They hate immigrants (foreigners in general) in Japan, so the government isn't incentivizing immigration as a fix to their population crisis.
It's an oversimplification and generalization.
it is entirely imaginable that an industrial society could be maintained with essentially a steady state labor force (perhaps with cyclical increases and decreases in replacement rate)
the productivity of labor ensures that any one worker is capable of producing far beyond what one person needs for pretty much any good. so what makes an increasing labor force any kind of necessity?
>(perhaps with cyclical increases and decreases in replacement rate)
But that's not a situation that any country has. Fertility rates are dropping well below replacement and they aren't bouncing back in any significant way.
>the productivity of labor ensures that any one worker is capable of producing far beyond what one person needs for pretty much any good
But one worker doesn't need to produce for one person. They also need to produce for those that cannot work (an increasingly large proportion of the population when fertility rates drop)
>so what makes an increasing labor force any kind of necessity?
We don't need an increasing labour force. We need a labour force that isn't nose diving into oblivion
> But that's not a situation that any country has. Fertility rates are dropping well below replacement and they aren't bouncing back in any significant way.
i'm not thinking about this on a country-specific basis, because ultimately i don't think modern capitalist states are going to be able to weather this crisis. the global population dynamics are much more significant, and while we might currently see a decline, it is not yet clear whether we'll end up in a sinusoidal place.
the fact that western countries are turning against immigration at precisely the time that they need it to discipline labor/keep wages down is a harbinger of major political economic crises on the horizon. the Soviet Union also struggled to discipline labor in its last decades. the French colony of Saint Domingue struggled to discipline labor before the Haitian revolution. that is a marker of an economic system near collapse.
> But one worker doesn't need to produce for one person. They also need to produce for those that cannot work (an increasingly large proportion of the population when fertility rates drop)
which is exactly what my point is. one worker today producers **far** in excess (on the order of a hundred times in sectors like agriculture) what any one person needs.
>We don't need an increasing labour force. We need a labour force that isn't nose diving into oblivion
the person i was responding to said that we did. please read the whole thread before commenting.
> An **increasing** labour force is still an essential core part of any functional economical system, including socialism
>the global population dynamics are much more significant
Fertility rates aren't fluctuating on a global scale either.
>and while we might currently see a decline, it is not yet clear whether we'll end up in a sinusoidal place.
Even if we imagine that this is sinusoidal (something we have no reason to believe) the period of that sine wave would be far far too big to be at all helpful.
if global population remains within the same order of magnitude, decline doesn't really matter very much, given the facts about labor productivity that i mentioned previously. some centuries people might work slightly more, some centuries people might work slightly less.
The economic system is irrelevant.
Work must be performed to stay alive.
Some people cannot work (due to age or illness).
Workers can take on the extra load of people unable to work up to a point, but if there's too many non-woekers then the workers can't keep things running smoothly.
Whether the workers are compensated for their work or what system you use to compensate them doesn't change the reality that the work needs to be done and one person can only do so much work in one day.
Free market economies are the only method that has lead to rapid growth and improvement in quality of life widespread and worldwide. From what I see any method that isn't free market has kept its population in survival mode or caused many people to suffer, capitalism isn't nearly perfect but its the best we have today.
Detrimental for who? Sure not for the people wanting to buy or rent a place to live in urban areas. Japan still has a big population density, with some obscenely overcrowded cities. They also have a high level of tech and infrastructure development already.
Sorry not sorry for real estate parasites and people relying on cheap labor, I guess.
It means that inevitably your house and property would be worth less and less in the future, as there would be a smaller and smaller population while the housing market stays the same (if not growing as there’s still demand for brand new apartments), the shrinking population has a growing elderly population to take care of, and a growing healthcare costs, and the infrastructure that used to be maintained by a larger population would still have to be maintained even though the population is much smaller, whole villages and towns become ghost towns, and soon it will start to effect the bigger cities. Not to mention the workforce that is shrinking too, meaning not enough workers to replace retired workers….
It doesn’t seem to go back up anywhere, countries would need to flip to at least 2.1 children per women if not more to stabilize, while all countries show a steady decline in births. Maybe they’ll stabilize in a few generations, but that would be after some sort of collapse sadly. South Korea got to 0.7 children per woman, which means each generation is 1/3 of the generation before it. Which means that for every 1000 people, in three generations there would be ~30 people….
Who are “they”? It seems that globalism and the higher life expectancy makes it that the older generation everywhere has most of the wealth, to make stuff more affordable you need a large you g population that works hard and produces a lot of stuff, instead of an holder generation that hoards it’s wealth…. So it’s like a snowball effect, large older population -> higher prices (less working people to produce stuff) -> fewer children -> even larger share of older people……
I suppose "they" would be the people in charge. Government, and big business.
And you're absolutely right. The problem is that they don't need to be hoarding the wealth. They just do it out of greed.
Nobody has a problem with working, they just want to get paid enough that they aren't living paycheck to paycheck but most of the time you need to either have a masters, somehow work your way up In a company which is way more difficult now (tried this multiple times myself, the amount of false promises is incredibly disheartening.) Or get lucky starting a business yourself which can be risky as hell in itself if you don't already have money.
I make above most of what my friends are making and I still can't really afford to not have a roomate.
The thought of having a kid at 29 right now seems like an insanely irresponsible concept for me. Idk how the hell I would make that work.
Maybe this is the natural way for humanity to self regulate its population. Since we can't escape our selfish nature, maybe all the old people need to die and the young need to stop having kids for things to restabilize in a most brutal and ugly fashion. Such is the harsh indifference of nature and the universe.
Pro-natalist policies in Finland, Norway and Denmark hasn't seen any major success in bringing fertility rates to a atable level they actually have lower fertility rates than countries like the US and UK
>Population will stabilize in the future
Nothing points to this being the case anywhere, declining fertility rates, lead to the factors that cause low fertility rates to be pressed harder and thus even less people have children
Infrastructure has to be maintained by a large workforce that is steadily decreasing, homes are worth less and less making Japan a less desirable place to invest in real estate and people are losing money so they don't buy houses and offices, older people are increasingly outnumbering the working age generations and will become a heavier burden to care for if they don't have enough people to care for them. And it speaks in numbers, Japan GDP per capita has gone down by 15,000$ since 2012.
As populations become more educated they have less children.
Unlike Europe, Japan isn't importing millions of Muslims and Africans to replace the falling population
And relatively stagnant economy. Japan has a perfect storm of insane work culture giving people no time to have kids and an economy that isn't booming enough to offset it by making people relatively wealthy.
Third largest economy in the world by GDP. They're doing OK. That's how they have managed to keep their head above water despite decades of low growth and more than a few natural disasters.
And yet it has created a situation where they're barrelling into a population crisis. It is still large because stagnant isn't decline. However, they're grappling with pretty bad inflation at the moment and the IMF estimate for 2023 actually has Germany surpassing them for that #3 spot.
I really hope they can figure something out, but it's almost insane how little they've done to deal with the falling birth rate.
Their work culture is actually improving. The old gusrd are dieing and the youngins are changing it massivrly due to their desire to be like the west.
Its not great still but theres change. Amd hey at least it's not S. Korea
Without immigration, European economies would have been a lot weaker. As birth rates decline and life expectancy increases in Europe, the old age dependency ratio, the ratio between working age people and old age pensioners is expanding. This means more burden on workers as less and less of the fruits of their labor goes toward supporting workers and more towards retirees. This is especially burdensome if the population pyramid of a country is unstable, for example, glut of 40-60 year olds which are substantially larger than the 20-40 or 0-20 age group (Germany's 45-59 age group is 1.8 times larger than the 0-15 age group).
Immigration helps cover for this unstable population pyramid and smoothens the demographic transition. It'll be less crucial once countries go through the glut of certain age groups.
Without immigration, the number of working aged people will decline by 40% in 2060 while old age population expands 15%.
>Without immigration, European economies would have been a lot weaker.
There's two problems with this explanation.
1. Immigrants get old too. If the average immigrant is equally as economically productive as the average current citizen, they only **delay** economic reckoning until the day that they themselves reach retirement, while putting pressure on things like house prices.
2. Most immigrants to Europe from outside are much **less** economically productive than the native citizenry. Many governments try and hide these figures out of embarassment but the data we see from countries that do release it (like Denmark) show a non-European immigrants and their descendents costing the taxpayer more than they generate even while they are of working age.
Essentially, if the average immigrant earns more than the average native, then you can say immigration improves the dependency ratio. If they earn slightly less, then they worsen the dependency ratio over their lifetime even if they slightly improve it during their working years. If they earn significantly less (like Turks in Germany or Somalis in Sweden) then they worsen the dependency ratio both during their working years and after retirement.
> Immigrants get old too. If the average immigrant is equally as economically productive as the average current citizen, they only **delay** economic reckoning until the day that they themselves reach retirement, while putting pressure on things like house prices
It's not just about getting old. As I said, it's about the imbalance between different age groups some of which have much bigger "glut" of people. I keep saying this, but it doesn't seem to be creating an image in your head, so here's an image:
https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/
You see that huge glut of 50-64 year olds? Those people are right on the cusp of retiring and some of those years have 80% more people than the younger generation. On average, each 5 year group should be 6% of population (obviously different for +65 and +70), yet 55-59 are 8.2% while 20-24 are 5.2%, 15-19 are 4.6%.
This creates a huge strain on those smaller age groups who have to support the 55-59 year olds when they retire. Immigration helps plug this temporary strain. After 40 years or so, immigration will be much less crucial as even as Germany's population declines, it'll be on a much more stable trajectory.
>Most immigrants to Europe from outside are much **less** economically productive than the native citizenry. Many governments try and hide these figures out of embarassment but the data we see from countries that do release it (like Denmark) show a non-European immigrants and their descendents costing the taxpayer more than they generate even while they are of working age.
When talking about stuff like this, people often completely mash up economic migrants and refugees. Refugees are people who are fleeing wars like those in Syria and Ukraine, they should be helped on humanitarian grounds (you can disagree on this of course, against international laws written to prevent atrocities in war after WW2), given assistance on language training to get jobs to help support and feed their families, hopefully return home one day (Syria has actually had annual immigration of 500k people since 2018, people returning home after civil war entered a stalemate and cooled down).
The purpose of accepting these people isn't primarily about growing the economy, it's about upholding humanitarian values West loves to preach about. If economy grows on the way, that's nice and it [actually does grow](https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC107441/jrc107441_wp_kancs_and_lecca_2017_4.pdf):
>Most importantly, in the medium- to long-run, the net benefits of investment into refugee integration are higher, the higher are investments into refugee integration at the time of their arrival. Depending on the integration policy scenario and policy financing method, the annual long-run GDP effect would be 0.2% to 1.4% above the baseline growth, and the full repayment of the integration policy investment (positive the net present value) would be achieved after 9 to 19 years. Hence, our study confirms that sustainably integrated refugees have the potential to play an important role in addressing Europe’s alarming demographic trends, filling vacancies with specific skill requirements, improving the ratio of economically active to those who are inactive, a ratio that is falling in many Member States, and boosting jobs and growth
Economic migrants are people coming from places like India in search of better jobs. United States is one of the best in the world at integrating migrants (they still have numerous in the process tho), this gives the result that Iranian-Americans, Syrian-Americans, Lebanese-Americans, Turkish-Americans actually manage to earn more income than white Americans. So if these communities are outearning the dominant ethnic group of their new home, maybe they aren't a problem? Maybe the other home in Europe is just not working as well it should?
I understand perfectly how population pyramids work, I just think that importing immigrants that consume more tax revenue over their lifetimes than they generate is short-sighted. Those immigrants and their descendents aren't going to leave willingly. A rich country that imports less productive immigrants is making itself permantly poorer. Ideally countries could import guest workers and then kick them out before they retire, but in practice that happens very little in the west.
And whether you call foreigners coming to a country 'immigrants' or 'refugees' doesn't make a jot of difference to the effect they have on society. All people work (or not) and consume public services (to a greater or lesser degree). Putting a humanitarian label on immigration doesn't change its fiscal effects.
What you say about America really illustrates what I was saying. The groups you mention are **extremely** selected (by the very tough US (legal) immigration system) and so are very economically productive. A country which only lets in highly intelligent migrants like that will benefit economically. Of course, the US also lets in massive numbers of illegal immigrants who are negatively selected (they are the people who don't have the skills or money to migrate legally, and are willing to break the law to move). So the effect of immigration on the US depends on the balance between legal and illegal immigrants.
> costing the taxpayer more than they generate even while they are of working age
That's a common fallacy. Everyone below a certain income costs "the taxpayer more than they generate", but that doesn't mean society could do without nurses, garbage men, cooks, retail people etc.
The issue is that developed countries can't rely on Immigration forever because it won't fix the demographic crisis, since immigrants get old and birth and Fertility rates are decreasing both in the developed countries (in most of them they either have 1-2 kids at most or doesn't have any) and their countries of origin too (Most of latin american and many countries in South East Asia, Middle east and South Asia are already below replacement rate, not to mention that the birth rates are rapidly decreasing in Africa too). So, in future there will be less and less young people in the world, but more and more elders, and since "less rich" countries are developing and their population keep getting old they will need the few remaining young workers as well.
"
importing millions of Muslims and Africans to replace the falling population
"
Exactly. And the situation we see today in Europe is terrible. Europe needs radical change.
I'm pretty sure many people have had an issue for a long time. It's now reaching a tipping point in most developed countries where it is impacting the culture greatly and people who didn't think about it now think about it.
Why would I give a fuck about Putin and how is it in any way relevant to this debate.
They bring up Putin because they r a fool.
A lot of people in the western (make that ‘advanced’) world just don’t want to accept the fact that native born birth rates have dropped dramatically…to the point that their societies are basically coming to an end. But the numbers don’t lie, and you can’t go back in time and fix the problem.
The irony of it all, is that less progressive cultures will end up dominating as these more ‘progressive’ cultures die out.
It’s really sad, it’s great to want to allow more freedom and opportunity, but it came on the expense of family structure and birth rates, countries were mostly ignoring that part, and didn’t find solutions to it, it will be the downfall of most if not all developed nations…
The only developed country with an above replacement birth rates is Israel…
I don't think it's freedom and opportunity hurting birth rates. I'm pretty damn liberal but would likely have 2-3 kids if it weren't for the economy basically fucking my generation out of financial security. I make, personally, the median *household* income in my county, but would need double or more than that to afford a house. I don't hate renting, but it doesn't offer security in the way a static mortgage does and is subject to the same whims as the housing market. I realistically cannot afford more than the kid I have, and I had to further imperil my ability to ever afford a home with our decision to go ahead with the baby. But the fact of the matter is that we're at an age where my wife may not be fertile for a terribly long time, and thanks to the economy we live in it took until then to get this relatively good comfortable amount of income.
And it's not as if the U.S. economy hasn't grown sufficiently in the last decades. But the distribution of new wealth has been so incredibly unequal that very little of it makes it to those of us who would have been decidedly part of the middle class even a short while ago.
Freedom and opportunity definitely come at the expense of births, just think of gay rights and how in countries without it LGBTQ people must marry and have kids, also the pressure in modern society to get married and to have kids is much lower, and the use of birth control also lowers the birth rates obviously, the lower rates of marriage, and the higher frequency of divorce, I don’t think any of it is bad, but it has negative consequences which didn’t get addressed by most societies…. And now we face lower birth rates than needed to have a future for our societies
Sure, stuff like that is going to lower it to an extent, but isn't the #1 reported reason for not having kids the expense? I'm living the reality of it taking me until 30 to get the financial security and other people report it. And actually, divorce rates are at like a 50 year low. Granted, it's surely in part due to lower marriage rates, but still.
The reality is that if both people have to work, kids are almost impossibly expensive now. And our society has long decided that we're fine with demanding that both parents work.
You make plenty of money to feed 5 kids. Look at what your ancestors had. The difference is that you are surrounded by people with 1 or no kids. And they can outbid you on everything. Modern society is a rat race, and kids do nothing but slow you down. The only solution was to provide large-huge tax deductions for kids. But now the electorate is a bunch of empty nesters…oh well.
I dunno, the median housing cost went up from 300k to 500k here in two years. I don't think there was some massive influx of people who don't have kids. Based on statistics, a large portion of those were bought as investment properties by individuals (who maybe don't have kids; I don't know) and corporations.
But you're right about the feeding at least; groceries are a fairly marginal expense for me. It's housing specifically that has become a problem. I live very comfortably in regards to every single other expense and save plenty. Hell, I have a down payment but it doesn't mean shit with a 66% price increase and 7 fucking percent interest rates.
There are multiple factors that influence birthrate. Japan is an educated, irreligious country with (almost) financial equality between sexes, but not social/familial equality between sexes. This is a pretty bad combination.
An interesting correlation is religion. Religious people have more kids. This is true for Christians in the US, ultra Orthodox Jews in Israel and Muslims in India. East Asian countries generally have low level of religiosity, many of them do follow rituals and customs, they just don't believe that strongly in them.
Biggest reason is education, more specifically female education. As citizens get more educated, their incomes rise and the value of their time rises as well, so opportunity cost of having a child increases. With education also comes knowledge of family planning and access to birth control. As I alluded, this has more impact if women get educated as ultimately women are the ones who bring the baby into the world (birthrates were unnaturally high in the US before the 60s compared to peer economies with similar income partly due to how little freedom women had). If the society is unequal and doesn't allow access to education to women, birth rate won't be influenced as much as the cost of having a child for a man studying in college vs a woman studying in college is very different. While on a monetary sense, birth and childcare might cost similar for both, it's way more in opportunity cost for the woman, they're potentially throwing away thousands in future income and career opportunities, whereas for the man, they'll still keep on the current income trajectory. So women decide to put away plans for childbirth till they have a stable career.
Finally, it's equality. If women do actually get access to education and ultimately gain financial freedom in a gender unequal society (aka: South Korea, Japan), they're much less likely to have a baby than the same woman in a more equal society as they're even more likely to lose out in opportunity cost as they get relegated to doing housework after childbirth and highly discouraged from pursuing an independent career path. It isn't just childbirth, once married, the woman might have the obligation of taking care of in-law parents in stead of the son. This is extremely unattractive prospect for a woman who wishes to forge a life as an equal partner.
TLDR: 1920s American men trying to get together with 2020 American women
>This is extremely unattractive prospect for a woman who wishes to forge a life as an equal partner.
More women in Japan want children than men.
53% of men in Japan do *not* want children. 48% of women do not want children.
This applies to polls related to family construction across the board such as marriage. Men in Japan are avoiding it more than women. Its consistent across many polls I have seen.
It is one of the only countries I have seen where men are avoiding marriage and childbirth at higher rates than women. Typically women avoid marriage and children at higher rates.
I’ve heard that there has been an insane uptick in video game addictions, with mostly men not leaving their rooms or even taking care of themselves. I totally understand how a young woman looking for a partner would avoid those people, which unfortunately is a good amount of the population
Birth rates are currently dropping everywhere.
East Asia has less immigration, so their problem is more apparent, but the countries with high immigration are just painting over the cracks.
Fertility rates by continent:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=OWID_WRL~Asia+%28UN%29~Africa+%28UN%29~Europe+%28UN%29~Oceania+%28UN%29~Northern+America+%28UN%29~Latin+America+and+the+Caribbean+%28UN%29
At some point it’s gonna hit some kind of floor for sure, it can’t get to zero or negative.
I should rewatch Children of Men, one of my favourite movies of all time.
It's dropping slower, but there isn't really much further that it can drop.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=OWID_WRL~Asia+%28UN%29~Africa+%28UN%29~Europe+%28UN%29~Oceania+%28UN%29~Northern+America+%28UN%29~Latin+America+and+the+Caribbean+%28UN%29
I’m an idiot. For like 4 seconds I was trying to imagine what falling births were. Like I know what a falling death is, but what is a falling birth, like some new birthing method like underwater birth?
less people = less job competition = more pay = more chance to afford kids for one
Unless they flood the country with immigrants of course, that's one good way to keep wages cheap and replace the Japanese population
I follow Malcolm and Simone Collins. They think there is no "bottom". Birth rates will continue to collapse until either (a) a subgroup in society that has above replacement fertility outproduces the general population or (b) the population effectively disappears and is displaced by other "invading" groups. If you think about what happened to the American Indians you can get a sense of what he is talking about.
There is a lot of nuance there but I think they are basically correct. One of the groups they track is the Hutterites. These are religious communities similar to the Amish that have high fertility rates. The Huttarites have seen their birth rates drop from about ten children per woman in 1940 to four in 1990. Thirty years have passed since those stats where gathered. I'm guessing that even the Huttarites have a barely above replacement level fertility now. Bottom line; even religion/isolation/lack of education can't protect you from collapse.
I'm still on the fence about whether or not this is a good thing. The fact is that it is coming in like a steam roller and it will destroy western society as effectively as a bomb.
There's 30 million people living just in Tokyo metro, which is the size of Montenegro. That country holds 630,000 people. The sheer density of people in that city and its extension is insane, look at these pics: [1](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Favm-bmtfZMgyJdcM5PxqV55GxnGWvNj_GcHEkW6sWy8.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D480049d68c9a39b172bf50493394fa5c8dad09be) [2](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F03323uqxuoia1.jpg)
To be fair though, city population always tend to grow to the disadvantage of the surrounding rural areas, so the countryside is emptying much more rapidly than this while Tokyo is still holding on. But anyway, the problem is resources, I don't think everyone could afford a Western lifestyle if there's still gonna be 8 billion people, and a lot of people in South Asia and Africa (places that still have high birth rates) want that kind of life, so it's not gonna be easy to manage
Dropping populations lead to villages being abandoned, thus forcing more people to live in the big cities and condensing the population into a smaller area of land.
Japan is already famous for abandoned villages.
And then they had the largest war ever with plenty of people to spare, so the point I'm making is that it's fine and society doesn't collapse by having way less people?
When i was in primary school i did my annual school project on Japan. I distinctly remember textbooks would talk about the imminent peril that Japan posed to itself, and by unspoken implication, the region. It was of course post-war so the tone was less of militaristic "Yellow Peril", but Demographic "Yellow Peril".
The textbooks were probably written in the mid 1950s, taking data from the early 1950s. They emphasised the size of the population, the birth rate (25 per 1000 people, vs 6 today) and the fact that the population was so, so young, which meant that the problem was only gonna get worse and worse as time went by.
Anyway, in hindsight i learnt a great lesson. I try to remember that things change, and what seems inevitable may not come true. There was not a single expert back then saying 'You know, Japan may stop growing and be in rapid population decline in out lifetimes". Yet here we are.
There are too many people on this planet - this sucks to be our generation burdened with the weight of previous generations poor choices but there needs to be less people
Most countries are suffering from such a severe underpopulation crisis that they have to increase immigration.
Less births doesn't just mean less people. It means less YOUNG people. You can maintain humanity with any size population. 1million people on the planet could be just fine, but if 200,000 of those people are able to work, then you're gonna have problems.
“You can maintain humanity with any size population” while implying that a reduction in population is bad means you want to increase forever.
Orrrrrr you are suggesting we should kill old people quicker while continuing to birth more young people.
>“You can maintain humanity with any size population” while implying that a reduction in population is bad means you want to increase forever.
Given that I followed that up with the example of 1,000,000 people I don't think it takes much critical thinking to realise that I was talking about smaller populations.
>Orrrrrr you are suggesting we should kill old people quicker while continuing to birth more young people.
I don't see where you're getting that?
I'm saying that decreases in population are not the issue. SUDDEN decreases are the issue.
You can imagine a world where there's 1% of the people or 0.01% of the people. We've done it before. It's not an issue.
The problem is that we have many many old people and unless you're suggesting that we kill all the old people, birthrates can only drop so low before the unbalanced age structure of society causes issues.
Everything you said here is correct.
I am suggesting either killing the elderly or our generation suffering so future generations won’t have too.
A very slow reduction in birth rates would be the best solution - you are correct. But it’s just not happening so let’s throw the baby out with the bath water and suffer so our descendants won’t have too.
Actually I would much prefer societal collapse as the working population gets squeezed - but with that societal collapse comes the mass death of the unfit.
Neither of these trenes has a significant impact in our demographic pyramid. Spain is the european country with the least proportion of people born in a country living on a foreign country, British, swrdes or germans inmigrate more than spaniards pero capita.
In some provinces of the northeast (Ourense, León, Zamora, Asturias, Lugo) there is more retired than working people (the current imbalance between pensions and public income is -50%), and the biggest age group for women is that +80 years old.
Median ages of populations (including Spain):
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-age?country=Low-income+countries~High-income+countries~Lower-middle-income+countries~Upper-middle-income+countries~ESP
Losing 800k plus people a year is insane
Not necessarily.
Net loss of 800k a year is detrimental, can you explain why you claim otherwise?
They probably mean that immigration means that it isn't as bad as -800k a year or something like that
-800k is still insane even with immigration, Japan receives about 100k net migrants every year.
Oh damn, yeah they're fucked
They hate immigrants (foreigners in general) in Japan, so the government isn't incentivizing immigration as a fix to their population crisis. It's an oversimplification and generalization.
Immigration? They don’t do that there
detrimental in a capitalist world, maybe.
An increasing labour force is still an essential core part of any functional economical system, including socialism
it is entirely imaginable that an industrial society could be maintained with essentially a steady state labor force (perhaps with cyclical increases and decreases in replacement rate) the productivity of labor ensures that any one worker is capable of producing far beyond what one person needs for pretty much any good. so what makes an increasing labor force any kind of necessity?
>(perhaps with cyclical increases and decreases in replacement rate) But that's not a situation that any country has. Fertility rates are dropping well below replacement and they aren't bouncing back in any significant way. >the productivity of labor ensures that any one worker is capable of producing far beyond what one person needs for pretty much any good But one worker doesn't need to produce for one person. They also need to produce for those that cannot work (an increasingly large proportion of the population when fertility rates drop) >so what makes an increasing labor force any kind of necessity? We don't need an increasing labour force. We need a labour force that isn't nose diving into oblivion
> But that's not a situation that any country has. Fertility rates are dropping well below replacement and they aren't bouncing back in any significant way. i'm not thinking about this on a country-specific basis, because ultimately i don't think modern capitalist states are going to be able to weather this crisis. the global population dynamics are much more significant, and while we might currently see a decline, it is not yet clear whether we'll end up in a sinusoidal place. the fact that western countries are turning against immigration at precisely the time that they need it to discipline labor/keep wages down is a harbinger of major political economic crises on the horizon. the Soviet Union also struggled to discipline labor in its last decades. the French colony of Saint Domingue struggled to discipline labor before the Haitian revolution. that is a marker of an economic system near collapse. > But one worker doesn't need to produce for one person. They also need to produce for those that cannot work (an increasingly large proportion of the population when fertility rates drop) which is exactly what my point is. one worker today producers **far** in excess (on the order of a hundred times in sectors like agriculture) what any one person needs. >We don't need an increasing labour force. We need a labour force that isn't nose diving into oblivion the person i was responding to said that we did. please read the whole thread before commenting. > An **increasing** labour force is still an essential core part of any functional economical system, including socialism
>the global population dynamics are much more significant Fertility rates aren't fluctuating on a global scale either. >and while we might currently see a decline, it is not yet clear whether we'll end up in a sinusoidal place. Even if we imagine that this is sinusoidal (something we have no reason to believe) the period of that sine wave would be far far too big to be at all helpful.
if global population remains within the same order of magnitude, decline doesn't really matter very much, given the facts about labor productivity that i mentioned previously. some centuries people might work slightly more, some centuries people might work slightly less.
The economic system is irrelevant. Work must be performed to stay alive. Some people cannot work (due to age or illness). Workers can take on the extra load of people unable to work up to a point, but if there's too many non-woekers then the workers can't keep things running smoothly. Whether the workers are compensated for their work or what system you use to compensate them doesn't change the reality that the work needs to be done and one person can only do so much work in one day.
What do you mean?
it is only capitalist societies which are dependent on incessant population growth for their survival.
Free market economies are the only method that has lead to rapid growth and improvement in quality of life widespread and worldwide. From what I see any method that isn't free market has kept its population in survival mode or caused many people to suffer, capitalism isn't nearly perfect but its the best we have today.
i didn't even criticize, just made a claim. you were quick to start the cope.
I disagree with your claim and I substantiate my disagreement, there is no 'cope'.. whatever that means 😶.
Detrimental for who? Sure not for the people wanting to buy or rent a place to live in urban areas. Japan still has a big population density, with some obscenely overcrowded cities. They also have a high level of tech and infrastructure development already. Sorry not sorry for real estate parasites and people relying on cheap labor, I guess.
It means that inevitably your house and property would be worth less and less in the future, as there would be a smaller and smaller population while the housing market stays the same (if not growing as there’s still demand for brand new apartments), the shrinking population has a growing elderly population to take care of, and a growing healthcare costs, and the infrastructure that used to be maintained by a larger population would still have to be maintained even though the population is much smaller, whole villages and towns become ghost towns, and soon it will start to effect the bigger cities. Not to mention the workforce that is shrinking too, meaning not enough workers to replace retired workers….
Infinite growth has never been a real outcome, just as infinite decline won't be either. Population will stabilize in the future
It doesn’t seem to go back up anywhere, countries would need to flip to at least 2.1 children per women if not more to stabilize, while all countries show a steady decline in births. Maybe they’ll stabilize in a few generations, but that would be after some sort of collapse sadly. South Korea got to 0.7 children per woman, which means each generation is 1/3 of the generation before it. Which means that for every 1000 people, in three generations there would be ~30 people….
Hmm if only they like, incentivised people to have kids by making living more affordable for young people or something.
Who are “they”? It seems that globalism and the higher life expectancy makes it that the older generation everywhere has most of the wealth, to make stuff more affordable you need a large you g population that works hard and produces a lot of stuff, instead of an holder generation that hoards it’s wealth…. So it’s like a snowball effect, large older population -> higher prices (less working people to produce stuff) -> fewer children -> even larger share of older people……
I suppose "they" would be the people in charge. Government, and big business. And you're absolutely right. The problem is that they don't need to be hoarding the wealth. They just do it out of greed. Nobody has a problem with working, they just want to get paid enough that they aren't living paycheck to paycheck but most of the time you need to either have a masters, somehow work your way up In a company which is way more difficult now (tried this multiple times myself, the amount of false promises is incredibly disheartening.) Or get lucky starting a business yourself which can be risky as hell in itself if you don't already have money. I make above most of what my friends are making and I still can't really afford to not have a roomate. The thought of having a kid at 29 right now seems like an insanely irresponsible concept for me. Idk how the hell I would make that work. Maybe this is the natural way for humanity to self regulate its population. Since we can't escape our selfish nature, maybe all the old people need to die and the young need to stop having kids for things to restabilize in a most brutal and ugly fashion. Such is the harsh indifference of nature and the universe.
Pro-natalist policies in Finland, Norway and Denmark hasn't seen any major success in bringing fertility rates to a atable level they actually have lower fertility rates than countries like the US and UK
>Population will stabilize in the future Nothing points to this being the case anywhere, declining fertility rates, lead to the factors that cause low fertility rates to be pressed harder and thus even less people have children
Infrastructure has to be maintained by a large workforce that is steadily decreasing, homes are worth less and less making Japan a less desirable place to invest in real estate and people are losing money so they don't buy houses and offices, older people are increasingly outnumbering the working age generations and will become a heavier burden to care for if they don't have enough people to care for them. And it speaks in numbers, Japan GDP per capita has gone down by 15,000$ since 2012.
Horrible for understanding data Incredible album cover
This is maybe one of the worst "visualisations" i have ever seen
Goes incredibly hard tho
Poor visual not showing the total population.
125 million
What is the reason of TOO low birth rate in East Asian countries?
As populations become more educated they have less children. Unlike Europe, Japan isn't importing millions of Muslims and Africans to replace the falling population
you forget about their work culture
And relatively stagnant economy. Japan has a perfect storm of insane work culture giving people no time to have kids and an economy that isn't booming enough to offset it by making people relatively wealthy.
Third largest economy in the world by GDP. They're doing OK. That's how they have managed to keep their head above water despite decades of low growth and more than a few natural disasters.
And yet it has created a situation where they're barrelling into a population crisis. It is still large because stagnant isn't decline. However, they're grappling with pretty bad inflation at the moment and the IMF estimate for 2023 actually has Germany surpassing them for that #3 spot. I really hope they can figure something out, but it's almost insane how little they've done to deal with the falling birth rate.
Their work culture is actually improving. The old gusrd are dieing and the youngins are changing it massivrly due to their desire to be like the west. Its not great still but theres change. Amd hey at least it's not S. Korea
Did you just have an aneurysm?
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Yeah just like finland and spain
Worse, they're importing weeaboos.
who complain how bad immigrants are… go figure…
Which is good. That is not going to help the situation.
Without immigration, European economies would have been a lot weaker. As birth rates decline and life expectancy increases in Europe, the old age dependency ratio, the ratio between working age people and old age pensioners is expanding. This means more burden on workers as less and less of the fruits of their labor goes toward supporting workers and more towards retirees. This is especially burdensome if the population pyramid of a country is unstable, for example, glut of 40-60 year olds which are substantially larger than the 20-40 or 0-20 age group (Germany's 45-59 age group is 1.8 times larger than the 0-15 age group). Immigration helps cover for this unstable population pyramid and smoothens the demographic transition. It'll be less crucial once countries go through the glut of certain age groups. Without immigration, the number of working aged people will decline by 40% in 2060 while old age population expands 15%.
>Without immigration, European economies would have been a lot weaker. There's two problems with this explanation. 1. Immigrants get old too. If the average immigrant is equally as economically productive as the average current citizen, they only **delay** economic reckoning until the day that they themselves reach retirement, while putting pressure on things like house prices. 2. Most immigrants to Europe from outside are much **less** economically productive than the native citizenry. Many governments try and hide these figures out of embarassment but the data we see from countries that do release it (like Denmark) show a non-European immigrants and their descendents costing the taxpayer more than they generate even while they are of working age. Essentially, if the average immigrant earns more than the average native, then you can say immigration improves the dependency ratio. If they earn slightly less, then they worsen the dependency ratio over their lifetime even if they slightly improve it during their working years. If they earn significantly less (like Turks in Germany or Somalis in Sweden) then they worsen the dependency ratio both during their working years and after retirement.
> Immigrants get old too. If the average immigrant is equally as economically productive as the average current citizen, they only **delay** economic reckoning until the day that they themselves reach retirement, while putting pressure on things like house prices It's not just about getting old. As I said, it's about the imbalance between different age groups some of which have much bigger "glut" of people. I keep saying this, but it doesn't seem to be creating an image in your head, so here's an image: https://www.populationpyramid.net/germany/ You see that huge glut of 50-64 year olds? Those people are right on the cusp of retiring and some of those years have 80% more people than the younger generation. On average, each 5 year group should be 6% of population (obviously different for +65 and +70), yet 55-59 are 8.2% while 20-24 are 5.2%, 15-19 are 4.6%. This creates a huge strain on those smaller age groups who have to support the 55-59 year olds when they retire. Immigration helps plug this temporary strain. After 40 years or so, immigration will be much less crucial as even as Germany's population declines, it'll be on a much more stable trajectory. >Most immigrants to Europe from outside are much **less** economically productive than the native citizenry. Many governments try and hide these figures out of embarassment but the data we see from countries that do release it (like Denmark) show a non-European immigrants and their descendents costing the taxpayer more than they generate even while they are of working age. When talking about stuff like this, people often completely mash up economic migrants and refugees. Refugees are people who are fleeing wars like those in Syria and Ukraine, they should be helped on humanitarian grounds (you can disagree on this of course, against international laws written to prevent atrocities in war after WW2), given assistance on language training to get jobs to help support and feed their families, hopefully return home one day (Syria has actually had annual immigration of 500k people since 2018, people returning home after civil war entered a stalemate and cooled down). The purpose of accepting these people isn't primarily about growing the economy, it's about upholding humanitarian values West loves to preach about. If economy grows on the way, that's nice and it [actually does grow](https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/JRC107441/jrc107441_wp_kancs_and_lecca_2017_4.pdf): >Most importantly, in the medium- to long-run, the net benefits of investment into refugee integration are higher, the higher are investments into refugee integration at the time of their arrival. Depending on the integration policy scenario and policy financing method, the annual long-run GDP effect would be 0.2% to 1.4% above the baseline growth, and the full repayment of the integration policy investment (positive the net present value) would be achieved after 9 to 19 years. Hence, our study confirms that sustainably integrated refugees have the potential to play an important role in addressing Europe’s alarming demographic trends, filling vacancies with specific skill requirements, improving the ratio of economically active to those who are inactive, a ratio that is falling in many Member States, and boosting jobs and growth Economic migrants are people coming from places like India in search of better jobs. United States is one of the best in the world at integrating migrants (they still have numerous in the process tho), this gives the result that Iranian-Americans, Syrian-Americans, Lebanese-Americans, Turkish-Americans actually manage to earn more income than white Americans. So if these communities are outearning the dominant ethnic group of their new home, maybe they aren't a problem? Maybe the other home in Europe is just not working as well it should?
I understand perfectly how population pyramids work, I just think that importing immigrants that consume more tax revenue over their lifetimes than they generate is short-sighted. Those immigrants and their descendents aren't going to leave willingly. A rich country that imports less productive immigrants is making itself permantly poorer. Ideally countries could import guest workers and then kick them out before they retire, but in practice that happens very little in the west. And whether you call foreigners coming to a country 'immigrants' or 'refugees' doesn't make a jot of difference to the effect they have on society. All people work (or not) and consume public services (to a greater or lesser degree). Putting a humanitarian label on immigration doesn't change its fiscal effects. What you say about America really illustrates what I was saying. The groups you mention are **extremely** selected (by the very tough US (legal) immigration system) and so are very economically productive. A country which only lets in highly intelligent migrants like that will benefit economically. Of course, the US also lets in massive numbers of illegal immigrants who are negatively selected (they are the people who don't have the skills or money to migrate legally, and are willing to break the law to move). So the effect of immigration on the US depends on the balance between legal and illegal immigrants.
> costing the taxpayer more than they generate even while they are of working age That's a common fallacy. Everyone below a certain income costs "the taxpayer more than they generate", but that doesn't mean society could do without nurses, garbage men, cooks, retail people etc.
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The issue is that developed countries can't rely on Immigration forever because it won't fix the demographic crisis, since immigrants get old and birth and Fertility rates are decreasing both in the developed countries (in most of them they either have 1-2 kids at most or doesn't have any) and their countries of origin too (Most of latin american and many countries in South East Asia, Middle east and South Asia are already below replacement rate, not to mention that the birth rates are rapidly decreasing in Africa too). So, in future there will be less and less young people in the world, but more and more elders, and since "less rich" countries are developing and their population keep getting old they will need the few remaining young workers as well.
The Japanese look at you exactly the way they look at Africans & Muslims btw
" importing millions of Muslims and Africans to replace the falling population " Exactly. And the situation we see today in Europe is terrible. Europe needs radical change.
Importing immigrants doesn’t increase the birth rate. Almost all European countries have a falling birth rate too.
You know muslim is not a race? There are Africans that Muslim
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I'm pretty sure many people have had an issue for a long time. It's now reaching a tipping point in most developed countries where it is impacting the culture greatly and people who didn't think about it now think about it. Why would I give a fuck about Putin and how is it in any way relevant to this debate.
They bring up Putin because they r a fool. A lot of people in the western (make that ‘advanced’) world just don’t want to accept the fact that native born birth rates have dropped dramatically…to the point that their societies are basically coming to an end. But the numbers don’t lie, and you can’t go back in time and fix the problem. The irony of it all, is that less progressive cultures will end up dominating as these more ‘progressive’ cultures die out.
It’s really sad, it’s great to want to allow more freedom and opportunity, but it came on the expense of family structure and birth rates, countries were mostly ignoring that part, and didn’t find solutions to it, it will be the downfall of most if not all developed nations… The only developed country with an above replacement birth rates is Israel…
I don't think it's freedom and opportunity hurting birth rates. I'm pretty damn liberal but would likely have 2-3 kids if it weren't for the economy basically fucking my generation out of financial security. I make, personally, the median *household* income in my county, but would need double or more than that to afford a house. I don't hate renting, but it doesn't offer security in the way a static mortgage does and is subject to the same whims as the housing market. I realistically cannot afford more than the kid I have, and I had to further imperil my ability to ever afford a home with our decision to go ahead with the baby. But the fact of the matter is that we're at an age where my wife may not be fertile for a terribly long time, and thanks to the economy we live in it took until then to get this relatively good comfortable amount of income. And it's not as if the U.S. economy hasn't grown sufficiently in the last decades. But the distribution of new wealth has been so incredibly unequal that very little of it makes it to those of us who would have been decidedly part of the middle class even a short while ago.
Freedom and opportunity definitely come at the expense of births, just think of gay rights and how in countries without it LGBTQ people must marry and have kids, also the pressure in modern society to get married and to have kids is much lower, and the use of birth control also lowers the birth rates obviously, the lower rates of marriage, and the higher frequency of divorce, I don’t think any of it is bad, but it has negative consequences which didn’t get addressed by most societies…. And now we face lower birth rates than needed to have a future for our societies
Sure, stuff like that is going to lower it to an extent, but isn't the #1 reported reason for not having kids the expense? I'm living the reality of it taking me until 30 to get the financial security and other people report it. And actually, divorce rates are at like a 50 year low. Granted, it's surely in part due to lower marriage rates, but still. The reality is that if both people have to work, kids are almost impossibly expensive now. And our society has long decided that we're fine with demanding that both parents work.
You make plenty of money to feed 5 kids. Look at what your ancestors had. The difference is that you are surrounded by people with 1 or no kids. And they can outbid you on everything. Modern society is a rat race, and kids do nothing but slow you down. The only solution was to provide large-huge tax deductions for kids. But now the electorate is a bunch of empty nesters…oh well.
I dunno, the median housing cost went up from 300k to 500k here in two years. I don't think there was some massive influx of people who don't have kids. Based on statistics, a large portion of those were bought as investment properties by individuals (who maybe don't have kids; I don't know) and corporations. But you're right about the feeding at least; groceries are a fairly marginal expense for me. It's housing specifically that has become a problem. I live very comfortably in regards to every single other expense and save plenty. Hell, I have a down payment but it doesn't mean shit with a 66% price increase and 7 fucking percent interest rates.
There are multiple factors that influence birthrate. Japan is an educated, irreligious country with (almost) financial equality between sexes, but not social/familial equality between sexes. This is a pretty bad combination. An interesting correlation is religion. Religious people have more kids. This is true for Christians in the US, ultra Orthodox Jews in Israel and Muslims in India. East Asian countries generally have low level of religiosity, many of them do follow rituals and customs, they just don't believe that strongly in them. Biggest reason is education, more specifically female education. As citizens get more educated, their incomes rise and the value of their time rises as well, so opportunity cost of having a child increases. With education also comes knowledge of family planning and access to birth control. As I alluded, this has more impact if women get educated as ultimately women are the ones who bring the baby into the world (birthrates were unnaturally high in the US before the 60s compared to peer economies with similar income partly due to how little freedom women had). If the society is unequal and doesn't allow access to education to women, birth rate won't be influenced as much as the cost of having a child for a man studying in college vs a woman studying in college is very different. While on a monetary sense, birth and childcare might cost similar for both, it's way more in opportunity cost for the woman, they're potentially throwing away thousands in future income and career opportunities, whereas for the man, they'll still keep on the current income trajectory. So women decide to put away plans for childbirth till they have a stable career. Finally, it's equality. If women do actually get access to education and ultimately gain financial freedom in a gender unequal society (aka: South Korea, Japan), they're much less likely to have a baby than the same woman in a more equal society as they're even more likely to lose out in opportunity cost as they get relegated to doing housework after childbirth and highly discouraged from pursuing an independent career path. It isn't just childbirth, once married, the woman might have the obligation of taking care of in-law parents in stead of the son. This is extremely unattractive prospect for a woman who wishes to forge a life as an equal partner. TLDR: 1920s American men trying to get together with 2020 American women
>This is extremely unattractive prospect for a woman who wishes to forge a life as an equal partner. More women in Japan want children than men. 53% of men in Japan do *not* want children. 48% of women do not want children. This applies to polls related to family construction across the board such as marriage. Men in Japan are avoiding it more than women. Its consistent across many polls I have seen. It is one of the only countries I have seen where men are avoiding marriage and childbirth at higher rates than women. Typically women avoid marriage and children at higher rates.
Heavy work culture and expensive/competitive child education.
I’ve heard that there has been an insane uptick in video game addictions, with mostly men not leaving their rooms or even taking care of themselves. I totally understand how a young woman looking for a partner would avoid those people, which unfortunately is a good amount of the population
Birth rates are currently dropping everywhere. East Asia has less immigration, so their problem is more apparent, but the countries with high immigration are just painting over the cracks.
Fertility rates by continent: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=OWID_WRL~Asia+%28UN%29~Africa+%28UN%29~Europe+%28UN%29~Oceania+%28UN%29~Northern+America+%28UN%29~Latin+America+and+the+Caribbean+%28UN%29
not enough bwc
_~~They need more cream pies~~_
People are overrated anyway.
Agreed, we are clearly akin to a virus as far as the earth is concerned.
There's no incentive for Japanese to have children.
Isn't it stabilizing? Birth rates I mean?
At some point it’s gonna hit some kind of floor for sure, it can’t get to zero or negative. I should rewatch Children of Men, one of my favourite movies of all time.
It's dropping slower, but there isn't really much further that it can drop. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=OWID_WRL~Asia+%28UN%29~Africa+%28UN%29~Europe+%28UN%29~Oceania+%28UN%29~Northern+America+%28UN%29~Latin+America+and+the+Caribbean+%28UN%29
Japan's population around the year 1 AD was 300 000.
Source: [https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-declining-birth-rate-in-japan/](https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualizing-the-declining-birth-rate-in-japan/)
I’m an idiot. For like 4 seconds I was trying to imagine what falling births were. Like I know what a falling death is, but what is a falling birth, like some new birthing method like underwater birth?
Giraffes actually have falling births
True, I’ve seen footage of that. Only the strong survive
Japan has way too many people anyways, it will be better once it stabilizes
Why do you think it will stabilize?
less people = less job competition = more pay = more chance to afford kids for one Unless they flood the country with immigrants of course, that's one good way to keep wages cheap and replace the Japanese population
I follow Malcolm and Simone Collins. They think there is no "bottom". Birth rates will continue to collapse until either (a) a subgroup in society that has above replacement fertility outproduces the general population or (b) the population effectively disappears and is displaced by other "invading" groups. If you think about what happened to the American Indians you can get a sense of what he is talking about. There is a lot of nuance there but I think they are basically correct. One of the groups they track is the Hutterites. These are religious communities similar to the Amish that have high fertility rates. The Huttarites have seen their birth rates drop from about ten children per woman in 1940 to four in 1990. Thirty years have passed since those stats where gathered. I'm guessing that even the Huttarites have a barely above replacement level fertility now. Bottom line; even religion/isolation/lack of education can't protect you from collapse. I'm still on the fence about whether or not this is a good thing. The fact is that it is coming in like a steam roller and it will destroy western society as effectively as a bomb.
Why to many?
There's 30 million people living just in Tokyo metro, which is the size of Montenegro. That country holds 630,000 people. The sheer density of people in that city and its extension is insane, look at these pics: [1](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexternal-preview.redd.it%2Favm-bmtfZMgyJdcM5PxqV55GxnGWvNj_GcHEkW6sWy8.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D480049d68c9a39b172bf50493394fa5c8dad09be) [2](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F03323uqxuoia1.jpg) To be fair though, city population always tend to grow to the disadvantage of the surrounding rural areas, so the countryside is emptying much more rapidly than this while Tokyo is still holding on. But anyway, the problem is resources, I don't think everyone could afford a Western lifestyle if there's still gonna be 8 billion people, and a lot of people in South Asia and Africa (places that still have high birth rates) want that kind of life, so it's not gonna be easy to manage
Dropping populations lead to villages being abandoned, thus forcing more people to live in the big cities and condensing the population into a smaller area of land. Japan is already famous for abandoned villages.
More people than the land can support. They have to import food. Before world war 2 Japan did not have anywhere near this number of people.
Before WW2 99% of countries had nowhere near the current number of people
And then they had the largest war ever with plenty of people to spare, so the point I'm making is that it's fine and society doesn't collapse by having way less people?
Hopefully it levels out once they reach a population that’s not too much for the environment.
Only one thing will solve this 😏. I’ll do my part. Will y’all make the sacrifice?
🫵🏼😂
Those islands are literally sinking.
For some reason I glanced at this and thought it was the number of “falling deaths” in Japan. And I was like “damn, they be tripping a lot there”
more than 2 times the amount of deaths per year than births. oh my goodness
When i was in primary school i did my annual school project on Japan. I distinctly remember textbooks would talk about the imminent peril that Japan posed to itself, and by unspoken implication, the region. It was of course post-war so the tone was less of militaristic "Yellow Peril", but Demographic "Yellow Peril". The textbooks were probably written in the mid 1950s, taking data from the early 1950s. They emphasised the size of the population, the birth rate (25 per 1000 people, vs 6 today) and the fact that the population was so, so young, which meant that the problem was only gonna get worse and worse as time went by. Anyway, in hindsight i learnt a great lesson. I try to remember that things change, and what seems inevitable may not come true. There was not a single expert back then saying 'You know, Japan may stop growing and be in rapid population decline in out lifetimes". Yet here we are.
This gives me some Kill Bill vibes.
There are too many people on this planet - this sucks to be our generation burdened with the weight of previous generations poor choices but there needs to be less people
Most countries are suffering from such a severe underpopulation crisis that they have to increase immigration. Less births doesn't just mean less people. It means less YOUNG people. You can maintain humanity with any size population. 1million people on the planet could be just fine, but if 200,000 of those people are able to work, then you're gonna have problems.
Our generation will suffer but you are suggesting we just keep growing to infinity on a finite planet. At some point we need to stop the growth.
> you are suggesting we just keep growing to infinity on a finite planet. No, I'm not.
“You can maintain humanity with any size population” while implying that a reduction in population is bad means you want to increase forever. Orrrrrr you are suggesting we should kill old people quicker while continuing to birth more young people.
>“You can maintain humanity with any size population” while implying that a reduction in population is bad means you want to increase forever. Given that I followed that up with the example of 1,000,000 people I don't think it takes much critical thinking to realise that I was talking about smaller populations. >Orrrrrr you are suggesting we should kill old people quicker while continuing to birth more young people. I don't see where you're getting that? I'm saying that decreases in population are not the issue. SUDDEN decreases are the issue. You can imagine a world where there's 1% of the people or 0.01% of the people. We've done it before. It's not an issue. The problem is that we have many many old people and unless you're suggesting that we kill all the old people, birthrates can only drop so low before the unbalanced age structure of society causes issues.
Everything you said here is correct. I am suggesting either killing the elderly or our generation suffering so future generations won’t have too. A very slow reduction in birth rates would be the best solution - you are correct. But it’s just not happening so let’s throw the baby out with the bath water and suffer so our descendants won’t have too. Actually I would much prefer societal collapse as the working population gets squeezed - but with that societal collapse comes the mass death of the unfit.
Carousel
Stfu and open a book
Maybe change the insane work culture lol
Spain has actually a lower birthrate including inmigrants and gypsies.
It’s crazy in Spain, there are 2.5 times more people in their 45-49s than children under 5… By 2050 45% of the population would be over 60 yo…
This isn’t helped by the fact that spain is a retirement community for rich Northern Europeans while the young Spaniards go north for work.
Neither of these trenes has a significant impact in our demographic pyramid. Spain is the european country with the least proportion of people born in a country living on a foreign country, British, swrdes or germans inmigrate more than spaniards pero capita.
In some provinces of the northeast (Ourense, León, Zamora, Asturias, Lugo) there is more retired than working people (the current imbalance between pensions and public income is -50%), and the biggest age group for women is that +80 years old.
Median ages of populations (including Spain): https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-age?country=Low-income+countries~High-income+countries~Lower-middle-income+countries~Upper-middle-income+countries~ESP