Number of Births in Japan To Hit Record Low in 2017 (reuters.com) 133
An anonymous reader shares a report: The number of births in Japan this year has fallen to is lowest since records began more than a century ago with about 941,000 new babies, the health ministry said on Friday, proof if any were needed that it faces an ageing and shrinking population. The number of births will be about 4 percent lower than last year and the lowest since the government started compiling data in 1899, the ministry said.
Bring on the Bbirths (Score:4, Funny)
Proof that slashdot editors are not robots, otherwise they wouldn't make such silly mistakes.
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And maybe we could buy p-p-p-powerbooks for the babies.
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Good times, man. Good times
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/p-p-p-powerbook [knowyourmeme.com]
So? (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. (Score:1)
There's like 38 million people in Tokyo. That is freaking insane. Anyway the "old person problem" will take care of itself with natural deaths.
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Only Japan being at the top in life expectancy may be a bit troublesome.
An obvious solution would be to raise the retirement age. Most Japanese retire at 60, when they qualify for public pensions (social security). To keep the system solvent, the retirement/pension age needs to go up to at least 68.
A big problem in Japan is that most promotions are based on seniority rather than competence, so the system is clogged up with old dolts that have no idea how to manage or lead. So they have an absurdly low retirement system to flush out the incompetents. Raising the retirement s
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To keep the system solvent, the retirement/pension age needs to go up to at least 68.
This may be true from an economic point of view, but different people age differently, and different jobs cause people to age differently.
68 is an extremely high retirement age for a substantial percentage of the population, and dare I say it, downright unfair to a lot of people.
I feel like the world economy is slowly moving toward "you work until you drop dead". I think that's unfortunate.
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68 is an extremely high retirement age
Indeed it is, but if it is any lower the math doesn't work. The longer Japan waits, the worse it will be. My prediction is that it will get a lot worse, since Japan has a very strong cultural preference for inaction, even when delay is obviously foolish.
I feel like the world economy is slowly moving toward "you work until you drop dead". I think that's unfortunate.
Two solutions:
1. Have more babies.
2. Build more robots.
A lot of SOs (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest reasons why this is a real issue are:
1) This rate is not stabilizing anything - it's well below replacement rate, which means population is shrinking.
2) Short term a shrinking population means fewer workers to pay into government funds to help the elderly,
3) Fewer elderly with children mean more reliance on the state in old age.
4) Fewer people mean shops have fewer customers, demand for housing drops, construction starts waning, economy goes down.
5) Long term, what happens when a country cannot sustain a population? Eventually it becomes a totally different nation as others will eventually take it over. I guess if you don't care about the preservation of Japanese culture that's not a problem.
If they were going to a sustainable level that would be one thing, but like I said what is happening is not sustainable without some really bad consequences.
Re:A lot of SOs (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not enough to stabilize at current levels, but it can still stabilize at a lower number, once the elderly have passed on. The time between now and then will still be unpleasant, for all the reasons you mention, but it's not necessarily inevitable doom.
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A shrinking population is bad because it means fewer people handling the tax burden, fewer people for businesses to sell to, fewer people who know the nation's history and character (especially for Japan which is unique in the world in a lot of respects.)
I can see why Japan is leery of opening the gates to immigrants. They want to remain Japan and not have some other culture, be it American, European, Chinese, Korean, or another not overrun what exists now.
So, what can Japan do? I've wondered about someth
Re: A lot of SOs (Score:1)
The solution is very simple, invite overseas Japanese expats back if they are willing to take up homes and jobs that are needed. Tax free.
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If you mean actual expats, I don't think it would be a meaningful number.
If you mean second+ generation overseas people of Japanese decent, then, they already tried that. It hasn't been working all that well. Japan encouraged Japanese-Brazilians to come work in Japan. For the most part, they got crap jobs and some discrimination - because, surprise, people born and raised in a different culture are culturally not Japanese! More importantly, I don't think the Brazilians came in any significant numbers.
Even 1
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There is no "Tax Burden" that was not already a "Laborer burden"
The old are not costing more, since Japan has no social safety net nor free medical care
So answer me this. (Score:1)
You seem to prefer a more! more! more! people attitude. Why? Why do you want to continually increase people on this planet? What is with this need for us to continually breed like a virus?
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Because if you believe in a welfare state, you need more and more people to pay pensions.
Which tells you a welfare state is a Ponzi scheme.
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Nope. A Ponzi scheme is fraud.
A Ponzi scheme is fraud when the private sector does it, but not when the government does it. The difference is that the government can compel people to participate, and force later entrants to pay more, thus preventing collapse.
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Nope. A Ponzi scheme is fraud.
A Ponzi scheme is fraud when the private sector does it, but not when the government does it.
Nope. Sorry, but a Ponzi scheme is a particular kind of fraud where there is no actual investment, just a claim there is, that's concealed by deliberately misrepresenting the situation to the potential investors. The difference is that what we're talking about is when the government is actually investing in what it's supposed to do(namely providing the elements of an orderly society) it is not fraud, whereas a Ponzi Scheme is only about fraud. That's all.
I mean, I suppose you COULD have a fraudulent, kl
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You seem to prefer a more! more! more! people attitude. Why?
More people means more new ideas, and more progress.
Why do you want to continually increase people on this planet?
We don't. But the world would benefit from more educated and productive people like the Japanese. The country with the highest population growth is Niger, which is a poor war-torn drought-ridden country suffering from overgrazing, desertification and unable to even feed themselves. Many of the women in Niger would prefer smaller families but have no access to contraceptives, and have cultural pressures for large families.
We would be much better off if b
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More people means more new ideas, and more progress.
This is a pile of hogwash. All cultures are not created equal. Some cultures can become worse through immigration because those immigrants often bring bad cultures with them. Similarly, some cultures improve through immigration when the immigrants bring a better culture with them.
The idea that lots of immigration and diversity lead to the best ideas bubbling to the top is just wishful thinking.
I'm not anti-immigration, but I think the citizens of any country would be wise to have careful selection criteria
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All cultures are not created equal.
Indeed. Japan produces far more innovation per capita than Niger, perhaps by a thousandfold.
Some cultures can become worse through immigration
Um. You lost me. I thought we were talking about more Japanese babies, not immigration.
Also, higher population always means more pollution.
Except when the extra people are highly educated and productive like the Japanese, and invent better wind turbines, better semiconductors for solar power, better thermal insulators, and blue LEDs (which made white light LEDs possible). Do you really believe that we would have less pollution if Shuji Nakamura [wikipedia.org] had never been born?
Re:A lot of SOs (Score:4, Insightful)
Your post is the quintessence of modern totally broken global economy: it's sustainable only if population keeps growing indefinitely. This is not what we should strive for. This is not what this planet can provide for us. This is not what it can provide even for the 7 billion of people who already inhabit it. We've already past the point of sustainability even if the population growth stops completely - forests keep shrinking, many ecosystems are dying, we trim the pool of available fruits and vegetables which could lead to massive food crises (universally loved bananas are on the verge of extinction), we observe catastrophic levels of global warming, there's massive population migrations and wars related to it.
The Earth doesn't need 7 billion people. It'd be better off with less than 5 if we are to preserve this planet and our species.
We must readjust and though the cost will be enormous, the benefits will be indisputable.
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And your post is the poster child for "I didn't actually read anything, or try to understand what little I read, but I am going to blather on on a point I feel somewhat strongly about anyways".
I know it can be quite difficult to grasp this, but sustainable doesn't mean growing. In fact the parent poster that you replied to didn't advocate for GROWING anything. It advocated for sustaining the current status quo, or at the very least a a decline that isn't as sharp as what is happening.
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Re:A lot of SOs (Score:5, Insightful)
1) This rate is not stabilizing anything - it's well below replacement rate, which means population is shrinking.
Not all jobs need to be replaced. If nobody makes trash, nobody is needed to take out the trash.
2) Short term a shrinking population means fewer workers to pay into government funds to help the elderly
The aging people payed government funds per capita at expected higher numbers. There is now fewer people. If the government doesn't have the money to support the fewer people then they are screwing the people.
3) Fewer elderly with children mean more reliance on the state in old age.
Fewer means less. Fewer people need less assistance.
4) Fewer people mean shops have fewer customers, demand for housing drops, construction starts waning, economy goes down.
Economy is related to population, "per capita". You can't have a down economy if it is reduced at the rate of population decline.
5) Long term, what happens when a country cannot sustain a population? Eventually it becomes a totally different nation as others will eventually take it over. I guess if you don't care about the preservation of Japanese culture that's not a problem.
Their population isn't shrinking towards extinction.
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Not all jobs need to be replaced. If nobody makes trash, nobody is needed to take out the trash.
All you're saying here is that instead of one person not contributing to the economy there will be two people not contributing to the economy. Essentially the same conclusion as the GP but twice as bad.
Job replacement is important to prevent economic collapse. It doesn't matter if that job is important or not, what matters is that money changes hands and is further spent in other areas. One less garbage collector means one less person buying ramen. The garbage may not need to have been collected because we
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Japan is super overcrowded. They can stand to downsize.
Inviting in immigrants who don't share your language or culture is the road to becoming a totally different nation as others will eventually take it over. The preservation of Japanese culture will never happen in such a case. It will be drowned like a spot of cream in a cup of coffee.
Peak Population Crisis (Score:2)
From my post in 2009, echoing your points: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net... [p2pfoundation.net]
[After citing some articles with statistics on low birth rates in most industrialized countries...]
Again, sick or dead young people can't pay for the health care of old people, nor can sick or dead young people be health care practitioners for old people. You would think old people could see it, but maybe it will take some leadership to help them see it?
Again, this is not to disagree with Michel's main point that people need to
focus
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https://countrydigest.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Population-of-Japan-chart.gif
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Not coming back down "slightly". This is the start of a dramatic population decline [wordpress.com], essentially the 20th Century population rise in reverse, bringing their population back down to 1900 levels in 2100. A little after 2100 the population of Japan with be only 1/3 of its peak of 2005: 40 million instead of 120 million.
To change this the fertility rate will need to increase. It is currently 1.46, it needs to climb to 2.1 or so, almost 50% higher, to stabilize the population. Even if they can develop policies t
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Its not a laudable thing, and lowering the population is not a bad idea. But it needs to be done very gradually to avoid some very difficult transition periods.
Japan is facing some of those difficult transitions as a result of its population trends.
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Why is overpopulation a laudable thing?
The Japanese home islands are already highly populated -- no need to increase the population. Stabilizing at early-1900s levels would be much more sustainable.
Over population isn't their biggest problem; the population pyramid no longer looks like a pyramid when compared to 1950:
https://www.google.fi/search?q... [google.fi]
If it continues to go in this direction, Japan could be facing serious problems (if they aren't already), unless they implement something like planned immigration, for example. Germany has a similar problem with their population pyramid, but the difference is Germany's rate of net migration per head of the population is over 5.5 times that of Japan's:
https [wikipedia.org]
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So they'll have more doctors and nurses for a few decades. And increased automation will help take care of the elderly.
Print money to get over the "hump" and move on -- no mass immigration needed.
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Bukkake! (Score:5, Funny)
Stop it, your kids are confused. Never going to knock up their GFs/wives that way.
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Introduce mandatory creampie pr0n in Japan.
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Yeah, over the last couple of decades, Japanese porn has transitioned. Around 2000, pretty much all Japanese porn had condoms and ejaculation on chest or face. Now most of it's done without condoms with ejaculation in vagina more often than not ("nakadashi").
Great news (Score:4, Insightful)
Now the rest of the world needs to follow suit.
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Yep, because if there's anything better than one screwed economy, it's ALL screwed economies!
Population decline needs to happen very gradually as the result of baby boomers dying, and not before. After that bubble of people have stopped requiring resources we can discuss gradual decline. Otherwise countries will be properly screwed.
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It's a huge problem for Japan. As the population becomes top heavy the tax base and care staff just are not there. They have the high costs of elderly care, and the high costs of raising children, resulting in fewer children and creating a feedback loop.
They need to get to at least a stable population.
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It's a little late to be thinking about it, isn't it?
Wars and epidemics aside, the size of your workforce is fairly predictable roughly twenty years in advance.
The bandaid solution is immigration. Why aren't they doing that?
bbirths another bitcon story? (Score:2)
Even worse for some European countries... (Score:5, Interesting)
For these countries, they will have to rely on immigration which some of them are already doing.
I guess that in about 50 years, these countries' demographic makeup in terms of race will be very different.
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In any case, the "huge spike in violent crime and terror attacks in Europe" has to be interpreted as meaning that Europe is beginning to get almost as violent as the United States, but actually not getting there, it's still less violent by about a factor of four.
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> Do you have any idea of the huge spike in violent crime and terror attacks in Europe which were non existent before 2015 ?
I lived through the IRA years. It seems to have been better in recent years. Nobody has tried to murder immediate family members in this decade or the last.
A pretty graph on Wikipedia supports that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In the list of incidents [wikipedia.org] we can see in recent years, islamic terrorists were the perpetrators of most of the attacks, they have not been perpetrating near
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Europe's already seeing a significant decrease in its standard of living. It will only get worse. At this point there may be no salvaging Europe. It will become a third-world hellhole much like the terrible places in Africa and the Middle East where these unskilled, uneducated, unproductive arrivals came from.
Governments are more interested in the "next generation," not today's immigrants. Canada has been successful to a degree. I am sure this is what they (the governments), are looking at.
European countries can help themselves by putting measures in place that discourage "white flight" [understand...iety.ac.uk].
And better still, they should discourage powerful countries (read the USA) from fomenting chaos in distant lands.
Remember that the Syrian refugees are in Europe because some powerful country decided that it was better to bomb
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Citation needed.
(You bleeding xenophobic idiot.)
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Citation provided.
The Total Fiscal Cost Of Illegal Immigration Is A Staggering $135 Billion, Report Says [dailycaller.com]
Illegal immigrants and their children eat up $135 billion in public funds every year, according to a report that examines the fiscal impact of unauthorized immigration in the U.S.
The study, released Wednesday by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), is one of the most comprehensive analyses of the costs of illegal immigration to date. It concludes that illegal immigration is a “staggering and crippling” drain on the public treasury.
Governments at the federal, state and local levels spent a total of $134.86 billion on illegal aliens in 2016, according to FAIR estimates.
At the same time, tax contributions by illegal immigrants did not come close to offsetting expenditures. Governments at all levels collected just $18.97 billion in taxes from illegal aliens, meaning that illegal immigration was responsible for a net fiscal drain of $115.89 billion last year
Whether he is a "xenophobe" (unlikely) is an open question. On the other had you are certainly uninformed.
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Sorry, but in sum it appears to be true, ... at least under the immigration policies of the recent past.
Mass immigration costs government $296 billion a year, depresses wages [washingtontimes.com]
The report also concludes that new arrivals aren’t assimilating as well as past waves of immigrants. They struggle to learn English and to increase their wages at the rates of immigrants just a few decades ago.
Written in heavily caveated academic language, the report tested a number of models of economic and fiscal policy based on different assumptions about immigration. That meant the scholars came up with ranges of outcomes rather than firm answers.
But those ranges were sometimes conclusive, particularly when it came to government finances. The researchers tested eight scenarios, and in each of them taxpayers came out worse.
The best-case scenario put the federal government ahead but states behind, for a total loss of $43 billion in 2013. The worst-case scenario showed federal, state and local governments losing $296 billion in 2013. That would be equivalent to about 4 percent of total government spending that year
Maybe it will change in the future with policy changes and a border wall.
sad (Score:3)
On the other hand, it produces really weird side effects like social repression, workplace stress, conformity in a bad way, racism / xenophobia, and relevant to this point... high cost of living.
If they don't start letting immigrants help them, and in a big way, this amazing culture will really die out. I mean, their countryside is basically emptying out.
Thank you (Score:2)
I commend the Japanese for understanding and taking action on the realization that this planet needs fewer people. Thank you, guys.
We may only hope that other nations (India and China) and continents (Africa and Americas) follow.
You'd probably be interested in this TED talk [ted.com] on population growth and inevitable starvation. And AGW will only make things worse.
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I commend the Japanese for understanding and taking action on the realization that this planet needs fewer people. Thank you, guys.
Population is worthless indication of anything. A single person in the developed world consumes the resources of dozens in an undeveloped country.
If you want a metric that means something try persons per household or resources consumed per person.
We may only hope that other nations (India and China) and continents (Africa and Americas) follow.
You'd probably be interested in this TED talk on population growth and inevitable starvation. And AGW will only make things worse.
Just another fool spewing discredited Malthusian nonsense. If you want something real to be afraid of try loss of crop diversity.
Not unexpected (Score:1)
Considering the advances in contraception and reproductive rights.
Add to that:
1. Japanese women putting career ahead of family, until their mid-30's
2. Japanese women who reach their mid-30's and decide dating isn't worth it.
3. Japanese men not living up to their women's standards (most men in Japan don't look like a member of the band Arashi) or women just prefer the single life.
4. Men, a far cry from the badasses they were just a generation or two ago, prefer to live at home with their parents, sleep with
Smart Groups Are Shrinking (Score:1)
Seven billion humans. The smart populations are shrinking as they weed out those among them who are unable to cope. Quality over quantity is going to win out in the future. We could have had eugenics, but instead we will have a vast lumpenproletariat ruled over by cynical and merciless overlords. Good work, democracy!
Pay people more (Score:4, Interesting)
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Pay people more . . . and work them less. This isn't because they don't want kids. Multiple studies and surveys have shown that. They can't afford to have kids . ..
Are you sure you're looking at data for Japan? You seem to be missing the mark on this. The problem is more fundamental than not having kids, a large percentage of them aren't even having sex.
Why are almost half of Japan's millennials still virgins? [cnn.com]
The problem isn't just money, it is social, and probably mainly social.
Cookie cutter socialist solutions probably aren't the answer here.
They can't afford dating (Score:2)
So yeah, cookie cutter socialist solutions are _exactly_ what's needed here, at least if they actually want to solve the birth rate problem. Or I guess they could do what the States does and get religion and ban birth control. But barring that it's either socialism or Japan goes away as a country. The South has much higher rates than the North and Western states, but
It is due to Manga (Score:2)
Allow epidural (Score:2)
My wife’s friend is Japanese and told us epidural isn’t available during births. She delivered three kids all without epidural. She wanted a boy because the first two were girls. For one, she was in labor for 16 hours. Childbirth is already difficult enough and without epidural that just adds to more reasons to have fewer children.