In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.
But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.
Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.
Outside of capitalism it is hard to function below replacement level because the young people have to take care of the elderly
Inside capitalism, people aren’t having children because captialism isn’t giving them the economic capability to do so.
The west’s population boom in the 50s to 80s only occurred because a single wage earner could, with a high school education and a wage just a little over minimum wage, be able to own a decent home, have a non-working SAH spouse, several kids, two cars in the driveway, and still have enough left over for a decent holiday once a year as well as save generously for retirement.
This all got stolen from these latest generations. What 90+% of the population was once capable of achieving is now only (largely) available to less than 20% of GenZ. A large proportion have given up on retirement, home ownership, or children. And this is WITH degrees and extensive career experience.
If you want to solve population crashes, start with income inequality: start taxing the wealthy and bring back a 90+% top tax rate. Get this money back into the hands of people who actually generate that wealth, and families will follow.
Young people would have time to take care of the elderly if they weren’t forced to work 60+ hour weeks consistently
Kind of adjacent when the person is tying infinite economic growth with population “degrowth”
Oh no, having to spend time with my family oh nooo /s
If rent weren’t so damn high and you didn’t have such a squeeze on every moment of your life to make as much money too survive, spending time and supporting each other efficiently maybe wouldn’t be a problem.
Values are defined by our parents? Is it a caste system? Is extended family more or less efficient? What is the goal: sustainability, B R E E D I N G, vacations, wealth compared to others, power over others, power over ourselves? Etc…
No they don’t. They just have to adopt a culture of euthanasia. I don’t say that to be cruel or indifferent. I assume state assisted programs are in a lot of countries’ futures assuming they can stomach it. It’s not something I’m advocating for. I just think the rich are cold enough to push it to try to fix the problem.
Japans GDP has been almost flat since the mid 90s, they are not following the west’s “”“infinite”“” growth. Not that I’m saying capitalism isn’t part of the problem, it absolutely is, just saying it isn’t the entire story.
everyone keeps repeating that cancer metaphor, but a plague is much more appropriate….
It can, but will it?
Is cancer really cancer if the rest of the body can adapt and grow faster than it? You describe capitalism as a finite system and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.
You describe capitalism as a finite system
No, I did not. Capitalism demands infinite growth. This planet is a finite system
and then heavily imply that we’re near the outer boundary of that system or that all current and future resources are almost depleted.
I don’t imply. I simply state a known fact. Anyone with even a passing exposure to economics and resource extraction would be very familiar with this fact.
For example, 100 years ago, the energy within a barrel of oil could extract an additional 300 barrels of oil from the ground. These days, despite technology that has made the process massively more efficient, we get barely 10 barrels of oil out of the ground for that same amount of energy expended.
These days same goes for almost every other resource you could possibly shake a stick at, from minerals such as steel and copper, over harvested materials such as fish and wood, and all the way down to agriculture, where the topsoil that almost all of our crops depend on will be completely depleted within the next 60 years, and will be depleted in most agricultural regions within the next 20-40.
Capitalism is a cancer, and it’s killing the planet.
The fact that our planet’s resources are finite is a matter of physics. Capitalism may come up with some innovation or another that adds more lifespan to it, the way that digital spaces and the financial industry have done, or it may have another global war that creates room for a new period of traditional growth at the cost of countless lives, but it will inevitably hit an insurmountable wall.
You can tell capitalism is super efficient and sustainable by how it totally collapses without fresh babies to sacrifice.
Which is why, in the U.S., the rich are turning back abortion rights and access to birth control, and gutting our public education. They could, instead, work to build a country where people felt safe, and supported–healthcare, jobs with decent wages, education, etc.–but the filthy rich are psychopaths who care only about themselves, and will do nothing that costs them money, power, and control. Instead, they’ll GLADLY watch the people (people they depend, incidentally, for what good is power and control, if there’s no one to wield it over?) suffer at great levels in attempts to achieve their goals.
It takes a lot of poor people to make one filthy rich person.
Babies are expensive and time consuming to develop into useful serfs. The US is not yet hitting most of the consequences from low birth rates because it’s balanced out by immigration. As long as they keep encouraging and welcoming immigration ….
Well-said. They don’t see people as people, they see them as farm stock plotted on spreadsheets that they can manipulate by pulling levers.
And happiness just isn’t a variable they would ever think of pulling a lever to increase. In fact I suspect they see a lack of it as an effective motivator, as long as it’s managed properly through division and distraction, and those desperately upset little data points don’t start assembling guillotines.
I don’t think any social/political structure would survive without a birth rate
Thing is, we don’t really know what’s the reason for the current worldwide trend in much, much lower natality rate. We’ve observed in rich countries and poor countries, religious and atheist countries, capitalist and communist countries (both USSR and PRC, who have had very different economic systems), in countries with no safety nets but also in countries with large social programs, in western countries, but also in eastern countries.
The only thing I can think of these days is education level. Is it possible that education is inversely correlated with natality rates? Or maybe women in the workforce. I’m not arguing for either point, I’m just thinking about what the cause of a world-wide issue might be, because it’s happening everywhere and seemingly without any clear common cause.
There’s plenty of research out there that shows educating women leads to reduced rates of teenage pregnancy and total number of children. Like its pretty damn solid evidence that educating women helps them make informed family planning decisions.
I think a bigger problem is increasing infertility rates and how many people need to use IVF to conceive in the first place. Something worldwide is disrupting our hormones and affecting our ability to reproduce. Even if someone had everything they needed and wanted to support a child, they might not physically be able to create one or carry a pregnancy to term.
Nothing to do with the plastics and their additives building up in our bodies that act on the endocrine system, no sir.
Any system would collapse without newer generations.
Except only one of those systems depends on the exploitation of the working class, ya know, your breeding live stock. Only one of those system destroys a work life balance. Only one leaves the population with little free time and shrinking resources with which to have and raise a kid. Japan is past, and the US is passing, the tipping point. Society may deem it necessary but the potential parents recognize it as untenable.
What happens when the orphan crushing machine has no orphans?Olympic level goalpost mover right here.
True, but no other system disincentives children like capitalism.
I mean, any system collapses if you don’t have the people to actively participate in it.
I’m not saying that as a defense of capitalism, more so as pointing out how dumb your comment is.
Lets see how China handles it down the road before we mark this one a problem of one specific system, rather than just humans seemingly sucking in sustainable long term planning on large scales in general.
China is also capitalist though, and they’re also starting to suffer from the same issue.
No, China is Communist, it says so right in their name.
/sarcasm
Had me in the first half lol
Well, if you prioritize shareholder growth, before Support of children and make sure people have to work super hard to be able to sustain themselves and can’t afford to have a family… Then you should not be supervised that you don’t have any babies in the country
The national pyramid scheme
Progressives have made kids useless. In the distant past they could help carry firewood or gay bales around the homestead.
Industrial revolution fucked it up. Sure for a while you could send them down into the mines or get them sweeping chimneys but over time that got outlawed due to the increased danger these jobs involved.
Now, why bother having kids? You can’t do anything with them. Even worse, they play games like Minecraft. You are literally spending your money for them to virtually work in the mines where they don’t bring in any money at all!
Wait, you you’re saying the solution is… being back child labor? We truly are living in some times when that isn’t considered a unique statement.
The children yearn for the mines.
I’m interested in the gay bales, where do I find out more about those?
I would hope it is obviously not a serious suggestion. But it does show a clear difference in modern society that might go some way to explaining current trends.
Apologies if you were being facetious, these days are times both difficult to discern, and filled with those who would proudly proclaim things like this.
Now, why bother having kids? You can’t do anything with them.
You mean you can’t do anything profitable with them. Maybe people should be able to have a family for other reasons than profit
Even without capitalism you need production, and children used to be part of that. Back then you would have as many kids as you could so that they could run your farm.
I’m not defending the current system, but profit isn’t the only reason the birthrate is declining in so many countries.
And the farm would largely be to feed your own family. Not profit.
Fertility rates say “maybe not”
Fertility rates are this low because people don’t have enough time to raise kids they’re too busy working 80 hours a week
Its not capitalism that causes the over leveraged ponzi scheme, its the lender of last resort they call the Bank of Japan.
In a capitalist lending system you wouldn’t get bailed out for making risky loans, so there wouldn’t be the moral hazard, or the heightened cantillon effect to profit off debt accumulation.
Taiwanese family living in Taiwan and frequent Japan prior to having kids and after having kids.
Most people are quick to point out the gruesome work culture, but honestly, that is just a small part of the total issue.
1- Japanese people culturally hate outsiders. So their immigration system is setup to almost never give a foreigner citizenship.
2- Japanese people culturally have a mindset that if you pop one out, it’s you and only you that share that burden. That means that if you’re on a train and struggling with a crying toddler that is tired of standing, nobody and I mean nobody will let you have their seat. Half the patrons will turn up their volume on their headset and the other half with mean mug/glare at you for annoying them. You wanna know the worst part. This mindset transcends to the kid’s grandparents. That’s right. The grandparents will not lift a finger to help you.
Edit: I also want to add that the burden is not even on the father, outside of the finances. The father does not need to help with any baby duties. I have met many Japanese men that has kids that has never even changed a diaper. Why the fuck would a Japanese woman want to have kids?
3- The government is not making it easy to help the families. Do you have a sleeping kid in a stroller? Well, you better hold the kid if you’re using mass transit. Elevators are an afterthought. So once you get off a train, you either have to walk an extreme distance to get to an elevator or in some instances there isn’t even an elevator at all. In some rare occasion there is a designated elevator for strollers and wheel chair access, it’s jammed packed with people who is able-bodied and can take the escalator, all of which won’t exit the elevator to let people with wheel chairs or strollers in.
I went to Osaka Universal studios and ask to rent a stroller. The guy didn’t speak English at all. We eventually used my phone to translate and he asked me my kids age. I said 5. He said, is today his birthday? I said no. He turned 5 a few weeks ago. He then poceeds to deny me from renting a stroller. I reasoned with him telling him my kid is having major jet lag and needs a place to sleep right now. He told me to just go back to the hotel to sleep because he wasn’t going to rent a stroller to me.
I love Japan and the Japanese people, but honestly they all hate kids.
The biggest issue that no one ever wants to talk about is …
… it’s isn’t about the QUANTITY of life
… it’s about the QUALITY of life.
If people are able to have a comfortable, stable and prosperous life, with plenty of their own free time to enjoy without worrying about losing everything then they’ll make time and an effort to have a family and children.
If all our wealthy overlords ever want to do is squeeze every penny out of us all the time, then people will be less likely to want to have children.
It also strongly correlates to women’s rights and access to education. The more educated women are, the less likely they are to have a lot of kids.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data
It’s why you see a renewed attack on women in some developed countries, especially in the US.
Here’s what happened in America.
In the 1960s the “Women’s Lib” movement started. They got a lot of press coverage because it was a good stroy, but didn’t actually change things a lot.
In 1973 the Oil Embargo hit and suddenly one job wasn’t enough for the family to survive. Lots of wives had to go out and look for work to keep paying the bills.
The Right has been lying that women getting jobs is what destroyed the one income family.
Tying the mortgage repayment rate to the median salary of a single individual would go some way towards fixing things then, but that would mean putting price caps on houses which would devalue the currency and also need anti-cartel laws (eg. Laws mandating a maximum amount of homes one can own, as cartels might see artificially low prices as an opportunity to buy up more houses).
Artificially constraining parts of banking and all of residential real estate is likely to have other unforeseen effects on the economy, but may still be worth it.
Another alternative is starting a state bank in which citizens can be part of a rent-to-own mortgage, with minimum but achievable life time repayments. If they don’t meet those minimum payments, the house is sold and the profit from the sale is portioned out between the state bank and the mortgage payer in proportion to how much % they paid off.
That’s a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
Frankly, I LOVE the idea of cartel laws for ownership of residences.
Sounds like you figured it out, since the debasement of the gold standard we locked away an inelastic good behind a mountain of debt, where prices rose to whatever interest rates would allow, providing a massive first mover advantage to those born prior. Then we wonder why nobody has kids.
If housing didn’t continue to rise how many boomers would hold it as an investment instead of downsizing and buying an appreciating asset?
This is also why Bitcoin will keep going up and everyone should own at least a little, it leverages the cantillon effect as central banks get looser and looser due to aging demographics and shrinking aggregate demand.
That’s a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
I like your ideas, but where do they live once they get foreclosed on by the State?
They use their profits from the house sale (which may be substantial depending on how long they’ve been there + market inflation), to rent somewhere.
That nest egg (which they’ve been paying into all this time) would give them breathing room and time to recover and get back on their feet to try again at a more stable point in thier lives.
It’s a win win because the mortgage payer gets a lump sum, and space to reassess what went wrong. The state bank gets the unpaid percentage of the home’s sale price, and then to sell the house again (under a new rent to buy mortgage arrangement).
P.S Part of how this works financially is that most of the money in an economy is created by loans issued from banks, those banks then buy Government Bonds periodically… A state bank would be another entity doing much the same thing, just with a specific purpose in mind.
How do you put price caps on houses? They vary so much in price depending on location. A shack in San Francisco costs the same as a mansion in the middle of nowhere.
No this kind of centralized approach is doomed to fail. We’re much better off with Georgism with a land value tax and the total repeal of zoning laws. People should be able to build what they want, where they want, and the land value tax captures the increases in property values as a result. When a neighbourhood becomes too expensive to afford for single family households it gets converted into apartments.
All of our housing problems come from meddlesome local politicians, their NIMBY supporters, awful zoning laws and easements, and a terrible property tax system which disincentivizes development. A very simple land value tax system along with the total removal of local politicians’ power over housing development solves all of these issues.
You think the gubberment is the problem, think we can know when house prices are too much for families to afford, but can’t possibly know the same to figure out appropriate price caps, think we can’t have centralized federal laws, that “people should be able to build what they want, where they want when they want”… and that developers should be given family homes when they become too expensive so they can “replace them with apartments”.
Look bud, we’ve seen these pro-Capialist libertarian “free” market solution already. Lots of what you’ve said has gotten America where it is today: to an unlivable oligarchy.
People want something different. I’m fine with Georgism, but the rest of what you’ve written is clearly thinly veiled Libertarian and Free Market economics.
You’re just reproducing the ideology that benefits people like Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk - putting the wealthy in power.
I’d prefer a highly regulated, legally transparent, auditable, government system in power. Not people rich enough to build apartment blocks whenever and where ever they want.
Your ideas are incorrect and we’re seeing that in realtime.
Libertarians like you are LYING when they say centralized systems are doomed they’re too inefficienct the most obvious way to disprove that idea is to look at the world wars, what happens to industry during world wars? It gets NATIONALISED. Centralized under government power, we do this in war time because it’s highly efficient - despite the free market propaganda you’ve swallowed whole.
Where as Libertarian become traitors and mercenaries in war time. You may not realize it, but you’re arguing for the wrong team (are we the baddies? Yes, you are), the team that lets Nazi in, and if they have enough money, sits them in the position of advisors and department heads right next to the president.
We want democracy, rights, the freedom of a garanteed place to live… By putting that in the hands of people with “no price caps on building anything anywhere” you’re looking to destroy that freedom. You’re taking security from the poor and exchanging it for freedoms exclusively for the rich who can afford it, developer cartels, and corporations.
So you’re just reproducing the system we’re already in… That’s not a solution. That’s just reproducing the problem.
These people worship their god almost identically to the way religious brain-rot peasants of the dark ages did, it’s just their god is “The Markets,” thinking it bears mircales through human sacrifice and suffering, except for the Divine bloodlines of their billionaire Kings and Queens their suffering is spared because “Where would society be without
Kingsbillionaires.” They think they’re so smart and ahead of the game, they think their bank account proves it, when really they’re dumber and less significant than a medieval peasant. Centrist free-market libertarians are a horrible, gutless bunch of egotistical twerps out there.
People should be able to build what they want, where they want
I’ll be sure to build a toxic waste dump right beside your house.
Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.
It’s not city hall zoning laws stopping you from building toxic waste dumps. When I said people should be able to build what they want, I was talking about mixed density housing and mixed use / light commercial.
There are some good people here on Lemmy but my god are there an awful lot of obtuse, blockheaded teenagers! Get a clue!
Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.
Good news! Trump is not only rolling back environmental regulations, but dismantling them entirely. Which means pretty soon, you will have no legal recourse whatsoever to any toxic waste that leaches onto your property.
And yes, my business would very much be a “light commercial” business.
and also need anti-cartel laws
Bring it on. Maximum 5 “homes” allowed per person, 7 for any family unit, children under 25 ineligible for ownership except as a post-death inheritance.
Anything above those limits is landlording-as-a-business, and combined with laws that make ANY business ownership of residential properly illegal, would force landlords to actually work for a living by getting day jobs.
Plus, have an extended “speculation tax” that hits any place being sold with a 100% tax on the first 2 years of owner-occupancy, with a straight-line decline to 0% in the eighth year. Any home being sold where the owner has never lived in it for a minimum of 2 years? 100% tax on the sale of the house straight out of the gate, with all proceeds going to a fund for first-time home owners. Exemptions, of course, for military deployment or death or a few other issues that cannot be leveraged for fraud.
It’s either developed countries or the US, you can’t have both
Which is the plot to Idiocracy and why the movie is no longer a fantasy and it is now a prophecy.
I love that movie, except for the premise which is actually based on eugenics.
You mean eugenics, but it shouldn’t be an ideological position, reality in this case is that intelligence is actually very inheritable, around three quarters is a summary of decades of research.
Yea sorry, I accidentally anglicized.
Skimming over the link, I can see that a clear explanation is still lacking and that environmental theory is showing results.
Believing it is mostly genetic reinforces the claims of the class who has access to better education to maintain those accesses and resources.
Intelligence is inherited, but evenly distributed over the population/across (so called) ethnic groups You’re skimming over a wikipedia article, but the guy you’re replying to isn’t off the mark.
I wouldn’t say that it’s entirely eugenics. Most of the point they were making is environmental factors like having uneducated parents that don’t enrich the child’s life or being too poor for education because the parents were too poor because they had 10 kids. It’s where we are headed because they are trying to actively destroy our education system and force people into unwanted births.
First, the comparison and core of the intro is about reproduction. Second, welcome to the Internet, where not everyone is from the USA.
But the movie was based in USA
I think it is a wonderful movie exactly because it is applicable everywhere. Berlusconi was already walking that path in the early 2000s in Italy.
I love Japan, but I will say it has its issues that often get overlooked. Workplace culture is horrific in Japan and it contributes to their high suicide rates. There’s even a word in Japanese that specifically refers to a person dying from being overworked. I know friends who immigrated to Japan, only to regret it because they saw for themselves just how harsh the workplace culture was. Japanese people have no time for their family. Something must change or this problem is going to get worse but given it’s a highly conservative culture I’m not sure it’s going to see changes anytime soon.
No one has time for family in Japan
When I watch yt videos about people leaving the workplace at 10pm, I wonder how suicide rate isn’t way higher
This. I think there’s so much to love about Japan, especially the cultural leaning towards doing everything with respect, dignity, and skill.
But the megacorpos definitely won in exploiting that, and the general social pressure revolving around workplace culture there is genuinely terrifying to me.
As a US person, our corporate-brainwash culture is awful too, but I’m glad we’re seeing bigger working class pushes to tell our employers “Go kick rocks. My family is more important.”
America has a individualist culture. Thats why we have unions and stuff (for now, anyway…) and don’t have to blow our bosses ego until 11pm every night.
Japan has a very…conformity driven culture. You conform to expectations around you, or you get ostracized heavily and treated like an outsider.
Which is a big driver for this kind of “I ahve to work till 5, then drink with my boss/coworkers until midnight, because if I dont I’ll lose my job and be ostracized” stuff.
There is no dignity or respect to the worker by the sound of it
It’s got nothing to do with megacorps, that’s just run of the mill Japanese culture/society.
There’s a reason so much anime these days is a salaryman dying on the job and reincarnating into a fantasy world.
I think I like the premise a bit more than the show. Zom 100 is about a kid who starts a soul crushing office job only to become the happiest guy alive after the zombie apocalypse starts and he realizes he doesn’t need to go to work anymore.
I’m sure artificially lowering female med student’s grades to increase drop-outs amoung women will help with the financial stability and job security needed to raise a child!
“It’s so expensive to have children in Japan that birthrate is further declining.”
I swear to God these people couldn’t connect the dots with a GPS.
Surely if they just instill good Christian moral values like forced birth, racism, and tribal isolationism all their problems will be solved.
I mean, Japan is one of the more isolationist countries on earth. And racism is a massive issue. Christianity isn’t a major factor, but traditional views on the roles of women and the set up of the household are a major challenge.
If you didn’t notice, those aren’t Christian values. They are christo-fascist values.
At least in the US those are basically the same thing
You associate how every you like but I wouldn’t just hand evangelicals the title they so desperately desire.
The other groups largely voted with evangelicals to make our country a fascist nation about 60 40. They don’t deserve as a group to be considered distinct
They don’t deserve to be associated with jesus, what’s your point?
Ah yeah I assumed you meant the extreme interpretations of Christian values.
The problems over there are the same problems Americans are starting to rekon with. That’s why you see Vance and his ilk push for this fetishized version of the American dream where every MAGA male gets their own concubine. It’s fantasy and has the exact wrong chilling effect. As it’s trying to answer the same racist question, “more of us less of them.” While what they need is a healthy population which they refuse to recognize requires a diverse composition with plenty of resources.
I’m not sure how true this statement is. I go to Japan every year and the child care infrastructure there is incredible.
The healthcare is icredible - you can literally summon healthcare assistant if youe kid is sick at any point for free to your home
Then there’s incredible public transporatiob system, parks, everything is equipped with child support and even culture heavily respects kids so they can do most things independently.
I think they mean expensive time and desire wise and Japanese still work incredible hours many of which seem to actually negatively impact productivity. People don’t feel like such investment is worth it and tbh that could easily shift around with cultural changes but Japan is very allergic to those.
This is an interesting point. So apparently the problems of having that terrible working culture are solved for (ish) to promote procreation, but it’s not helping. Gee, I wonder if possibly creating a society of miserable people and making it easier for them to create more people they presume will be miserable doesn’t work because they just don’t want to do that.
But what about housing? If you live in a shoebox with no hope of getting a larger place, it’s unlikely that you’re gonna have kids.
Housing is pretty good in Japan outside of Tokyo, especially if you don’t mind a bit of a train ride
My first two kids were born in Japan, and they were actually pretty cheap. The local city gives you some money (a few thousand) when your child is born, and day care was good and super cheap, like $10 per day because it was subsidized.
It really wasn’t very expensive.
That an average situation? perhaps you were financially better off than the rest
I was better off, but this was an average government subsidized day care, a neighborhood Hoikuen (保育園). Everything else was just normal stuff. In fact, we didn’t qualify for the few thousand from the city office because we were ex-pats. Medical is free for Japanese. So where are the costs?
You can thank their housing market
pretty much the same in korea, i think korea is slightly worst off, china is beginning to see its effects too, they already trying to change that by “encouraging more sex”, but they arnt solving the underlying issue, which is the one-child policy that devastated the female to male ratio and HCOL. and they also have harsh work ethic.
Well it does get a lot more expensive when almost everybody wants to live in the same tiny square of the country Tokyo’s population will decline in 2035 according to some estimates
With Japan, they only have so much inhabitable land anyway. It’s a mountainous island where all viable land is already pretty much taken.
where all viable land is already pretty much taken.
Very much untrue, the actual issue with living away from one of the major cities is the same thing the US is dealing with: capitalism and a highway system (HSR there) encouraging suburban sprawl and the death of the small town. No need to visit 5 different shops in your small town if you’re going to pass a Donqi on your train ride into work. Then people eventually just move away from the smaller towns entirely to be closer to where the work and businesses are, and the cycle deepens
Although yeah, Japan is about 2/3 as big as California so it’s not as big as people think on top of that
deleted by creator
Management issues… I know what can help… Introduce Agile.
People now realise that kids are a lot of hard work and fucking expensive…and that yearly skiing holidays are fun.
What if the population is stabilizing? Unlimited growth is death. Anyone who thinks differently hasn’t looked at how life works. That a population that undergoes a huge increase crashes due to starvation and disease. This is observable from bacteria to humans. It could be Japan is entering a stable period where needs and resources are predictable and known. Sounds like a higher standard of living to me. The downside is the huge geriatric population will need more and more resources until that situation becomes part of the new stable norm.
Stagnant is how a capitalist mindset sees it. They can’t stand that since their scam depends on unlimited growth. So of course any take on this from the stand point of greed would think its a terrible thing for a population to shrink to fit its resources not keep growing to allow ever increasing profits.
This problem is not isolated to Japan. Countries all across the world are facing the same issue and have been for a number of years.
Create a shitty, miserable, society with no rights or support, and people do not want to bring children into it… who’d guess?
The flannel has been wrung dry to the detriment of the working class; there is no where to go, no more water to squeeze from them. This is global society / capitalism falling apart.
Exactly its not some mysterious problem no matter how much the government and media try to frame it as one, people of the age to have kids have no time for kids and no money for kids so no wonder they have no desire for kids.
Even if they did want children, without the support systems, it may not be feasible for them to have kids. Having them might mean choosing to starve or go without a house.
Even if you’re in a country with a public health care system, a sick/young child means having to take time off work to care for them.
Countries all across the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Isn’t it interesting that the more “developed” countries have the lowest birth rates.
It’s what follows education. It’s the largely uneducated areas of the world that still raw dog like there’s no tomorrow.
So apparently under Sharia law, Muslim men can have anal sex with a girl under 8, and vaginal with a girl over 8.
And Muslims can openly lie about what is and isn’t true under Sharia law???
No, Muslims cannot openly lie about what is and isn’t true under sharia law. Islamic jurisprudence is a thing. It’s pretty important to Muslims to know what they can or can’t do.
There are different traditions (remember - there are Sunnis and Shias as the largest groups, some more obscure splinters, and splinters off of Sunni and Shia). Not everyone accepts the same Hadith, and there are, ya know, like more than thirteen centuries of interpretations and various schools. (Like, people get Islamic law degrees - that’s kinda why the medieval Muslim world was pretty well known for education, you needed the madrassas to be teaching people this stuff)
I have never heard the idea that anal sex was permissible in Islam. The Hadith cited in my link I think are direct enough that basically all traditions would accept them outright.
I don’t understand the 8 years old distinction bit (maybe something to do with the heinous child rape involved in bacha bazi - but that would not be considered permissible by Islamic scholars)
Solid racism. People aren’t raw dogging because they didn’t learn how sex works in school. Even if your correlation is “accurate” (according to imperial definitions/measurements of “education”), that’s not causation.
People also tend to have more kids when the life expectancy of their kids if very low. Colonized people have low life expectancy because their labor and resources are exploited by the privileged.
Pointing out an objective fact isn’t racism, it just is.
My understanding is that lower fertility follows higher female education for several reasons, including that women in school - and with access to birth control - prefer to wait until finishing school and starting a career before having children. Countries where women have fewer educational and fewer career opportunities, people often start having babies sooner, and more babies overall.
Another oft-mentioned factor is social safety nets such as social security (as much as that can count as a safety net). Areas with no or weak elder support outside of the family tend to have bigger families. Shockingly, this was also the case in the “developed” world back before they developed. Ask older adults in the USA how many brothers and sisters their grandparents had and it is probably a lot more than the next generation had, and the next, etc.
Do colonized people have lower life expectancy or do their children? Or both? Certainly, exploited people may also be living in (and unable to escape from) a society with poor elder care and insufficient safety nets such as social security or other retirement options. Which, of course, makes having lots of kids a totally rational decision. And also limits the ability of many women to participate in the economy outside of the home, which can also slow the development of the country / area’s economy.
This is just fucking dumb
Capitalism is the best we’ve got. Even North Korea has acknowledged this. With other systems people starve en masse. My hope is that we get over the taboo of regulation. Capitalism fucks up real-estate and wealth distribution. And health-care should 100% be government funded.
Seems super likely that capitalism is going to be a major factor in our extinction. Maybe we could have a bit less of it and actually survive as a species
The major shareholders have voted down your proposal.
I actually agree with this. Capitalism presumes infinite resources.
It seems like you already understand some of the limitations of capitalism. Look into why regulation has gradually been rolled back in the US since the 70s. Why did politicians start to agree with corporate execs demands for lower regulation. Keywords to look up - regulatory capture.
On a separate point, there’s plenty of famines that have occurred in capitalist economies due to capitalist exploitation - that is make more money, at the cost of of creating a famine. Some estimates put the deaths due to famines under capitalism higher than those under socialism. I used to simply know only of the famines under socialism and not know of the famines under capitalism.
Finally the capitalism we live in since the Great Depression is significantly different than the capitalism before it. Socialists, actual Marxists in western counties, yes the US included, were actively involved in the policies that created the welfare states across the west along with the regulatory regime. Some of FDR’s economic advisors were Marxian economists.
That was the compromise to save capitalism from imminent worker revolution. The unregulated, no-safety-net version of the system had lead to the conditions for such revolution. The socialist policies that averted the revolution in have slowly been dismantled over time and the system is reverting to the pre-Great Depression state. Faster in some countries than others.
If you want to reform capitalism to the point where it can no longer revert to economic liberalism (free market fundamentalism), you’d have to almost completely eliminate wealth accumulation. You could only do that by changing the ownership of the means of production. E.g. all employees in all corporations become equal owners (or controllers) of the machines and therefore the decisions on sharing the wealth those machines produce, instead of those decisions being made by a tiny number of major shareholders. You’d also have to significantly expand the industries operated by the government. At that point you end up with socialism. And yes socialism doesn’t mean central planning and no markets. Capitalism doesn’t mean no central planning and just markets. We do plenty of central planning in capitalist economies across governments and large corporations.
I’m not asking you to change your mind today. Just pointing out a few things to look into in case you haven’t.
As an American (or at least a non Japanese native) if my boss came up to me yelling and swearing in my face I would punch him out cold.
Actually if more Japanese did this I think things would improve at the office.
So you’d want to go to jail for a few months (several weeks at least) over someone yelling at you?
Shit I hope you don’t get married or have a girlfriend or kids.
Japanese are very against violence, and incidentally it’s the safest first world country. And the work culture has been improving in the last decade or so - though not nearly fast enough.
No you wouldn’t, lol. You need your job for health care.
Jokes on you, I don’t have healthcare.
yeah but then they’d end up killing all of the middle management….
yeah, it’s a good solutionAmerican culture really has mastered being both violent and fragile
Punching people is illegal in general. If it was that easy, there wouldn’t exist any class struggle.
Easy, just make it legal.
Problem solved.
I live and work in Japan, and it definitely is not a very condusive environment for younger Japanese people to have children. My wife and I are both foreigners, and we are in out late 30’s and just had our first. The country has some really great benefits and support services for having children, but we definitely would not be able to do this if we worked for Japanese companies, and with the Japanese work mentality.
While it IS getting better, work being the central pillar of life and the expectations from the older generations are still very much a thing. The long hours of paper pushing, the culture of promotion based on age and time served rather than innovation and hard work takes a toll on people. If you are not living in the office in your 20s to show your dedication, you are looked down upon, at least accoridng to my Japanese friends.
Immigration could help fix some of this. Japan is a desireable, largely affordable country, that is safe when it comes to raising children. Living here as a foreigner though has specific challenges, and your job prospects are pretty poor unless you are lucky, and access to housing and just general living can be challenging, even if you can speak Japanese.
I just got a new job in Kyoto, and I currently live in Tokyo. I would say around 40% of the houses we applied to look at would not even let us see the properties because we are foreigners. That’s 100% legal and totally ok to say here, and I take that in stride. In Australia (where I am from), they would either just tell you to piss off, or show you the property knowing you don’t have a chance, so at least they are upfront about it here I guess. Getting a credit card is a massive ordeal, which you kinda need here because debit cards are increasingly hard to find, and they don’t even work for all bills and systems, and getting a bank account … it all just snowballs.
Also anything outside of the major cities is kinda dead. I love it, but living and thriving there in places that have more space that would probably promote having big families, is nearly impossible, or at least impossibly boring. This is not unique to Japan, Australia is largely the same outside of the main cities.
Not sure what the fix is. But annecdotally I see these articles all the time, and yet there are kids and younger families always around, so not sure if it is as serious as they are saying, or more media hype?
Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.
Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.
Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn’t escape. And, of course, government jobs.
Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan’s Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.
I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn’t say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.
I am lucky enough to not have an English teaching job, and never have. But unless you are highly specialized, or somehow manage to start your own thing here, there seems to be limite scope as a foreigner to really have a strong career.
I am actually moving to Shiga Prefecture in a few days. It’s going to be a big change from living on the outskirts of Tokyo for the past six years. Excited to see how my perception of life in Japan changes from the move.
I’ve always had this silly dream of running a large, wealthy tech company, and attempting a startup in Japan, not reliant on business with other Japanese companies, that promotes a healthier work culture, and then stuffs the high productivity results in the faces of other companies. As a stretch goal, it could even locate out in the burbs, with an investment in better infrastructure access.
Japan has so many great things about it, but the major points around banking, sexism, and seniority really twist the image.
Its hyped by FT and more economy driven outlets because it makes them nervous. The replacement rate of births was always enough to support retirement pension plans. Now it’s not.
Japan is way ahead of the curve on this inevitable trend than other countries so it will be really interesting see how it adjusts and what markets are affected by this.
In terms of buying a house, is remote work really not a thing in Japan? Living in a remote village sounds lime a dream. Otherwise, are there no towns/villages where foreigners sort of band together and are allowed to buy property? Just curious about how Japan functions
Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like “buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian”, just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.
Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it’s more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.
As far as “how is Japan adjusting” to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can’t be automated.
Give them some days off.
Japanese workers get more days off than American workers.
Japan 26
USA 10
Japanese on average don’t work longer than Americans (2017)
#39 United States 1,765.00
#43 Japan 1,738.36
Don’t get me wrong, they have a crazy work culture, but it’s worse in the USA.
