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I keep saying it all the time
It isn't about the QUANTITY of life
It's about the QUALITY of life
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have. Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future .... then they will be more likely to have a family.
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
I mean, misery is extremely relative. One of the paradoxes of Japan, thanks to its extremely conservative immigration policy and hyper-competitive economy, is that they've made a genuinely beautiful country to live in but one in which foreigners can't stay and most natives can't enjoy it. This population of NEETs who failed the cut-throat academic setting lack the resources to live a comfortable middle class existence. Meanwhile, the new guest worker program simply brings foreigners in to crush the wage labor out and dispose of them. Only foreign tourists, wealthy labor aristocrats, and the handful of small business owners who figured out how to survive get to enjoy Japan for what it is.
But, like, it shouldn't be a miserable place to live. The amenities are world class. The country's ecology is well-preserved. The education system rivals international peers. They've got advanced industry, mass transit, modern health care, spectacular recreation, a population large enough to keep the ball rolling indefinitely without going Easter Island on their own turf, and excellent placement adjacent to other post-industrial powers.
All they need to do is reform their abysmal work culture. But the work culture has become a tulpa they're convinced creates the beatific conditions, rather than a cancer that's destroying it.
+1 for correct understanding of "tulpa". We need to be aware of our ideas and ideals we create and sustain. Not all tulpas are what we envision. They are, otoh, all teaching spirit-guides.
Beautifully articulated!
without going Easter Island on their own turf
what does this mean
I think they may be referring to the archaeological history of the Easter Island culture .... a wealthy productive society that once thrived on Easter Island in the South Pacific but then used up all the resources of the island until nothing was left and it destroyed their society and they disappeared.
On the one hand, yes having a child with a higher quality of life is better than having many children.
However, there's a good Kurzgesagt video about how the severe decline in birthrate can doom a population. Basically, if a population is not at the very least replacing itself, it will run out of young workers to keep the country going and vastly skew the proportion of elderly people to young workers. Small, rural towns will not survive since young people will flock to cities for work.
Though the video is based on Korea, the same concepts apply for Japan as well.
The logical, healthy approach to natural population growth and maintenance would be to provide social protections and supports for families and young people to grow into a society where they are encouraged and helped to start a family of one or two children in order to supply a healthy steady supply of new people for future generations.
Unfortunately, our world is governed by sociopathic wealthy overlords who demand more from people and want to give less to them. It's not all their fault because the majority of us all sit around and just passively accept it as just a normal part of society. What that will probably mean is that in the future it will be a strange form of population control where children are no longer born but they will be manufactured and bred in order to provide a steady supply of human resources to keep the profit driven capitalist machine running for wealthy overlords.
From the look of how we managed our society in the past century ... we won't solve this problem sensibly, or with any empathy for society as a whole but rather try to deal with it from an economic and financial point of view. The wealthy owning class don't see humanity as a whole that should be supported in any kind of healthy way ... they see humanity as a source of wealth and a group of thinking individuals that can be taken advantage of to extract wealth for owners rather than for the whole of society.
"fear of decline"
also, your argument is based on the totally-nonsense assumption that there "has to be a certain number of workers to sustain the elderly" which is bullshit (frankly). it's not about the number of workers; it's about the productive output, and as we all know, that has risen tremendously the last few years. So there should be no shortage of workers regardless of how many workers there are. Everything else is bullshit the news (which btw are owned by billionaires) tell you because they want to sack a significant part of productive output for themselves - well ofc if rich take 90% of output it's not gonna be enough for everyone. but that's the rich's fault and has nothing to do with "there not being enough workers".
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have.
And working age people are necessary to make (and keep) life manageable, comfortable and sensible. This isn't a hypothetical; they're suffering the effects already. We'd need to lean a lot more into automation before society can function as an inverse pyramid.
Or, we could transition away from people doing made up jobs that don't need to exist to doing things that actually need to get done
Hear me out for a wild idea: businesses could offer living wages, benefits, and work-love balance.
One of the most overcrowded, expensive, energy- and arable land-poor nations on earth with an unemployment crisis and comical economic inefficiency is facing a population decline.
Oh no.
It is not an inverse pyramid though. The older humans are the more likely they die. So you always and up with a pyramide at the top, at least somewhat. With low birth rates a society has to care for fewer children. That results in an actually fairly stable ratio of working age population to dependents.
A shrinking population also means build infrastructure is already built. They just have to keep things running.
Totally agree.
It's nearly impossible in rich areas for young people to afford a family sized house and daycare.
We need to solve those problems if we want young people to have families.
But this idea that more people leads to lower quality of life… that’s 1980s overpopulation panic talking.
Japan’s quality of life is suffering because they don’t have enough working age people to support their society.
Literally, we are going to have some difficulties in the coming decades because we don’t have enough people.
I’m not saying more people is always better, or that we have no limits. But when there are more old people than young people, that’s a bad situation, plain and simple.
Nah, tax the billionaires to bring money back to the working class and to fund the nursing homes. There are enough resources to support an elderly population, it’s all just being hoarded by assholes.
Money isn't a person, though, you still need some people to work in industry, unless autonomous bots are your thing
They could fix this overnight, but that would require making a bunch of old men less comfortable.
The first step is probably not thinking of it as a problem to be fixed.
My two cents with a decade in Japan under my belt:
Edit to add that the above excludes anything related to immigration as I don't really know the right answer/balance there; the above are things that could help immediately without as much handwaving about "destroying our cultural values!" that some complain about by suggesting such daring things as married Japanese couples having separate surnames (illegal in Japan; if both are Japanese, they must unify to one name).
Edit 2: just saw this elsewhere talking about some changes coming: https://leglobal.law/countries/japan/looking-ahead-2025-japan/
They've done nothing, and it's still not improving!
They have to make it easier for them to have families, the men have to be taught to support the family more, and the salary man has to disappear. That's my outside, doesn't know that much, opinion.
The salary man? What's that?
Traditional Japan work culture where you're not allowed to go home until your boss goes home. Boss hates his family and will twiddle his thumbs until 10pm and then say you have to come out for drinks until 2am. If you don't comply, your life will be made hell, and there will be a zero chance of career growth.
This type of culture coupled with shit economy has turbo dived Japanes population growth. There's 10-million "abandoned" homes in Japan, IE old person died alone and you can buy a fully furnished home for $7-50k. Honestly, I'm look at Japan as a place to move and at some point they're going to advertise to open the doors for immigration or completely revamp their work culture....or go extinct as a country.
To be fair not all companies are "black" in that sense. The salaryman isn't dead yet, but AFAIK you can have a good-ish work-life balance in Japan nowadays. It's not quite the complete revamp they need to survive the 21st century, but things are slowly getting better.
How would one realistically buy a house, move to japan, and stay there for years tho?
Like visas and stuff
Be aware that foreigners are always treated as second-class citizens in Japan.
"We understand that the declining birthrate is continuing because many people who wish to raise children are not able to fulfill their wishes," Hayashi said.
That’s just a single neutrino in a supergiant star of a problem.
People aren't just wageslaves. If there are many, it's easy to see people as a "mass product". If there are fewer, i hope that any individual will be seen with higher value.
And, you know, more land and water and clean air for them.
Legalize weed, get more liberal, and allow some immigration and my useless ass would love to live there
I just want to notice that most people have been told by the economy in recent years that more people are needed to fulfill all jobs because the economists wanted to increase the supply of workers and therefore push the wages down.
Recently, economists have started understanding that this (AI) wave of automation/innovation might indeed be the last one, the one that reduces demand for human labor without creating more new jobs as a side-product. As such, the number of workers needed declines. Since economists would favor lower taxes, they try to limit Universal Basic Income to a minimum, but that implies fewer people to pay for. As such, they are taking a "lower fertility rate is better" stance now. We're gonna see a lot of "news articles telling us that the falling birth rate is a good thing" in the near future. It just takes a significant effort to spread that message in the population.
We need to investigate this immediately. If they've discovered Stargate technology and are quietly slipping out the back exit to somewhere habitable (and even that's negotiable for a short-term stop), I'm not getting stuck here when that door slams shut on our impending apocalypse.