, or the two atomic bombs and the Emperor's fall from a godlike being to a symbolic leader "destroyed" Japan.
It's not like Japanese ancestors from 1800s would recognize today's Japan, anyway. Women leading men? People getting married in Christian churches? Unthinkable!
> It's not like Japanese ancestors from 1800s would recognize today's Japan, anyway.
In 2003 I read an essay that said in part, "It was fascinating to learn that the Chinese were visiting [Chinatown in] San Francisco to look at their own history. They saw the city as a snapshot of Chinese culture, pickled in time, whose residents preserved as much as possible the China of 1850, from which San Francisco had been populated. The visiting Chinese were fascinated by the antique dress, the quaint old customs, and the old-fashioned language. Our most vivid memory of the event was of the visitor who spoke some English remarking 'This little town is more Chinese than China is.'"
The Anglicans Online site wasn't captured often enough for the week you referenced to be directly accessible. While looking at the nearest capture I noticed that the Anglicans Online site itself retained past essays on a "morgue" subdomain. I was then able to use an early 2004 snapshot to find the essay from December 2003.
Related phenomenon to this would be immigrant "time bubble", when immigrant's mental conception of their original country is frozen in time, when after decades, their origin country has moved on. Especially true in older generations that don't travel back often and fallback to what they knew.
Sure, societies evolve, but they evolve together. Introducing heterogeneity is an entirely different thing. Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order?
Sweden is the bellwether for this. They have a negative immigration rate now. They tried immigration, realized it didn’t work, and stopped it. Just like they tried social democracy in the 1960s, realized it didn’t work, and moved back to a more market economy in the 1980s.
> Name a single developed country in the last 70 years where high immigration from the developing world has improved quality of life and the social and political order?
OK: The developed country you live in — and to which your own family immigrated from the developing world.
Sure, sometimes it takes a few generations to assimilate the newcomers. But it can definitely be a good thing overall.
I'm curious why you arbitrarily limit your time frame to the last 70 years. One pair of my own grandparents, who were lower-middle-class or working-class people AFAIK, immigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans in the early 20th century. They were part of a flood of immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Back then, that part of Europe would have been regarded by many "real Americans" as part of what we now call "the developing world." My siblings and cousins, though, are quite firm that our grandparents and parents made net-positive contributions to American society, however modest those contributions might have been in those initial years.
EDIT: On another branch of my family tree, my great-grandparents came here in the late 19th century as part of a continuing Irish diaspora that had started in response to the Great Famine. In that era, the Irish were viewed with disdain by many of the same "real Americans." (My late grandmother used to tell of seeing signs in the early 20th century: No Irish need apply.) Today, anyone who claimed that all those Irish should never have come here would be regarded as totally out of touch with reality.
I limited the time horizon to 70 years because Japan’s experience with immigration is much more likely to be like Sweden’s or France’s than America’s.
But America isn’t even an exception. Without immigration, America would be more like Australia or Canada in the late 20th century. Those are better countries than the U.S.: more socially cohesive, better run, lower in crime, less corrupt, and more efficient. Canadians and Australians get much better government per tax dollar because they spend far less political capital bridging over group conflicts.
The influx of immigration I was a part of made Virginia a worse place too. It was an extremely orderly and well-run state when I was growing up in the 1990s. It’s still coasting on that, but in 30 years it will go the way of California.
It’s not a coincidence that there are zero immigrant societies that function as well as Denmark or Sweden. Disorder and conflict is part and parcel of putting different cultural groups in the same place and having them try to run a country together.
If time travel is invented in your lifetime, you should go back a thousand years or so and have a talk with King Cnut — he of the legend of showing his courtiers just how much control he had over the tide [0] — about your views on immigration.
Immigration comes because migrants are dissatisfied enough with the status quo to take risks to do something about it. That ingrained tendency is a major part of human progress.
The accompanying disruption can be uncomfortable. But it plays a big role in how humanity's learning things we didn't know about reality — and in figuring out how to deal with it. Some familiar examples: The amount of life-improving technology that came from WWII, the Cold War, and the Space Race. Advances in vaccine research instigated by the global spread of covid-19. And so on, and so forth.
(Back in the 1980s, Jared Diamond argued that humanity was better off millennia ago, when people were hunter-gatherers, and that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history [1]. Shockingly, his argument didn't seem to get any traction.)
> Sure, societies evolve, but they evolve together. Introducing heterogeneity is an entirely different thing.
As I just said, Japan suffered a brutal defeat in a World War, with two atomic bombs, losing sovereignty for ~7 years, military leaders getting executed for war crimes, foreign military bases sprouting everywhere (which still exist), and the monarch reduced to a symbolic role.
And arguably Japan is better for that and I doubt most Japanese people would want to go back to the glorious days of Japanese Empire even if they could.
So I don't really get this phobia of how Japan allowing a few million immigrant workers at almost the lowest level of the societal ladder would ruin its culture. Like, exactly what concrete part of Japanese culture do you expect to be ruined? Light novels?
I'm not sure anyone knows. The total absolute working-age population will still likely be higher in 2060 than it was in 1950, and complemented by a great many productivity-enhancing machines. It's just that the number of elderly will be much larger, and the number of young children much smaller. But that's also a trend that could reverse; the absolute number of children in Japan will still be higher at that point than it was during, say, the Meiji era. Perhaps large families will come back into fashion for whatever reason.
The number of young people is thinning out AND the fertility rate remains low, and these have a multiplicative effect. Compounded, they are an oncoming freight train. There are very real, very serious reasons that the fertility rate is low. For a vast majority of the population, the decision to have children and provide for them is a decision to sentence yourself to a very hard life. Society is set up this way and most people see no issue. I think that suggesting large families "may come back for whatever reason" completely ignores this reality. You reap what you sow.
This is true, but the future is hard to see and there are multiple possible roads. It's not guaranteed to be an extrapolation of the present.
One possibility is a pivot towards immigration, but I think equally likely would be a pivot towards ever-larger financial incentives for parenthood, the kind that would make being a stay-at-home parent start to make financial sense.
A lot of young people put off parenthood not by preference, or because they're so passionate about being a corporate tax accountant, but just because they don't feel they have a choice; only one route offers financial security. That's been the reality in many developed countries since perhaps the 1970s-80s, but it won't necessarily remain true in the years ahead.
This would require that elderly people (who are an ever-growing voting bloc) support this shift of government support towards young people. It might not happen without some kind of external stimulus. But elderly people also tend not to be pro-immigration either, and presumably also don't love the idea of empty schools and playgrounds and dying towns. It's hard to say what will happen.
I agree with everything about what you said. I agree with you that the elderly are unlikely to support young people, unlikely to support immigration, and probably don't like empty schools and dying towns. What I guess they will do is: absolutely nothing. Hold on to power and live out the rest of their days. And that scenario is an extrapolation of the present.
OK, here's a controversial statement: Maybe Japanese culture is in need of some change. And I don't even mean, what you think I am referring to. I mean, maybe the Japanese don't have the right entrepreneurial attitude to develop modern 21st century businesses and maybe foreigners can bring some fresh perspectives. I believe that is one of the factors that makes the US so successful.
Maybe Japanese culture needs changing, but it doesn’t follow that immigration would produce the right kind of chance. You can replace order with disorder, but why would that be a positive change?
I don't follow your logic. The parent comment suggested immigration would inject entrepreneurialism into an otherwise staid society. That doesn't imply disorder, it implies entrepreneurialism.
Order arises from (1) everyone following the same rules; and (2) everyone being subject to a shared system of informal social reinforcement. Immigration injects a foreign population that was socialized according to different rules, and isn’t part of the system of shared social reinforcement, and so creates disorder. There is no orderly society that has a significant share of immigrants.
You mean besides ours, the most successful society on the planet, proprietors of a global hegemony something rapidly approaching an entire century. And I'm sure others, I'm just saying this one is a pretty obvious counterexample.
We've only recently started mass immigration and it's not going as well as previous decades when immigration was more controlled. Giving small amounts of immigrants time to assimilate instead of bringing in so many at once they start building their own enclaves is what works.
The U.S. isn’t an orderly country, especially the immigrant-heavy parts. Importing U.S. levels of disorder to Japan would be a huge downgrade in standard of living.
Cheap immigrant labor and skimming the cream off the top from other countries makes American companies more competitive, yes. That doesn’t make a place orderly and well-run, with a high quality of life for the average person.
New York’s GDP per capita is double that of Japan and significantly higher than the Tokyo region. I doubt most Japanese would be happy living in New York. Indeed, if Americans could even conceive that a city could be like Tokyo—clean, orderly, polite, with effective transit and public services—most wouldn’t want to live in New York either.
You started out with a clear statement, which felt easy to rebut with similarly clear statements, and we've now reached a point where I'm not even sure what it is you're saying.
I said immigration creates disorder. Your points about America prove rather than rebut my point. America is rich, but it’s not orderly. Everything from individual social interactions to the operation of every level of government is characterized by disorder resulting from heterogeneity.
Japan is considering more immigration to deal with its population problems, but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
My neighbors are great. I have an Italian neighbor. He’s great too. But for two generations, American democracy was upended as Italians voting as an ethnic bloc fueled corrupt machine politics. New York and New Jersey never recovered.
Your neighbors might be great as individuals as well. That’s irrelevant to my point. Chicago might be the poster child of a city that could’ve been orderly and well run. Except for the last century it’s been riven by ethnic conflict and immigration-fueled machine politics that has sapped the government’s ability to actually serve its people.
Contrast New England. A large number of people from New England retire in the Annapolis area because of the sailing and warmer weather. The cultural difference is undeniable. Many have said to me that, growing up, they learned food was for surviving, not enjoying. They cut donuts in half at events so people aren’t tempted to eat too much, and regularly run out of food (because better to run out of food than to waste it). As a Bangladeshi, I find them totally unrelatable and frankly kind of scary in how little they seem to care about having grandchildren. But it’s impossible to deny that the little New England towns they created are extremely orderly places.
I fail to see your argument. How would opening up immigration benefit Japan, other than depressing wages? Japan is an island already overpopulated relative to it's native energy and agricultural resources. Importing more low-value workers will only lower the quality of living for existing inhabitants of Japan.
Japan should focus instead on better utilizing the high-skill labor force that they already have.
Assuming Japan and Korea's fertility issues don't self correct (they appear culturally incapable of addressing the root problems that cause them), don't they _have_ to significantly relax immigration policies at some point to avoid their societies imploding?
Out of all of Japan's problems, I think the fundamental root is they need to import a significant amount of energy. They do not have significant coal, oil, uranium. They have limited access to solar and wind for their population size. To offset all of their energy imports, they need to work very hard to produce a lot of exports.
The economic troubles are centered around having to pay a premium to import energy. The birth rate is negatively impacted by the economic situation. Their foreign policy has to keep energy access as a main priority.
> The birth rate is negatively impacted by the economic situation
Only to a certain extent. Looking at data of every single rich country, and my own circles, there’s just no appetite for most of people to have 3 children (2.1+ needed for replacement).
I weirdly think about this issue way too much, since I’m a part of a problem. All my girl friends, who want children, only want one or two. Why would anyone sacrifice, at the very bare minimum, 6 years of their youthful years for 3 children? There’s just too much opportunity loss compared to lower income / less rich countries.
I have no idea how to tackle this problem, but would be very interested to read about or somehow even contribute to potential solutions that are beyond “people have to have lots of children for cultural reasons!” argument.
Unfortunately a shrinking population leads to a situation where there are more older people alive than young people, which makes our retirement and health care systems quite unsustainable.
I think coupling these ideas together, it’s all rather unsustainable, no? That seems to be the elephant in the room, but everyone is too busy here telling others they’re just “dicking around” not having children. Just kick that can down the road a bit more I guess.
Apparently, the expected population peak with Africa and India is about 10 billion people.
My suspicion is that machines replace more and more economic activity within wealthy contracting nations. Humans already cost several $100k in the US once you look at health education and food subsidies. If a machine can pay for itself +ROI, it probably will be built.
Well, one solution could be for Western economies to irreversibly contract under the strain of a high dependency ratio, leading to the cessation of industrial fertiliser production. At that point, I expect a large fraction of the population would return to subsistence farming, and rediscover the traditional incentive that children can work as farm-hands, the more the better (esp. in case some of them die to cholera, typhus, etc.).
Nothing more than a modest proposal to spur discussion...!
That is a beautiful story that, like all population pyramid anxieties, completely fails to take into account the colossal productivity gains made in the last century, which allow a much smaller percentage of an active workforce to support a high standard of living.
43.7% of the population is still working age (25-65).
And in 2100, it would be 41.2%.
As of 2020, it is 58.2%.
---
Now, you tell me, in 80 years of technological progress and economic development, do you think China will be able to become 40% more productive? And manage to do ~the same amount of work with 30% fewer workers?
(PS. China's per-capita GDP grew 40 times in the past 40 years. It's full of smart people, I think it's going to figure something out.)
> And worrying about 'what will happen if human population actually drops to zero' is like worrying about commuter traffic congestion on Mars.
Why not? I don't think it will happen, but at the same time, I don't want to say anything about human behaviour without stating assumptions. If you think (as do I) that there is always some point above zero population at which birth rates do stabilise, then it's valuable to examine what exactly that would entail.
It sounds like we agree the point exists somewhere - we could extend your example to the whole Earth's population becoming 2 and the population becoming (8 bn / 2)% more productive. Why can't we extend it to the population becoming 1?
Because fertility has feedback loops. When there are two people left on earth, their decision to have children or not will not be based on any of the economic or social concerns that we currently face.
It's a completely different situation, and none of the shit we are arguing about applies to it. There's a fundamental difference between running and meeting the long-term needs of a human society of 10 billion people and a human society of 10.
The mathematics you're using is the same reduction to absurdity that leads a manager to believe that nine women can deliver one baby in one month.
But under the current system, the wealth generated by those productivity gains is captured by a tiny fraction of the population. Elon Musk has many children, but most people are caught in the rat race.
Given the preponderance of depression, anxiety, frustration, hopelessness, loneliness, suicide, poor self-care, etc that seems to take hold in "high standard of living" communities, you may be conflating measures of a strong economy with measures of a healthy and durable society.
The 20th century west made an all-in bet that those things might be correlated, and coaxed (and sometimes coerced) others into joining, but it's not clear that the bet is paying off or that it will.
I'll always argue that what we've been seeing for the last few centuries is a local-maxima, and we're in a rut. We've hyper-optimized food and other goods production at the expense of a bunch of things, that we're only now realizing.
The environment is the familiar one, but also at the expense of health safety (PFAS/lead/etc), and at the expense of our societal makeup. Perhaps the optimal distribution of labor for food production isn't 0.00001%, but would be good for growth and other intangibles if it were say 0.05%.
Why would a bad dependency ratio mean we stop using industrial fertilisers? If anything it's the opposite, using more fertiliser and technologies to cope with labour shortages.
You mean humanity would be forced to rediscover how to maintain stable, renewable relationships with nature, and population growth would be naturally limited to what the land can sustain? The way every other species does, and the way humanity had done for hundreds of thousands of years? As opposed to the last few centuries of catastrophic "progress" which has enslaved our minds and bodies to the relenless dehumanization of blind technological growth, vulgar consumer capitalism, panopticon surveillance and which is fueling the inevitable destruction of our entire biosphere?
I'm not sure I follow how the irreversible contraction of Western economies would lead to the cessation of industrial fertilizer production. Unless you are assuming that such contraction would inevitably lead to 0 population which seems an unlikely outcome compared to it just finding some new equilibrium. It also seems to assume that no other productive economy could pick up the slack.
In some civilization collapse scenarios that I am vaguely familiar with, they may have been proceeded by a dark age (like post bronze age collapse or post Roman empire collapse). But the world is connected in these days in ways that make that scenario seem less likely. Knowledge on things like fertilizer production are very wide spread and not central to one specific culture.
I should have been more clear. Assume these 4 things:
1. Industrial activity will continue to require nonzero human participation, even in the future.
2. Culture has no impact on the fertility rates of citizens in developed economies, they are incorrigible homo sovieticus, entirely shaped by material conditions and quality of life. Populations immigrating from other regions quickly reach the same quality of life, and follow suit.
3. There exists some level of economic contraction that would lead to present-day Western countries' inability to feed themselves. In one extreme case, if productive activity in the OECD went to zero, nobody would do anything at all, not even work knowledge-sector jobs; and therefore couldn't even afford to import fertilizer, food, etc. from other parts of the world. By a sort of intermediate-value theorem, assume the level in question exists, and lies between 0 growth and total cessation of industrial activity.
4. Starvation constitutes poor quality of life.
If the level of contraction (3) happened, I advance that one of two cases would happen.
1. People starve. The population does not stabilise. The marginal fertility response of humans in developed countries to this particular decline in living standards is zero or negative. The population continues to shrink. In the long run, if this happens again and again, the working-age population repeatedly falls below some number required to maintain successive level of industrial production, until there is fewer than 1 working-age human left. (This could take several hundred years.) By the first assumption, we need at least one person to continue all industrial production in the OECD countries, so at least one such minimum number exists; and so in that person's absence, we recover a situation with zero industrial activity. The remaining n non-working citizens cannot eat and quickly die.
2. People starve. The population does stabilise at a new equilibrium. This requires, by definition, at least replacement fertility in response to declining living standards, and constitutes a non-cultural solution as sought by the GP comment.
If at any point case (2) happens, then a level of industrial contraction of some degree solves the GP's request without requiring cultural factors. Otherwise, case (1) will happen again and again unconditionally, and we will go extinct in the long run.
It's a very unpleasant solution, but it does exist. I don't really believe that humans' behavioural responses are so non-smooth that the last two people on Earth would choose to have a single child, and then send that child off to learn the Haber-Bosch process -- it's only a limiting case.
Even if one were to grant your assumptions (which I would challenge) you still end up positing a false dichotomy/dilemma. You might rightfully say that you cannot think of a third possible outcome of your highly specific and one dimensional constructed situation but that does not mean there are precisely two possible cases.
As the most trivial example off the top of my head, I cannot imagine any situation remotely close to what you are suggesting without war. I don't think the cost of the precursors to fertilizer will stop Western countries from taking it.
At any rate, the idea that the nail in the coffin of our society will be our inability to produce fertilizer seems an unlikely and remote possibility. I'm not saying that there is no path to that outcome (we could probably spend all day making up scenarios where that is a possible outcome), it just seems rather unlikely.
> Why would anyone sacrifice, at the very bare minimum, 6 years of their youthful years for 3 children?
Most of the most fulfilling and meaningful things in life don't always make sense or are reasonable. But they often almost always have to do with serving and sacrificing for others.
They don’t always make sense or are reasonable to you. It’s a perfectly valid take, but a lot of people are genuinely living a fulfilled life without having any children.
And again, so many young people right now have none or just one sibling. They can see it’s been okay for themselves so obviously there’s no pressure to have 3. If everyone had just 1 child, we still would have the same problem, except it would be harder to make “emotional fulfillment from having a child” argument.
> Why would anyone sacrifice, at the very bare minimum, 6 years of their youthful years for 3 children? There’s just too much opportunity loss compared to lower income / less rich countries.
> solutions that are beyond “people have to have lots of children for cultural reasons!”
But you've already just framed it as a cultural dilemma in the preceding paragraph. Are you really meaning, "without challenging my own cultural values, how can I get someone else to provide the time and money I don't feel justified investing myself?"
Hm, you have a point. That being said, I’m not just a tiny minority who don’t have children. Well, also as a man without a partner, it’s not really easy.
Super-majority of families have 2 or less kids (about 80% up here in Canada). So it’s not just me who doesn’t want to subscribe to that idea.
Tie things like social security, healthcare in old age, etc. to how many kids a person has had. You only get full retirement benefits if you have had three children and raise them to adulthood. There are bonus levels for going above three children. Those who are infertile can adopt to meet their quota.
Only 17% of families up here in Canada have 3+ children. Yeah, that proposal will never fly. I wouldn’t even support it, because it doesn’t really make “having children” a benefit for currently living families.
> 6 years of their youthful years for 3 children? There’s just too much opportunity loss
No there isn't. People want to dick around without responsibility. That's fine. But most people don't really accomplish anything that would come close in worth to raising a child in those six years, in no way shape or form.
Let's not frame it in economic terms. People just want to dick around and that's fine.
Fair. In my head I consider “dicking around” a part of opportunity loss. Basically sacrificing whatever your definition of fun is with having children and the responsibilities that come with it.
Earlier you said "There’s just too much opportunity loss compared to lower income / less rich countries." I think the lost opportunity value of dicking around would be about equal between wealthy countries and developing countries. You can go to the beach/lake/woods, drink all night, play video games, and binge TV most places in the world. Maybe the wealthy countries would have nicer TVs and more expensive intoxicants, but it's basically the same thing everywhere.
You have more money to dick around with. More money means different types of opportunities, making it less boring. You can keep occupying yourselves with things other than having children.
There’s still some sense of “I should have children to survive in my later years” in developing countries. Not really needed for richer ones where things have established and you can get support in times of needs.
As a childless woman in her mid-30's, I take issue with this comment. I run a successful business that supports the livelihoods of a dozen people, I volunteer and am a an active community advocate, and I teach, among other things.
My decision to not have children is so I can focus my attention on other economic contributors and keeping my team employed. I'd hardly call that "dicking around without responsibility."
Your post is a great example of the NAXALT fallacy.
On the whole, he's right. There are some people who can't have kids because they're too busy managing companies and employing dozens of workers, but such people are a very small fraction of the populace.
...And even that, I'd suggest, is cope. Lots of extremely successful people have children. They just hire nannies, utilize daycares, get grandparents involved, etc. It can be done.
I completely agree. It’s a fairly bad take whenever people say “you can do both”, because it really doesn’t work that way. Like theoretically you could, but chances are, one will negatively affect the other part.
My sister, in her late 30s with 3 children, always emphasized how she wouldn’t be successful if she didn’t have unlimited support from her partner in terms of income and career. But that’s very rare for an average family.
We either have to embrace the new world and make it work for our species in terms of population, or we have to go back to the old ways on some level (after admitting they were that way for a reason).
Here are some ideas, some wild, some controversial, some super obvious that we can try. But we never will because the backlash from the usual suspects will always be too great.
1. Pay people to have babies. Seriously, tax breaks and literally free money. E.g. for every baby a citizen makes and cares for, we'll give them enough to times their monthly salary by 1.06. You could do this tomorrow, and people would have babies. That relieves the burden placed on people for the wonderful gift they brought into the world.
2. Make daycare a universal human right. Quality care and free for all your citizens, no questions asked.
3. Give mothers 1/2/3/4/5 years worth of paid maternity leave. No, don't get the companies to pay it. Should be a government salary that matches the employer's salary with yearly growth. That way pregnant women aren't a drain on a company, but rather the burden we happily accept as a society.
4. Pay people to get married and stay married if they have kids. Maybe even make divorce a hard thing to motivate for and only for the right reasons such as abuse. We don't want divorces breaking up family homes and our baby-making factories prematurely.
Some potentially wacky ones:
5. Ban dating apps and outlaw hookup culture. We want genuine relationships and marriages to form, as they're the backbone of a culture that values generational properties such as legacy and community.
6. Make promiscuity illegal. Track who hooks up with who and you can't do more than X per year. Seriously, sex needs to be hard to attain. Side note, ban sex work and porn.
7. Subsidized baby-assistance jobs. Pay to get a nanny or au-pair or teacher in every home. Bonus points you help with the unemployment question.
8. Baby making factories or make it a profession for women to do - however workable until we figure out artificial wombs. There are so many people out there that just will never be able to get the chance to be parents even though they'd make wonderful and loving parents, why not help them by letting them adopt.
And yes I know there are many ways the above could go bad, or are riddled with "a ha gotcha" holes, but at least we'd be doing something as a society. Right now, our governments are doing nothing and just complaining "oh shame look at our poor birth rates, we wonder why. Let's just conveniently import more of them from the poorest and most incompatible countries, that outta fix it and not cause problems down the line.".
We could fund most of the above by just getting rid of all the silly government expenditures such as military and who knows what other fat we have lurking in the government.
TFR is collapsing to irrevocably below replacement levels in wealthy muslim countries as well. My friends in the region have cheap housing, relatively well paying jobs - are religiously traditional - the women want families, have the resources, cultural and the family pressure to, but still end up settling for 1-2 kids for less than >2 TFR. They also have help, like maids and nannies. This shit is not resolvable via just positive policy.
I think at some point you need to tie inheritence tax and wealth transfer into the mix, i.e. large % wealth/property can only goto direct kids, that scale up with # of kids. If you have 1 kid, max they can inherit is 40%, no properties. 2 kids and 80%, 3 kids and 100%. No kids, and 80% wealth/savings goes back to state redirected towards those with kids. Property gets auctioned off for same purpose. Positive incentives alone not enough, it has to be cripplingly expensive NOT to have kids.
> They have limited access to solar and wind for their population size.
I would have assume an island nation on their latitudes would profit from solar and even more from offshore wind. Is there a reason why it doesn't seem so?
122 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadJust about every developed nation has this problem today and no one has an answer. It seems no amount of money can be thrown at the problem as people just don't want as many kids as they used to. And I'm not sure they wanted so many of them back then either but rather lived with the consequences of their actions as birth control wasn't nearly as available.
To face the problem we need to really consider how to make people far more productive in the fields where it really matters and we face a logjam. That's healthcare and hospitality/services for aging and end of life people. Today's methods and approaches will obviously not work down the road since the human capital simply won't be there.
The current solution of desperately importing human capital, almost exclusively low value human capital, in the hopes that enough of them and/or their offspring will be able to and willing to change adult diapers, go shopping, and cook meals for the resident elderly is clearly causing social issues of their own right now and appears destabilizing and unsustainable.
Governments need to open up innovation in the healthcare industry especially as it pertains to elderly and aging people. We need automation in the elderly care industries.
Japan has had the lowest labor-hour productivity of any G7 nation for five decades: https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h01196/
In such a system it is no wonder that people are not having kids, especially since Japanese wage growth is stagnant because of the poor productivity.
The very first ruling that firing a woman for pregnancy was discriminatory only happened in 2017. https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170203/p2a/00m/0na/01...
20% of women have reported maternity harassment in Japan. https://mataharanet.org/en/what-is-matahara/
Replacement is a TFR of about 2.1 and few modernized countries reach that. France has a relatively high value for a modernized country -- its TFR for 2022 is listed as 1.79 (rank 124) at the source you cite. Japan's TFR in 2022 is listed as 1.26 (rank 199), while we have 1.46 for Germany (rank 172), 1.41 for Norway, 1.33 for Canada and 1.32 for Finland. If progressive policy in the area of women's employment were a significant factor in TFR, the relatively large difference between France and Finland or Canada (both quite progressive countries) and the relatively small difference between Japan and Finland are both hard to explain.
If we look at the 2024 figures, which seem to be what you pulled for the ranking (Japan's ranking is higher in 2024 than in 2022, interestingly), then we have 1.8 for France, 1.6 for the UK, 1.5 for Germany, 1.5 for Canada, 1.5 for Norway, 1.4 for Finland and 1.3 for Japan. These seem to be provisional figures, though -- 2024 is not over -- I'm not sure we should take them as the basis for our discussion.
We all know what the answer is, we just don't want to admit it: Poverty.
It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to see that the poorer countries have higher birth rates. The richer you become the less babies you will have; Japan is the 4th largest economy in the world and they have the cratering birth rate to match.
The problem is rightfully nobody wants to live in poverty.
A century of propaganda is that there is no place for average people anymore, which is statistically ignorant at best.
So close, yet so far. The actual solution is to allow children to be a tangible benefit to parents.
Those in impoverished countries have more children, not because of poverty itself, but because poverty means they have strong incentive to put the children to work and reap the benefits of that labour. Children make them richer (not rich, but richer than they would be without children). In our society, children generally make the parents poorer. To the point that "think tanks" love to make it known exactly how much poorer a family can expect to be.
Forcing the first world into poverty, but without changing laws and other social norms, wouldn't make much difference as the children would still be left to be useless lumps who do nothing but sit around in a school all day. Who wants to produce a useless lump? And if you do for some reason, your backyard woodworking shop is just as good at producing useless lumps at a fraction of the cost.
It’s a biological problem - limited time window when you can have children and socially accepted (let’s randomly say 20-35). If you want above replacement level, a couple needs to have 3 children, so have to sacrifice 6 years (pregnancy + 1st year). I’m just spitballing numbers here, so that’s about 40% of your younger years that are gone. In every single rich country, you have so many more opportunities to find fulfilment.
To make it a net benefit you have to convince people having 3 children is better than 0, 1, or 2. And it’s very tough when you know the amount of sacrifices one has to make. In our countries we obviously don’t have the cultural or religious push to have my kids anymore. And younger generation wants it even less. The easiest way is to switch to “you have to have” children society, which sucks, and I wouldn’t want that either.
I do think this problem will escalate in the next 10 years and people will take it more seriously since it’s starting to impact everyone economically.
I think low/declining birth rate is a self-solving problem (assuming it is a problem) that isn't worth crying bloody murder about.
Why? Simple: The world will always be inherited by children, childless people literally have no equity in the future.
Childless people cannot affect future birth rates, people with children can and the children will. The birth rate decline will eventually level out because life selects for people who have children.
That's not true. Maybe in a vacuum it's true, but those children don't exist in a vacuum, and as such, are human beings with agency which is influenced by people around them, including the childless people. If a childless person convinces the child to also not have kids, the child won't have kids, affecting future birth rates.
If childless people make the world a bleak place, with climate change and politics, such that children who have grown into adults don't want to bring a child into the world, then they've affected future birth rates.
Theoretically the issue might be resolved by itself, but it would be an incredibly tough road for everyone involved.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with people who don’t want children right now. They don’t want it, again, because given current paradigm, it’s just a net negative for a young couple to have a kid. We can preach “no equity in the future” as much as we want, but in the real world, you don’t need it unless you’re subscribed to a specific cultural or moral belief.
Also, the more childless people live through their lives and pave the way to emotional fulfilment, the more likely for others to follow.
Funnily enough, that fact alone might be enough to reverse course!
What we see over and over and over and over again throughout history is that the rich will do something that stands out and then the poor will try their best to emulate it; seemingly stemming from a subconscious (and perhaps sometimes conscious) "That must be why they are rich. If I do the same, I will become rich too!"
In fact, I would argue that the fertility situation is just another example of that. When the rich were able to start choosing to not have children, they did, and the poor have been trying to do the same ever since. As suggested in earlier comments, it is quite clear that the no children/few children movement started with the rich, and now is working its way through the entire population. Like you imply, perhaps unintentionally, it has become assumed in our culture that the rich are rich because they don't have children. To the point that we see a lot of messaging towards our youth along the lines of "What about your education? Having children is throwing your future away."
However, as we reach the long tail of the poor no longer having children, there is a pretty good chance that the rich will start having children again because they can – as a display of their opulence. Should that take hold, the poor will try everything they can to follow suit. They always do. And then... Problem solved.
Now, my six year old could definitely handle the work of my employees making $60-80k per year, legalities aside. If we stick with the social norm of 18 years of the child being an extension of the parent, that is 12 years of gains. If I recall, the cost to support a child is $4,000 per year[1], so let's say after 12 years one child will pay out $672,000[2]. $2MM from all three children.
That's a $500,000 payday ($2MM less the $1.5MM opportunity cost) by the time your children have left the nest, or, as the universities like to calculate it, $8MM in additional lifetime earnings. I am quite certain that if you told would-be parents that they stand to gain a $8MM by having three children they would take notice!
Trouble is, in rich countries that is unquestionably considered amoral, and is no doubt illegal. Without that changing, it is, indeed, hard to realize the benefit. But, by the same token, if you forced the people into poverty without a change in those legal and social norms, they're still not going to be able to realize the benefit. It is not poverty itself that is significant.
[1] You will probably be more familiar with a figure around $13,000, but you will notice that it factors in things like the cost of housing, etc. While it is not unreasonable to include those things in certain contexts, for the sake of this discussion it would not be an additional cost. You're probably not venturing into the woods and living under the leaves if you don't have children. The housing cost is there with or without them.
[2] It is more complicated than that, I know. But, for the sake of illustration let's run with it.
I find it VERY amusing when I see high profile elites who create these workaholic atmospheres bemoan the dropping birth rate.
In 2008, 26 states had above-replacement birth rates. And it wasn’t just impoverished immigrants propping up the rate: states like Wyoming, Nebraska, Utah, the Dakotas, Alaska, Iowa, Idaho, Minnesota, etc., which are predominantly native-born people also had above-replacement birth rates.
Why would countries that have higher poverty have more children when children take up resources? Parents from wealthier countries should be having more kids, instead we see the opposite?
In countries where agriculture is the main economy, more children equals more labor to run the farm. These countries tend to be poorer but we can look at the Amish and Mennonite communities in the US, they are not that poor but they often have large families.
If we look at the factors in a post-industrial economy, are both parents working away from home? What education is expected for the children(parents pay for collage? Agriculture doesn't require that)? Think about the time and money sink for children activities that society put on the parents, need to have kids in sports, band, summer camp.
We in the west have pushed for having both parents work, which make it very difficult for those who only want to have a single working parent household due to societal pressure and also economic pressure as well.
Women generally contribute considerably to factors in the economy, whether it's stuff like nets and rush mats or ballpoint pens and machine-sewn shirts. What is different about industrial society is that parents can do basically no meaningful work around their children, and so they can't be available for their children, because not working is not an option.
Another point that should not be lost is that homemaking/homecare is a job abet not a GDP generating one. With some of our advancements; time savings(dishwashers, clothes dryers and washing machines), food logistics(grocery stores with fresh food vs growing & canning), fast fashion(cheap clothing) we have taken the job from being a full time position to part time.
This triggers a shift in labor allocation, we now(ideally) split the part time job between the family members to allow the adults to focus on profit generating activities.
It's painful in the short term, but in the long term maybe it makes more sense to let the population level off to a stable point that's somewhat short of the maximum number of humans we can squeeze onto Earth.
Perhaps no developed nation has the problem to a degree extremely urgent to fix. Certainly some people think it's urgent. Certainly also I don't see it as top priority anywhere. Certainly the third, some people are gleeful about what they see as a necessary anti-growth factor.
People who have children today are looking at a deal along these lines:
- Send your kids away early in the morning to be looked after by strangers.
- Go somewhere else to be looked after by strangers yourself.
- After 10 hours (including commuting), come home to talk to your kids.
- Wonder about what's really going on in their lives.
- Do this for 20 or so years for each kid; maybe thirty years in total.
I can see why people who consider this reflectively -- whose parents did this and whose grandparents did this -- might simply opt out.
He doesn't put the leader in leadership. That's why his politics have been stagnant, it's a leaderless ship.
The recent LDP financial scandals merely finally broke the back of a camel who was already suffering arthritis.
None of this is to say the LDP will lose governmental power, though. The opposition parties are somehow even worse.
Nearly the whole developed world, from Sweden to Japan, countries became rich in the first place without immigrants. What’s changed that they need immigrants now?
For one the premise is shaky, a lot of developed countries depended strongly on migrant labor, German Gastarbeiters, the Anglosphere in general etc, but what's actually changed is that the average Japanese person is 50 years old.
If you have any interest in maintaining a growing economy you need more capital flowing to the young rather than the young paying for the old, in particular in a democracy where a geriatric population threatens to just vote in more benefits for itself. This is pretty much the sole reason for America's absurd economic strength among developed countries.
In 1990 Japan's GDP was 60% of Americas. Today it's 20%. The astonishing thing is when you adjust for working age population and purchasing power, real productivity grew at similar rates, it's not as often assumed the fax machines. The demographics have simply obliterated Japan.
But to refute the actual point even though it hasn't much to do with Japan today, early industrialization was also a story of immigration. It just happened to be internal migration, i.e. urbanization. The story of getting rich in places like Manchester isn't particularly pretty, and it's a story of huge churn of uneducated rural workers and surplus labor being funneled into emerging economic centers. As it is in China or India today. For the habitual culture warrior nowadays internal migration isn't very exciting, but it is economically the exact same thing. And if you're Japan and you don't happen to have 20 million young rural folks sitting around, but you want growth, you're going to have to look for people somewhere else.
Sometimes I wonder who wants growth (leadership obviously). I feel like most east asian cultures would gladly take less ridiculous/involuted work culture where you waste half your waking like appeasing to hierarchy. How many would take slightly less growth for much more free time. Assuming that's how that scales, and it does feel that's how it scales with how many people doing shit all in the office or doing work activities just to keep up face time. There are some strategic industries where I understand the need to grind people to work 200% harder to have 10% competitive advantage, but there are tons of less essential work where salary man culture does returns relative ot effort.
I don't know what animates you in the conversation, but for me it is question of whether immigration of people with very different cultural backgrounds into a country has harmful effect that in the long term might cancel out the positive economic effects.
You have not explained (and I have failed to guess) how your "was also a story of immigration" sheds any light on that question.
Meh, in the same sense the country being forced to open up to European merchants, the Meiji Restoration, or the two atomic bombs and the Emperor's fall from a godlike being to a symbolic leader "destroyed" Japan.
It's not like Japanese ancestors from 1800s would recognize today's Japan, anyway. Women leading men? People getting married in Christian churches? Unthinkable!
In 2003 I read an essay that said in part, "It was fascinating to learn that the Chinese were visiting [Chinatown in] San Francisco to look at their own history. They saw the city as a snapshot of Chinese culture, pickled in time, whose residents preserved as much as possible the China of 1850, from which San Francisco had been populated. The visiting Chinese were fascinated by the antique dress, the quaint old customs, and the old-fashioned language. Our most vivid memory of the event was of the visitor who spoke some English remarking 'This little town is more Chinese than China is.'"
(The essay was at the Anglicans Online Website but seems no longer to be there; I'd quoted it in a blog post, https://www.questioningchristian.com/2003/12/time_warps.html) EDIT: Thanks to @philipkglass, who found it on the Wayback Machine (see below); I'd looked there but didn't think to look where he did: https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.ang...
https://web.archive.org/web/20041126091310/http://morgue.ang...
The Anglicans Online site wasn't captured often enough for the week you referenced to be directly accessible. While looking at the nearest capture I noticed that the Anglicans Online site itself retained past essays on a "morgue" subdomain. I was then able to use an early 2004 snapshot to find the essay from December 2003.
Sweden is the bellwether for this. They have a negative immigration rate now. They tried immigration, realized it didn’t work, and stopped it. Just like they tried social democracy in the 1960s, realized it didn’t work, and moved back to a more market economy in the 1980s.
OK: The developed country you live in — and to which your own family immigrated from the developing world.
Sure, sometimes it takes a few generations to assimilate the newcomers. But it can definitely be a good thing overall.
I'm curious why you arbitrarily limit your time frame to the last 70 years. One pair of my own grandparents, who were lower-middle-class or working-class people AFAIK, immigrated to the U.S. from the Balkans in the early 20th century. They were part of a flood of immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Back then, that part of Europe would have been regarded by many "real Americans" as part of what we now call "the developing world." My siblings and cousins, though, are quite firm that our grandparents and parents made net-positive contributions to American society, however modest those contributions might have been in those initial years.
EDIT: On another branch of my family tree, my great-grandparents came here in the late 19th century as part of a continuing Irish diaspora that had started in response to the Great Famine. In that era, the Irish were viewed with disdain by many of the same "real Americans." (My late grandmother used to tell of seeing signs in the early 20th century: No Irish need apply.) Today, anyone who claimed that all those Irish should never have come here would be regarded as totally out of touch with reality.
But America isn’t even an exception. Without immigration, America would be more like Australia or Canada in the late 20th century. Those are better countries than the U.S.: more socially cohesive, better run, lower in crime, less corrupt, and more efficient. Canadians and Australians get much better government per tax dollar because they spend far less political capital bridging over group conflicts.
The influx of immigration I was a part of made Virginia a worse place too. It was an extremely orderly and well-run state when I was growing up in the 1990s. It’s still coasting on that, but in 30 years it will go the way of California.
It’s not a coincidence that there are zero immigrant societies that function as well as Denmark or Sweden. Disorder and conflict is part and parcel of putting different cultural groups in the same place and having them try to run a country together.
Immigration comes because migrants are dissatisfied enough with the status quo to take risks to do something about it. That ingrained tendency is a major part of human progress.
The accompanying disruption can be uncomfortable. But it plays a big role in how humanity's learning things we didn't know about reality — and in figuring out how to deal with it. Some familiar examples: The amount of life-improving technology that came from WWII, the Cold War, and the Space Race. Advances in vaccine research instigated by the global spread of covid-19. And so on, and so forth.
(Back in the 1980s, Jared Diamond argued that humanity was better off millennia ago, when people were hunter-gatherers, and that the invention of agriculture was the worst mistake in human history [1]. Shockingly, his argument didn't seem to get any traction.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cnut#The_story_of_Cnut_and_the...
[1] https://www.livinganthropologically.com/archaeology/agricult...
As I just said, Japan suffered a brutal defeat in a World War, with two atomic bombs, losing sovereignty for ~7 years, military leaders getting executed for war crimes, foreign military bases sprouting everywhere (which still exist), and the monarch reduced to a symbolic role.
And arguably Japan is better for that and I doubt most Japanese people would want to go back to the glorious days of Japanese Empire even if they could.
So I don't really get this phobia of how Japan allowing a few million immigrant workers at almost the lowest level of the societal ladder would ruin its culture. Like, exactly what concrete part of Japanese culture do you expect to be ruined? Light novels?
What has changed is that the fertility rate dropped dramatically below the replacement rate. Do you understand the consequences of this?
One possibility is a pivot towards immigration, but I think equally likely would be a pivot towards ever-larger financial incentives for parenthood, the kind that would make being a stay-at-home parent start to make financial sense.
A lot of young people put off parenthood not by preference, or because they're so passionate about being a corporate tax accountant, but just because they don't feel they have a choice; only one route offers financial security. That's been the reality in many developed countries since perhaps the 1970s-80s, but it won't necessarily remain true in the years ahead.
This would require that elderly people (who are an ever-growing voting bloc) support this shift of government support towards young people. It might not happen without some kind of external stimulus. But elderly people also tend not to be pro-immigration either, and presumably also don't love the idea of empty schools and playgrounds and dying towns. It's hard to say what will happen.
The US is successful, but in terms of GDP per capita countries like Denmark and Sweden have kept pace with the U.S. since the 1980s: https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/denmark/usa?sc=... https://countryeconomy.com/countries/compare/sweden/usa?sc=X.... Having a market economy seems much more important than immigration.
New York’s GDP per capita is double that of Japan and significantly higher than the Tokyo region. I doubt most Japanese would be happy living in New York. Indeed, if Americans could even conceive that a city could be like Tokyo—clean, orderly, polite, with effective transit and public services—most wouldn’t want to live in New York either.
Japan is considering more immigration to deal with its population problems, but the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
Your neighbors might be great as individuals as well. That’s irrelevant to my point. Chicago might be the poster child of a city that could’ve been orderly and well run. Except for the last century it’s been riven by ethnic conflict and immigration-fueled machine politics that has sapped the government’s ability to actually serve its people.
Contrast New England. A large number of people from New England retire in the Annapolis area because of the sailing and warmer weather. The cultural difference is undeniable. Many have said to me that, growing up, they learned food was for surviving, not enjoying. They cut donuts in half at events so people aren’t tempted to eat too much, and regularly run out of food (because better to run out of food than to waste it). As a Bangladeshi, I find them totally unrelatable and frankly kind of scary in how little they seem to care about having grandchildren. But it’s impossible to deny that the little New England towns they created are extremely orderly places.
Japan should focus instead on better utilizing the high-skill labor force that they already have.
At this point, Japan needs to boost productivity, so that its workers can earn more and boost consumption. Right now real wage growth is stagnant.
The economic troubles are centered around having to pay a premium to import energy. The birth rate is negatively impacted by the economic situation. Their foreign policy has to keep energy access as a main priority.
Only to a certain extent. Looking at data of every single rich country, and my own circles, there’s just no appetite for most of people to have 3 children (2.1+ needed for replacement).
I weirdly think about this issue way too much, since I’m a part of a problem. All my girl friends, who want children, only want one or two. Why would anyone sacrifice, at the very bare minimum, 6 years of their youthful years for 3 children? There’s just too much opportunity loss compared to lower income / less rich countries.
I have no idea how to tackle this problem, but would be very interested to read about or somehow even contribute to potential solutions that are beyond “people have to have lots of children for cultural reasons!” argument.
My suspicion is that machines replace more and more economic activity within wealthy contracting nations. Humans already cost several $100k in the US once you look at health education and food subsidies. If a machine can pay for itself +ROI, it probably will be built.
Nothing more than a modest proposal to spur discussion...!
And worrying about 'what will happen if human population actually drops to zero' is like worrying about commuter traffic congestion on Mars.
Even in a worst-case projection scenario, like, say, China (Currently at 1.16 births/woman) in 2070:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/china/2070/
43.7% of the population is still working age (25-65).
And in 2100, it would be 41.2%.
As of 2020, it is 58.2%.
---
Now, you tell me, in 80 years of technological progress and economic development, do you think China will be able to become 40% more productive? And manage to do ~the same amount of work with 30% fewer workers?
(PS. China's per-capita GDP grew 40 times in the past 40 years. It's full of smart people, I think it's going to figure something out.)
Why not? I don't think it will happen, but at the same time, I don't want to say anything about human behaviour without stating assumptions. If you think (as do I) that there is always some point above zero population at which birth rates do stabilise, then it's valuable to examine what exactly that would entail.
It sounds like we agree the point exists somewhere - we could extend your example to the whole Earth's population becoming 2 and the population becoming (8 bn / 2)% more productive. Why can't we extend it to the population becoming 1?
It's a completely different situation, and none of the shit we are arguing about applies to it. There's a fundamental difference between running and meeting the long-term needs of a human society of 10 billion people and a human society of 10.
The mathematics you're using is the same reduction to absurdity that leads a manager to believe that nine women can deliver one baby in one month.
The 20th century west made an all-in bet that those things might be correlated, and coaxed (and sometimes coerced) others into joining, but it's not clear that the bet is paying off or that it will.
The environment is the familiar one, but also at the expense of health safety (PFAS/lead/etc), and at the expense of our societal makeup. Perhaps the optimal distribution of labor for food production isn't 0.00001%, but would be good for growth and other intangibles if it were say 0.05%.
Oh no, that would be terrible.
In some civilization collapse scenarios that I am vaguely familiar with, they may have been proceeded by a dark age (like post bronze age collapse or post Roman empire collapse). But the world is connected in these days in ways that make that scenario seem less likely. Knowledge on things like fertilizer production are very wide spread and not central to one specific culture.
1. Industrial activity will continue to require nonzero human participation, even in the future.
2. Culture has no impact on the fertility rates of citizens in developed economies, they are incorrigible homo sovieticus, entirely shaped by material conditions and quality of life. Populations immigrating from other regions quickly reach the same quality of life, and follow suit.
3. There exists some level of economic contraction that would lead to present-day Western countries' inability to feed themselves. In one extreme case, if productive activity in the OECD went to zero, nobody would do anything at all, not even work knowledge-sector jobs; and therefore couldn't even afford to import fertilizer, food, etc. from other parts of the world. By a sort of intermediate-value theorem, assume the level in question exists, and lies between 0 growth and total cessation of industrial activity.
4. Starvation constitutes poor quality of life.
If the level of contraction (3) happened, I advance that one of two cases would happen.
1. People starve. The population does not stabilise. The marginal fertility response of humans in developed countries to this particular decline in living standards is zero or negative. The population continues to shrink. In the long run, if this happens again and again, the working-age population repeatedly falls below some number required to maintain successive level of industrial production, until there is fewer than 1 working-age human left. (This could take several hundred years.) By the first assumption, we need at least one person to continue all industrial production in the OECD countries, so at least one such minimum number exists; and so in that person's absence, we recover a situation with zero industrial activity. The remaining n non-working citizens cannot eat and quickly die.
2. People starve. The population does stabilise at a new equilibrium. This requires, by definition, at least replacement fertility in response to declining living standards, and constitutes a non-cultural solution as sought by the GP comment.
If at any point case (2) happens, then a level of industrial contraction of some degree solves the GP's request without requiring cultural factors. Otherwise, case (1) will happen again and again unconditionally, and we will go extinct in the long run.
It's a very unpleasant solution, but it does exist. I don't really believe that humans' behavioural responses are so non-smooth that the last two people on Earth would choose to have a single child, and then send that child off to learn the Haber-Bosch process -- it's only a limiting case.
As the most trivial example off the top of my head, I cannot imagine any situation remotely close to what you are suggesting without war. I don't think the cost of the precursors to fertilizer will stop Western countries from taking it.
At any rate, the idea that the nail in the coffin of our society will be our inability to produce fertilizer seems an unlikely and remote possibility. I'm not saying that there is no path to that outcome (we could probably spend all day making up scenarios where that is a possible outcome), it just seems rather unlikely.
Most of the most fulfilling and meaningful things in life don't always make sense or are reasonable. But they often almost always have to do with serving and sacrificing for others.
And again, so many young people right now have none or just one sibling. They can see it’s been okay for themselves so obviously there’s no pressure to have 3. If everyone had just 1 child, we still would have the same problem, except it would be harder to make “emotional fulfillment from having a child” argument.
> solutions that are beyond “people have to have lots of children for cultural reasons!”
But you've already just framed it as a cultural dilemma in the preceding paragraph. Are you really meaning, "without challenging my own cultural values, how can I get someone else to provide the time and money I don't feel justified investing myself?"
Super-majority of families have 2 or less kids (about 80% up here in Canada). So it’s not just me who doesn’t want to subscribe to that idea.
No there isn't. People want to dick around without responsibility. That's fine. But most people don't really accomplish anything that would come close in worth to raising a child in those six years, in no way shape or form. Let's not frame it in economic terms. People just want to dick around and that's fine.
There’s still some sense of “I should have children to survive in my later years” in developing countries. Not really needed for richer ones where things have established and you can get support in times of needs.
My decision to not have children is so I can focus my attention on other economic contributors and keeping my team employed. I'd hardly call that "dicking around without responsibility."
On the whole, he's right. There are some people who can't have kids because they're too busy managing companies and employing dozens of workers, but such people are a very small fraction of the populace.
...And even that, I'd suggest, is cope. Lots of extremely successful people have children. They just hire nannies, utilize daycares, get grandparents involved, etc. It can be done.
My sister, in her late 30s with 3 children, always emphasized how she wouldn’t be successful if she didn’t have unlimited support from her partner in terms of income and career. But that’s very rare for an average family.
This shows up in economic data all the time, and disproportionately impacts women
Of course young women in high-intensity fields are hesitant to hamstring their careers just as they’re getting started
Here are some ideas, some wild, some controversial, some super obvious that we can try. But we never will because the backlash from the usual suspects will always be too great.
1. Pay people to have babies. Seriously, tax breaks and literally free money. E.g. for every baby a citizen makes and cares for, we'll give them enough to times their monthly salary by 1.06. You could do this tomorrow, and people would have babies. That relieves the burden placed on people for the wonderful gift they brought into the world.
2. Make daycare a universal human right. Quality care and free for all your citizens, no questions asked.
3. Give mothers 1/2/3/4/5 years worth of paid maternity leave. No, don't get the companies to pay it. Should be a government salary that matches the employer's salary with yearly growth. That way pregnant women aren't a drain on a company, but rather the burden we happily accept as a society.
4. Pay people to get married and stay married if they have kids. Maybe even make divorce a hard thing to motivate for and only for the right reasons such as abuse. We don't want divorces breaking up family homes and our baby-making factories prematurely.
Some potentially wacky ones:
5. Ban dating apps and outlaw hookup culture. We want genuine relationships and marriages to form, as they're the backbone of a culture that values generational properties such as legacy and community.
6. Make promiscuity illegal. Track who hooks up with who and you can't do more than X per year. Seriously, sex needs to be hard to attain. Side note, ban sex work and porn.
7. Subsidized baby-assistance jobs. Pay to get a nanny or au-pair or teacher in every home. Bonus points you help with the unemployment question.
8. Baby making factories or make it a profession for women to do - however workable until we figure out artificial wombs. There are so many people out there that just will never be able to get the chance to be parents even though they'd make wonderful and loving parents, why not help them by letting them adopt.
And yes I know there are many ways the above could go bad, or are riddled with "a ha gotcha" holes, but at least we'd be doing something as a society. Right now, our governments are doing nothing and just complaining "oh shame look at our poor birth rates, we wonder why. Let's just conveniently import more of them from the poorest and most incompatible countries, that outta fix it and not cause problems down the line.".
We could fund most of the above by just getting rid of all the silly government expenditures such as military and who knows what other fat we have lurking in the government.
I think at some point you need to tie inheritence tax and wealth transfer into the mix, i.e. large % wealth/property can only goto direct kids, that scale up with # of kids. If you have 1 kid, max they can inherit is 40%, no properties. 2 kids and 80%, 3 kids and 100%. No kids, and 80% wealth/savings goes back to state redirected towards those with kids. Property gets auctioned off for same purpose. Positive incentives alone not enough, it has to be cripplingly expensive NOT to have kids.
I would have assume an island nation on their latitudes would profit from solar and even more from offshore wind. Is there a reason why it doesn't seem so?