I just recently spent some time in Japan (Kyoto), and I frequently travel to Tokyo. It always interests me to see these Japanese birthrate articles because anecdotally you might never know it while walking around the cities - you'll see so many young parents with babies strapped to their chests / in strollers / on bicycles.
I mean if you're in Tokyo you won't really notice - the effect of Japan's demographic shift has been that everyone moves to the largest cities and the countryside gets emptied out, which is why afaik Tokyo's population is still increasing even as Japan as a whole has shrunk in the last few years.
To notice the effects you have to go out into smaller prefectures and notice things like elementary schools closing and towns merging because they no longer have enough people to support public services for both individually.
I have lived for the past twenty-five years in Japan’s second-largest city, Yokohama, in an area convenient for shopping and mass transit. While the neighborhood immediately around my home hasn’t changed much during that time and is still a mix of single-family houses and two- and three-story apartment buildings, along the main streets and waterfront there has been steady construction of high-rise condominiums. The local public elementary school, which my two daughters attended and which my grandson will enter in 2026, is facing a critical shortage of classroom space as families with children move into the area [1]. Parts of Tokyo are facing a similar crisis [2].
I haven’t traveled much outside the major cities since before the pandemic, but the steady depopulation in many areas is said to be equally apparent.
> Ministry officials said deaths outnumbered births in the area by a wider margin than in previous years, fewer people entered the country from abroad amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and more people moved from the capital to other prefectures.
Its depicted in Wolf Children animated movie, where newly widowed mum sees a "we pay you to live in this village house" as best for her limited savings and she teams up with 5 fellow mums to commute her kids to school to a town with one.
we recently traveled to Kaga and that's where I saw what appeared to be the "aging population" in full effect. it was a pretty big city around the Kagaonsen station, and it did look like it _used_ to be bustling and full of life at _some_ point. now, you can drive around and you'll barely see anyone around. if you do see someone, it's likely someone at least 50.
though the caveat is that maybe we visited at the wrong time (it was a weekday). maybe the youth only show up on the weekends.
> anecdotally you might never know it while walking around the cities
The decline is entirely in rural areas. Entire villages emptying out. Defunct buildings, no municipal coverage or money to demolish them. No workers at all. Bathroom not working?
Yeah, take a dump in the forest.
Want to see a doctor? Drive 50 miles if you are lucky.
And it's not really a matter of low birthrate at these places. In fact, Tokyo has consistently had the lowest birthrate of all Japanese prefectures over the last few decades. The problem is that young people are migrating to large metropolitan areas in search for better opportunities.
It's also worth noting that despite the image, Japan's birth rate is HIGH for its region and among developed countries it is the almost the highest. Japan's fertility is higher than China's, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The only arguably developed state in Asia which has a higher fertility rate is Brunei and I don't really know if it counts - it's very conservative and the economy is mostly based on oil and gas.
Japan's problem is that it has industrialized earlier than its Asian neighbors and the effects of low birth rates are already very evident (in the countryside). It also got the attention in western media as the poster child for low birth rate, but it shouldn't be — that honor should probably go to South Korea (fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023).
I'm fascinated by declining birth rates, especially where it's sharpest like in Japan and South Korea. Trying to imagine all the long-term consequences of it, or how it ends, is mind-bending. I do hope that it ultimately leads to places like Japan and South Korea becoming more open to immigration, especially if they also become more affordable (although even if real-estate becomes more affordable, that might be canceled out by increased costs due to labor shortages).
Any man in those countries i can guarantee you can marry and have kids today, provided they fly to a poor country and find a woman (who is attracted and willing)
All men in well off countries have it tough.
I was shocked when I first arrived in Europe and US - how many hoops an average man has to jump through to just get shot at dating.
Men were trying to be 6ft+, 6 figure and Comedy King just to get dates with average women.
My FAANG friends (both whites, black and Asians) make lots of money when compared to average person, they are interesting and have a high IQ too. Guess what?they had zero luck with women.
It was ruthless - I just told my FAANG bros, you know what? You can skip all that and just be fit and decent human being and fly to a poor country and treat the woman with kindness, generosity and love and respect and you'll get the kids and wife you want within a few months.
And soon enough now most of them are married who took action.
You can cry as much as you want but women in developed countries have lots of options and are super risk averse and very demanding in what they want.
It's not about economy when FAANG bros who make 6 figure income are crying for basic level of attention and affection. So I'll never buy into this argument (well houses are expensive you know)
There are tons of men in country who don't even have 6 figure income yet they are married and have kids.
In West, how attractive, popular and bad boy you are matters more than how much money you've.
From a recent Astral Codex Ten monthly links email:
> 54: Koreans are not okay:
https://x.com/airkatakana/status/1847964003416543478 ("83% of young korean women think of south korea as “hell” and 80% of them want to leave korea. if your mental model of south korea does not match this, it’s your mental model and not the data that is wrong")
Extrapolate to forward looking fertility rate. South Korea total fertility rate as of 2023 is 0.72.
Interesting, and that's a shame. When I lived in Seoul as an American 10 years ago[1], I loved it. Everything there seemed nicer, more functional, and safer than in any city that I've ever experienced in America. It had an attractive mix of shiny new stuff and ancient stuff. There was natural beauty even just outside of the city, easily accessible by public transit. I'd like to see them open up to immigration because my wife and I would actually consider moving our family there permanently one day if it were an option.
[1] For just a year, and on the US government payroll, so obviously a very different experience from growing up there as a Korean.
While this is probably all true -- none of it deals with culture, family, employment mobility, and social services.
I think S. Korea has a long way to go to meet up with the modern day. It can be very frustrating to see women's rights move forward globally, however glacially, and feel like you don't have those things.
Not just young women, but older people too (~64%). Seems hard to believe they literally think it's hell, without serious societal breakdown. Are immigration and suicide sky high?
> South Korea has the fourth highest suicide rate in the world and the highest among OECD countries. The elderly in South Korea are at the highest risk of suicide, but deaths from teen suicide have been rising since 2010. In 2022 suicide caused more than half of all deaths among South Koreans in their twenties. It is the leading cause of death for those between the age of 10 and 39, in line with most OECD countries.
Shouldn't it be even higher if you think your country is literally hell? Maybe they have a more optimistic idea of hell than me. I guess that squares with 3% more believing it's hell than wants to leave.
I still think this survey doesn't make sense, or at least something is lost in transactional.
A 2021 study further found that one in three Korean women have experienced domestic violence, with intimate partners responsible for 46 percent of these cases.
declining birth rates are not a problem unless you are an aspiring empire, or if you are surrounded by enemies, or if you have a huge debt.
As GPD falls, the share of debt becomes greater and the burden falls on fewer people. So taxes must go up, productivity must go way up (death loop, adults working more and not seeking families), or welfare spend must go down
> unless you are an aspiring empire, or if you are surrounded by enemies, or if you have a huge debt.
Or if you depend on future generations to take care for older ones once they reach retirement age, which is all of them. (A savings account can't care for the elderly, so debt doesn't really have much to do with it; you can see the problem entirely while staying in real economic terms without looking at money.)
You can make up for some of that with immigration, but whether people will be very accepting of something like a >50% immigration rate over a single or two generations is also questionable.
I know this seems crazy, but if a country is willing to enforce a one-child-policy might they just turn their old folks into soylent green as well?
It doesn't mesh with existing chinese culture, so I wouldn't expect this to happen in our lifetime, but it wouldn't be the first time malthusian government policy is deployed at large scale.
If debt is just 0s, consider you haven't been out much. I dont think you'd get a good receiption for that message in 1950s germany, or today in argentina, or lebanon.
Yeah, "surrounded by enemies" comes to mind for South Korea. I served there as an American in defense of the ROK, as generations of American troops have done since WWII, and I think it's ironic that in 100 years they might cease to exist not because of a North Korean and Chinese invasion but because their birth rate simply led to a collapse. (Although North Korea and China have their own demographic problems - I'm not sure if that defuses or heats up the situation.)
The socioeconomic system is broken, not the people. Population boom only happened because women weren't empowered, contraceptives weren't wildly available. For the human, this is great, if it is their choice (we should want to support agency and autonomy imho). For the systems? Bad for them. Build better systems. If your economic system requires a total fertility rate floor above what a combination of desired and realized fertility is, you're gonna have a bad time.
People will argue about the cost of caring for the elderly, sovereign debt that will need to be paid back, and so on. Well, perhaps consider the obligations you're originating and foisting on a future that may not pay for them.
Comments I've written with robust citations for this thesis:
There is always this uncomfortable undercurrent of misogyny in all these fertility discussions along the lines of "how do we coerce women to have more children?" or "it's a woman's duty to breed." I'd like to hope we are more enlightened than that, but the sentiment is worryingly pervasive.
The doomsayers are probably right, we are in for hard economic times as birth rates decline. But maybe that is a good thing, and we can finally come up with a system that doesn't depend on exponential population growth.
That's not really what's happening - in Korea, there are many young people, male and female, who would be willing to have kids if life is easier. They don't because they can't afford a house, or they don't want their kids to go through the brutal education system they suffered themselves.
Or they are simply overworked and don't have time to raise kids.
So, many "pro-birth" policies are aimed at helping women at work so that they don't have to sacrifice their career. But the government isn't doing much (our current president said people should be "allowed" to work 120 hours per week if they wanted to - and somehow still got elected), and what little policy Korea has is constantly attacked by conservative young men for being "sexist" because it's "feminist propaganda" that victimizes those poor young men.
And every year Korea slides further into population collapse.
How much of this is due to housing price increases? It naively seems like rising house prices trigger an arms race in education and productivity among young people to afford housing.
If the labor quota is high enough… then nothing else will happen. GDP will rise, but individuals will steadily be sacrificing family, entertainment, and joy.
In poorer nations people have more children because, while life is hard, it doesn't get much harder if you have one more kid. You don't have to put your kid to 12 years of education; you don't have to worry about college fund. If you are a subsistence farmer life may actually get easier because a kid is a free labor.
That was also reflected in past Korean society where people frequently said the cost of one more kid is just "a spoon and a pair of chopsticks."
Very different from modern, industrialized Korea, where the lifetime cost of raising one kid equals multiple years of your salary. Unless you don't care about your kids and think they'll just sustain themselves by working in the rice paddy from age six to seventy.
>My developer friend in Japan who always wanted a family never received much dates and when he did not one commited.
I had absolutely no trouble getting dates here when I moved here. There must have been something about your friend that just isn't attractive to Japanese women. Is he religious, overweight, or have a beard? You can't expect a person to be equally attractive to any arbitrary group; different cultures have different standards.
Edit: if he put right in his dating app bios "I'm looking for a woman who wants 4 kids!" I can see why he didn't get many responses from Japanese women.
He only wanted 1 kid but his wife convinced him to have 4.
No one wanted kids, he's slight above average looking japanese man with good personality but whenever he tried to get commitment, he got dumped even if relationship was several years long.
He told me it's because they don't want to take risk.
>whenever he tried to get commitment, he got dumped even if relationship was several years long.
Interesting story, but talking about commitment and having kids is something you need to do before you're even seriously dating someone; it's not something you wait several years to bring up. What you're looking for in a relationship and what you want out of one in the future is one of the most basic compatibility factors in a relationship, so it should be discussed after a few dates or so.
I kinda feel like something's missing from this story.
Most people only ask "if you are open to having kids in future"
Followed by rough estimate of timeline which may or may not materialize with the same person.
A lot of people don't really know much about themselves, change their mind later, or give the compatible answers because they don't wanna lose the anticipated benefits of being with this person.
I mean that's a lot of pressure for anybody if it's already a set number. I'd say it's better to advertise that you're open to having kids, or at most that you want to have kids.
Even if you want many kids, your potential partner might want kids, too, but feel pressured to have them right away if you say 4.
This is an important point that's usually under discussed. From the 70s onwards, you had multiple governments with anti-natalist policies from Malthusian fears. You had China with the one child policy for urban dwellers, in India max two children were encouraged if you want to be in polite society, feminism encouraged anti-natalist thinking in almost all countries. It was only relatively recently, maybe last 15 years, that concerns about low fertility rates started being discussed.
“Anti natalism” is not a genetic trait that gets inherited. Any woman can look at what another woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/infant rearing and think they might want to avoid that. Or avoid doing it multiple times.
OTOH there are some with a great desire to procreate even though it might mean (temporary) hardship or doesn't fit with their socioeconomic status. I know several of those.
>“Anti natalism” is not a genetic trait that gets inherited.
Citation needed. There are many things influenced by genetic traits. So many that I think the burden of proof is that you'd have to show that there's no influence of genetic traits here. Add to this memetic influences, and it's clear evolutionary biology that those that want to produce children will have more offspring and thus at some point antinatalism should be reduced as a portion of society.
It is possible for genes to influence the desire to birth more children, but it seems apparent to me that humans are capable of sufficiently complex cause and effect analysis that genetic influence would be insufficient to drive this specific decision making process, since it’s not a snap decision and there’s so many opportunities to reverse course.
Human beings are the only animal (that I am aware of) that can short circuit the process of reproduction by completely de-linking sex and pregnancy.
It is possible that evolution resulted a trait (cognitive plus physical ability to manipulate nature) that ultimately is not conducive to procreation.
And it is possible that in a million years, perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, or humans don’t exist but some other species exists with a different mechanism of reproduction, or humans figure out how to make babies in artificial wombs, or humans start living a lot longer, etc etc.
> perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant
I guess technically it should be “because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, be financially independent, and physically independent/secure”
Well more typical would be something like the tribe that survives into the future has always removed women's ability to not get pregnant while the other tribe dies off.
I guess there are two types of social evolution, or evolution in general... One is where one tribe changes its customs over time, so evolves through intra tribe competition. Another is where you have multiple tribes with different customs, so evolves through inter tribe competition. Reality would be a mix of these two models.
>Any woman can look at what another woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/infant rearing and think they might want to avoid that.
They can, but then in some cultures, their religious leaders will tell them they need to go through all that, many times, or else their god will be angry with them.
Yes, I was alluding to that. My greatest concern for my daughter or her kids is the eventual loss of women’s rights simply due to shrinking of population of tribes that support women’s rights and proliferation of tribes that do not.
Yes, I don't have a daughter, but I'm also very concerned about that. It feels like there's an assumption that the tribes that don't support women's rights will adopt that cultural mindset over time, but I'm not so sure it's a good assumption.
Poor women have children because they often don’t have the choice not to have children. That is why every single country when women gain rights and financial independence, the total fertility rate plummets.
Lower and middle class people in developed countries have fewer kids because they want to provide a home with their kids’ own room, be in good school districts because they are afraid of what happens if their kid doesn’t get into a good college, etc. The fear of not being able to provide a certain minimum quality of life prevents many from having kids.
It actually switches back to richer women having more kids because they have more security of owning their home, affording childcare while still being able to save for retirement, having health insurance, etc.
I just find it hard that these times, it's more like heaven from human history point of view.
At least in there, there's no active war (there is a threat but bullets aren't flying around or you have problem acquiring food and water), and cities are moderately safe, you can buy stuff with a few clicks, many entertainments to choose from, convenient phones etc etc. And you get to take advantage of those without earning a fortune.
It's so absurd to think this is some sort of hell. They don't know actual hell like past and some present people are experiencing.
Why don't those people appreciate the situation they're in?
The working culture in South Korea absolutely seems like hell compared to most of human history. People had much more free time in agricultural societies, and they mostly spent it outdoors, instead of slaving it in the offices doing meaningless work to make shareholders richer.
People starving, born with disabilities/incurable diseases, people at the front line of a war, especially if critically wounded, people caught as a prisoner being tortured, people living their lives as a slave with physical violence and any other serious situations I couldn't imagine, seem like worse than someone at least with physically safe condition and possibly a way to escape if one wants to.
Exactly. And hedonic adaptation makes all that entertainment with phones, TVs etc meaningless.
Lack of free time is hell. Especially if you spend all your days in the same drab office building. Office work is fine in and of itself, but humans are meant to move, to be outside for a good portion of the day. Work-life balance is more important than the latest gadgets.
Hedonic adaptation. Humans can quickly become accustomed to circumstances, rich or poor, and then they can start criticizing it. This is in fact one of the prime drivers for innovation in the world, because those that thought everything was already good enough wouldn't be the ones innovating.
The term "Hell Joseon" was widely popularized (Joseon is the old name of Korea, and incidentally still the name used for North Korea in Korean, Chinese and Japanese).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon
I think only a small percentage of respondents have brought their aspiration into practice, but they obviously think other countries are better than Korea. I'd love to see a poll asking them which countries they would prefer.
I don't think they are entirely wrong. Economic hardship and uncertain future for young people are prevalent in all developed economies, but South Korea also suffers from terrible work-life balance and strict work culture (probably significantly worse than Japan on both counts). And recent admissions scandals[1][2] have made Koreans even more skeptical about the fairness of the system. I'm not sure if Ivy League universities are any better, but the Korean scandals were really in-your-face.
No. Pollution, likely microplastics are preventing and interfering with reproductive behaviour.
Understand, we are complex beings. The desire to reproduce is not conscious. It is innate and compulsive. And if you interfere with that hormonally derived urge, this is the result.
It's not about money. That's on the conscious side. People had scads of kids during depressions and recessions, even when the pill was available, having kids was more important than not.
And if you looka around the world, the amount of children has nothing to do with the country, or culture. Women oppressed or not, it doesn't matter.
And what culture is more unique than Japan compared to the West? It's not culture, for the entire planet has a collapse in birthrates.
I think that is hyperbole, but I agree with your general take.
Maybe we are just at the top of the human population sigmoid curve and this is a normal collective correction. We've hit the carrying capacity of the post-industrialized world. Food isn't the limiter as much as an unconscious 'perceived opportunity for growth'.
It’s amazing that rather than recognize that the rich have too much and we too little, we’d rather organize around them hoarding so much wealth that the population declines.
Like we could not imagine a fairer distribution that would incentivize more people to have children in a positive fashion.
I think we might even go the other direction - circumscribe the rights of women directly to increase the birth rate, Handmaids Tale style.
People don't want to have kids even with all the incentives in the world. For many, it's now a lifestyle choice. And I mean, who can fault them, no one can be forced to have kids (unless you want to go through some unsavory means).
What incentives? That really depends on where you are. In the US, having kids is horrifically expensive. You can look forward to tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, even with good insurance, just for one hospital birth. Then having to pay tons of money for medical insurance for your kid, plus all the other regular expenses that come from child-rearing. Don't even get me started on the costs for daycare. In the US, there's enormous disincentives to having children.
Here in Japan, it's much better: all medical expenses for children are free. There's also a cash bonus for having kids. Daycare is still a problem though, but the cost isn't nearly as awful as in America, however availability is a real problem.
The real costs add up in the 40 hour work week. School, daycare, and even the legal frameworks those operate in are intended for at least one parent to live close to the child and work at most part time.
By and large millennials in the US were the first generation where both parents were raised to work for a variety of good reasons. How many jobs really let parents cut out at 4 to commute home for a 5pm pickup?
Now consider the childcare and opportunity costs of raising children.
>How many jobs really let parents cut out at 4 to commute home for a 5pm pickup?
That's an American problem because of its car culture. In better societies, there's public transit, and/or cities/towns are walkable, so kids can just walk home by themselves. Here in Japan, kids are far more independent and have no trouble getting themselves to and from school, even with non-working parents.
Not the US, I mean in Europe, specially Scandinavia. They've tried so many things to incentivize people but still people don't have kids. It seems to be that as countries develop and get richer, the number of kids born tends towards zero.
I like to joke that microplastics are responsible for social changes, and I don't deny that it has some effect but it is probably minor in the grand scheme of things
How is it bad? Economically, it's a burden. Older people are more expensive, and the ratio of young to old people has certain economic implications too. As you pointed out, there are good and bad aspects to it, but the bad aspects are real and not histrionic mirages.
1. directly: in a democracy where the majority of voters are 60+ years old and retired, politicians will end up seeing the old and retired as their base and pandering to them; and this will lead to them implementing policies that serve the old and retired, to the detriment of those of working age. (See: literally anything about Japan's work culture.)
2. indirectly: social mores evolve over time, but this mostly occurs within the more-flexible, still-identity-forming minds of people of young ages. You can think of "modern" social mores as viral memes that spread easily between the "young" nodes in a social network; but which won't spread to/through the "old" nodes of the network. A a "top-heavy" society, where the old greatly outnumber the young, doesn't have the mean virality coefficient necessary to allow "modern" social mores to spread and achieve fixation. This in turn means that younger generations will feel they are living in a society that is "stuck in the past", with "outdated" thinking, where they cannot affect meaningful social change, despite everyone in their own (usually generational-cohort) social circles agreeing with them.
For a while I've also had the gut feeling that the average age creeping up does something to the general mood of a culture. Young people are naturally more restless, ambitious, daring, and when the median person is very "settled" in their ways and closer to death than birth I think a certain vitality is lost.
Not only that, but the young have to support the old in their retirement. This becomes a huge problem when there are multiple elderly per young person and the young find that they are spending most of their time and effort supporting the aging population. The elderly start being seen as a burden on society.
Said differently, many government programs for citizen retirement benefits (eg Social Security) are structured as Ponzi Schemes that require population increases over time so later generations can pay for earlier generations.
If population is declining, it breaks how these programs are funding because there’ll be less n the younger generation to pay for the more people in the older generation.
putting the problem in terms of economics isn't incorrect, but I think it can be framed in a slightly more human and horrifying way:
As a fact of nature, young adults must do the hard labor necessary to keep the world operating. Historically, there have always been more of them than there were people physically incapable of doing that work: the old and very young.
If there are too many old people and not enough young people, who will take care of the old people?
Change isn't necessarily bad, but rapid change usually is. And reproduction rates that more than halve the population per generation is an extremely rapid change.
Structure society and economy in a way that makes it appealing to have children (both in that the hypothetical parents feel safe in doing so without endangering their own quality of life, and in that they can imagine the hypothetical children to be happy too), and people will have them.
People that think it’s purely an economic problem are wrong. Economic and political solutions are not enough. You also need social solutions too. Like make it cool to have kids and solutions that allowa women of child bearing age to be around other women who have young children
Having children in modern society is pretty isolating. We had it very good because our neighbors have children of similar age and we could share the burdens of cooking and watching them while simultaneously also seeing other adults. If both parents work and you do all your chores you have approximately zero time to socialize outside your immediate vicinity. It takes a village but nobody has a village any longer
What do you mean by "need less people?" Normally, technology/automation is thought of as reducing the need for labor, but the total amount of labor needed is still proportional to the total number of people.
There are many roles that haven’t been automated yet, including elder care.
I’m skeptical that nurses could be enhanced by automation to the degree of them managing more patients, but with the same quality of care as they do now.
Because people make societal level choices that lead to low birth rate when things are terribly wrong with the society that demands less people for one reason or another
Just select cities. I had a decent bachelor pad from 2014 to 2020 that was 55,000 yen (~$550 at the time) with no rent adjustment over that time either, and I'm in an urban area of ~1 million people. Current place is ~82,000 but with the Yen getting body-slammed by the US dollar it's not that much more expensive.
"Voluntary" is such a tricky word. The low birth rate was entirely manufactured by societal norms instituted by the elites. Not just in japan, but in much of the world ( US, china, russia, EU, etc ).
> and not caused by an endemic health concern
Declining population is an endemic health concern. If you don't put a stop to it, the nation eventually ceases to exist.
And actually it's not all humans who would go extinct, it's modern urban/semi-urban more-liberal people. There are pockets of often-rural highly religious populations that are well above the replacement rate right now. Basically Kamala Harris supporters are going extinct and Donald Trump supporters will populate the future, unless something changes.
In Japan, it's the rural areas that are going extinct while the urban areas are increasing in population. We'll probably see the same thing in the future in the US as well.
No, not unless the US changes its zoning laws drastically. They won't allow new housing in the cities, so the only way to increase population is if hordes of homeless people move in and camp out. However, the urban areas can increase in size, so that large areas are basically gigantic and growing suburbs.
Well even in Japan it's all urban sprawl. Tokyo is the largest metropolis in the world, so if the US follows suit, it would similarly grow outward not upward. Solving zoning law issues seems to be extremely difficult as NIMBYs explicitly vote against solutions as it harms them directly. I understand why they vote that way, but we would need top down solutions which are hard to come by politically.
>Well even in Japan it's all urban sprawl. Tokyo is the largest metropolis in the world
This isn't true (the urban sprawl part): while Tokyo is the largest metro area and does have a lot of sprawl, it's also continuously growing upwards, and not that much outwards because there really isn't much room left on the periphery (ocean and mountains are hard limits). Older, smaller buildings are regularly being knocked down and replaced by new, taller buildings.
I don't think so at all. Growing outwards only works if you have an instantaneously fast transit system. There's a reason the real estate in central Tokyo is some of the most valuable in the world: because it's close to everything. The farther out you go, the less valuable land is, because it takes time to get to the center (or anywhere else).
This is of course true in American cities too, but zoning laws largely prevent new (and taller) housing construction close to the center, so they have no choice but to build outwards. In Japan, building upwards is much more feasible, only requiring that you acquire some desirable existing property first. (Of course, there are some limits to what you can build on it, but it's nothing like in the US so it's much easier to get approval to build some nicer and/or bigger/taller.)
I live in a depopulating regional capital city of Japan, and we're still building upwards. In the past 4 years or so, I can count at least 7 large (12+ story, 150+ unit) condo buildings that have gone up. People want access to entertainment and short commutes to their jobs.
The thing that needs to change is zoning in cities. We don't let people move into our big cities in the US the way they do in Japan. That's the only change we need.
Not Japanese myself, but have some Japanese friends. From what I understand, the cost of living is very high, and women are typically expected to stop working after marriage or childbirth, meaning the men have to bring in a fair amount of money in order to support a family, especially a family with multiple children. Given the price of larger dwellings in larger cities, this is not easily accomplished.
For obvious reasons, the countryside is far cheaper, but very few young couples want to start a family out in the middle of nowhere.
It's not different in the US - talk to any tech couple and you'll either hear about nannies and babysitters or a stay at home partner. Housing prices are high enough that you either must choose a very long commute with a stay at home partner, or the nanny/babysitter route. Stay at home partnership is very unappealing as Millennials were majority raised by divorced parents. Often by the parent who was stay at home and found themselves in perilous economic circumstances.
Anecdotally, I'm not seeing many babies in my extended high school network. I have a daughter, but honestly could not afford more children despite both my partner and I working at top-tier tech firms.
Barring a major change in circumstance, which reduced costs/competition - I would expect the birthrate in the US to follow that of Asian and European economies.
also, working hours remain unofficially very long with things like after-work activities, so it has the double whammy of making it nearly impossible for women to balance career with housework and also making it hard for men to contribute to housework at all.
Not Japanese either, but I have lived and worked in Japan long enough.
> From what I understand, the cost of living is very high
The cost of living in Japan is not as high as it used to be and lower than many other countries. There is relatively high inflation now, but that's due to a weak Yen and relatively low interest rates. If anything, Japan's cost of living has hit rock bottom in absolute terms.
>Women are typically expected to stop working after marriage or childbirth
That's also quite outdated. This is called "kotobuki taisha" (can be roughly translated as "Congratulatory quitting") and it used to be the norm, but nowadays most of the women return to work, usually after taking a maternity leave and childcare leave, which are guaranteed by law[1].
There is still an issue of old (or old-fashioned) bosses and colleagues who either push women to quit after childbirth or passive-aggressively hint them that they should be taking better care of their children by being full-time moms. That behavior is called "matahara" (maternity harassment) and its frowned upon, but unfortunately still quite common[2].
> men have to bring in a fair amount of money in order to support a family
The cost of raising a child is high and probably a factor in choosing to have fewer children, but I don't think Japan is different from most other developed countries here. Public education is quite comprehensive in Japan, and private spending on education is lower than OECD average[3].
> Given the price of larger dwellings in larger cities
Large dwellings in Tokyo and other central metropolitan areas are expensive, but you have to keep in mind modern Japanese houses are quite small by international standards, even in rural areas where land is cheap. Old Japanese houses were larger, but this is just the standard for new Japanese houses. The norm is probably somewhere around 70-120 square of meters of floor space (i.e. all floors combined). I've yet to see any Japanese person complain about the size of Japanese houses, this doesn't seem to be a concern for anyone (except for us foreigners, who got used to a different standard of living).
If you're fine with a not-too-large house, you could get a house in the suburban area around Tokyo with a 2 hour commute, with mortgage for a while. But land prices rose quite a bit recently (not sure if this is true for all areas), and with the recent interest rate hikes, Japanese mortgages are not quite the nearly-free money they used to be.
In short, I think most of the factors above are outdated. High cost of living for single-income families and workplace hostility towards double-income families were probably strong factor in the previous decades, but not now.
I don't know if there is any accepted conclusion on the most relevant factors that affect Japan, but for me the following factors ring true:
1. Lack of daycare facilities (hoikuen): Japan has two types of pre-primary education: preschools (youchien) and daycare centers (hoikuen). Youchien end too early for working parents, and they traditionally structured around the assumption of having a full-time housewife. The mother is expected to do a lot of busywork like making bento (lunchboxes), sewing uniforms, attending various events, handling regular feedback the teacher, etc.
Hoikuen is a better fit for working moms, but there seems to be a shortage, and there are long waiting lists for daycare centers in some areas. The situation seemed to have improved significantly over the last couple of years, but this was a big issue in previous year. If you can't find a daycare center, it's kinda hard for a mom to return to employment after childbirth.
2. Nomikai Culture: Japanese companies tend to constantly have Noimaki (drinking parties) after work. Depending on the company and role, these can range from once a month to 3-4 times a week, and from optional fun to implicitly mandatory. In many companies, they could be optional in theory, but schmoozing during these parties is important for promotion and relationship with your customer. This culture took a strong hit during COVID-19, and seems to have never fully recovered since. So this is another factor that may be improving, but still affected birthrates over the last 10 years.
3. Matahara: As I've mentioned above, women who choose both career and child-rearing might still suffer some harassment at work. Women who don't need to rely solely on their husband's income. Naturally, stay-at-home-dads are barely a thing in Japan.
4. Limited unskilled labor immigration: Most western countries have accepted a large number of unskilled immigrants who by definition tend to be less educated. Women education is widely accepted to be the number one factor in determining birth rate, so having high unskilled labor immigration artificially pumps up your country's birth rate as long as that immigration trend continues (the original immigrants would typically get closer the country's birthrate within a generation or two).
Until recently, Japan severely restricted immigration of unskilled employees, but that has been changing too over the last few years. There are still many limitations that keep education levels higher than "completely unskilled", such as requiring Japanese language proficiency and professional exams and training, and visa recipients cannot bring their family to Japan until 5 years later (and even then with some restrictions). So I don't expect seeing big shifts in that direction for the next 10 years.
The lack of daycare is indeed something that comes up on the regular. I had assumed this was an expense issue (daycare is typically expensive just about everywhere unless heavily subsidized). But maybe it's a supply issue instead? Is there some kind of stigma against running a daycare? Seems like a relatively easy (and probably effective!) thing for the government to encourage.
Shinzo Abe (RIP) implemented a bunch of daycare reforms as part of his "three arrows" campaign. These included massively reducing the cost as well as increasing investment into availability.
In just a few years it went from being so expensive it was not worth the mother working a part time job because that money would completely go to daycare to being 100% free until the kid turns 4. Availability also went from long waiting lists in most cities to now only having waiting lists in a small handful of districts (mostly in dense areas of Tokyo where just finding the room to build them is hard but also in my rural area where the salaries were so low all the daycare workers moved to higher salary areas and hiring was impossible).
So while it's not perfect it has gotten much much better in a relatively short time.
I think he means in total, as in 1 hour each way. That's not unusual in America these days either. The difference in Japan is that, in Tokyo or other big city, that means sitting on a train most of that time (probably reading a book or looking at your phone), not actively driving.
Japanese commuter trains don't have a ton of seats; there is some bench seating but that's it. So it's possible you might be standing for much of it, which is significantly less comfortable to do activities with.
As someone who did a standing hour-long commute on a subway train for a good portion of my life, I wouldn't really think of it as something desirable.
My (non-Japanese) take: With a few local exceptions, the Japanese governments' interventions are all politicians eager to be seen "doing something"...without having to do anything particularly difficult. For deep, complex socioeconomic problems, "do something" interventions almost never succeed.
There is a theory that urban living and culture results in lower fertility, and Japan is very urban. It's happening everywhere, so probably not something easily fixable without some kind of revolutionary changes.
No. In France birth rate is sustained by immigration, and its higher fertility rate. The birth rate of the native population is well below replacement rate. So technically there is population growth, but it's not the same as before. I highly doubt Japanese are willing to go this route.
Indeed. Paying for babies works very poorly in practice.
>France spent heavily on family policies (see chart 3). Since the turn of the millennium it has disbursed 3.5-4% of GDP a year on a mixture of handouts, services and tax breaks, meaning it has the highest pro-natalist spend in the OECD club of mostly rich countries. But in 2022 fewer children were born in the country than at any point since the second world war.
>[...] In France each extra child over the past decade has cost [$2 million].
Problem is that it is hard to measure if a person is raising a future productive member of society, so a government cannot simply pay for one.
The government can pay for babies, but incentivizing the production of just babies while not being able to incentivize the raising of the babies such that they become productive members of societies is going to be very counter productive.
I don't think that's the problem. It's the same issue insurance faces when setting prices. The government knows how to price insurance and hire actuaries.
Most of this decline isn't driven by a change in current fertility rates, but instead by a persistent trend downward in number of reproductive-aged adults. That was locked in by the fertility rates 20-40 years ago. These things move in the timescale of decades. Even if policy were reasonably successful, it would be a quarter of a century before things stabilized.
The answer probably lies in the wealth distribution in Japan. In the US 50% of the nation owns 2-3% of the nation wealth. For Japan I haven't been able to find this number, but I bet it's closer to 0.5% and that's why common folk there are permanently stressed and cannot afford kids.
There's an interesting analogy between lifecycle of nations and stars. When there's few people, they are dispersed over the land - that's the gas cloud stage of a star. As the number of people grows, the gravity pulls them together, they are forced to interact more and form a society with rules. Further growth of density starts amplifying certain animalistic traits, and a government is created to prevent the descent into anarchy. The gov essentially cools down the society, slows it down, and prevents certain runaway reactions. But the mass of the nation keeps increasing and its star slowly turns into a white dwarf: a super dense and rigid structure where not much is happening.
Wealth is savings. If you don’t save, you don’t have any wealth. But by income, the bottom 50% are responsible for 20% of the productivity / income. They are probably more than 20% of consumption, given the others save more than they consume out of their income.
> The [white dwarf]'s low temperature means it will no longer emit significant heat or light, and it will become a cold black dwarf. Because the length of time it takes for a white dwarf to reach this state is calculated to be longer than the current age of the known universe (approximately 13.8 billion years), it is thought that no black dwarfs yet exist.
Might get lucky there, unless
> A carbon–oxygen white dwarf that approaches this mass limit, typically by mass transfer from a companion star, may explode as a type Ia supernova via a process known as carbon detonation
I just recently spent some time in Japan (Kyoto), and I frequently travel to Tokyo. It always interests me to see these Japanese birthrate articles because anecdotally you might never know it while walking around the cities - you'll see so many young parents with babies strapped to their chests / in strollers / on bicycles.
I mean if you're in Tokyo you won't really notice - the effect of Japan's demographic shift has been that everyone moves to the largest cities and the countryside gets emptied out, which is why afaik Tokyo's population is still increasing even as Japan as a whole has shrunk in the last few years.
To notice the effects you have to go out into smaller prefectures and notice things like elementary schools closing and towns merging because they no longer have enough people to support public services for both individually.
> everyone moves to the largest cities
Anecdotal evidence in support of that:
I have lived for the past twenty-five years in Japan’s second-largest city, Yokohama, in an area convenient for shopping and mass transit. While the neighborhood immediately around my home hasn’t changed much during that time and is still a mix of single-family houses and two- and three-story apartment buildings, along the main streets and waterfront there has been steady construction of high-rise condominiums. The local public elementary school, which my two daughters attended and which my grandson will enter in 2026, is facing a critical shortage of classroom space as families with children move into the area [1]. Parts of Tokyo are facing a similar crisis [2].
I haven’t traveled much outside the major cities since before the pandemic, but the steady depopulation in many areas is said to be equally apparent.
[1] https://www.city.yokohama.lg.jp/kosodate-kyoiku/kyoiku/sesak...
[2] https://digital.asahi.com/articles/ASRDW7QGQRDNOXIE03K.html
Tokyo area population falls for first time (2022): https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14691787
> Ministry officials said deaths outnumbered births in the area by a wider margin than in previous years, fewer people entered the country from abroad amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and more people moved from the capital to other prefectures.
That has probably already reversed, people have come back again post covid.
Its depicted in Wolf Children animated movie, where newly widowed mum sees a "we pay you to live in this village house" as best for her limited savings and she teams up with 5 fellow mums to commute her kids to school to a town with one.
we recently traveled to Kaga and that's where I saw what appeared to be the "aging population" in full effect. it was a pretty big city around the Kagaonsen station, and it did look like it _used_ to be bustling and full of life at _some_ point. now, you can drive around and you'll barely see anyone around. if you do see someone, it's likely someone at least 50.
though the caveat is that maybe we visited at the wrong time (it was a weekday). maybe the youth only show up on the weekends.
> anecdotally you might never know it while walking around the cities
The decline is entirely in rural areas. Entire villages emptying out. Defunct buildings, no municipal coverage or money to demolish them. No workers at all. Bathroom not working?
Yeah, take a dump in the forest.
Want to see a doctor? Drive 50 miles if you are lucky.
Not all of it is negative but it is noticeable.
Rural areas and smaller cities.
And it's not really a matter of low birthrate at these places. In fact, Tokyo has consistently had the lowest birthrate of all Japanese prefectures over the last few decades. The problem is that young people are migrating to large metropolitan areas in search for better opportunities.
It's also worth noting that despite the image, Japan's birth rate is HIGH for its region and among developed countries it is the almost the highest. Japan's fertility is higher than China's, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. The only arguably developed state in Asia which has a higher fertility rate is Brunei and I don't really know if it counts - it's very conservative and the economy is mostly based on oil and gas.
Japan's problem is that it has industrialized earlier than its Asian neighbors and the effects of low birth rates are already very evident (in the countryside). It also got the attention in western media as the poster child for low birth rate, but it shouldn't be — that honor should probably go to South Korea (fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023).
I'm fascinated by declining birth rates, especially where it's sharpest like in Japan and South Korea. Trying to imagine all the long-term consequences of it, or how it ends, is mind-bending. I do hope that it ultimately leads to places like Japan and South Korea becoming more open to immigration, especially if they also become more affordable (although even if real-estate becomes more affordable, that might be canceled out by increased costs due to labor shortages).
Any man in those countries i can guarantee you can marry and have kids today, provided they fly to a poor country and find a woman (who is attracted and willing)
All men in well off countries have it tough.
I was shocked when I first arrived in Europe and US - how many hoops an average man has to jump through to just get shot at dating.
Men were trying to be 6ft+, 6 figure and Comedy King just to get dates with average women.
My FAANG friends (both whites, black and Asians) make lots of money when compared to average person, they are interesting and have a high IQ too. Guess what?they had zero luck with women.
It was ruthless - I just told my FAANG bros, you know what? You can skip all that and just be fit and decent human being and fly to a poor country and treat the woman with kindness, generosity and love and respect and you'll get the kids and wife you want within a few months.
And soon enough now most of them are married who took action.
You can cry as much as you want but women in developed countries have lots of options and are super risk averse and very demanding in what they want.
It's not about economy when FAANG bros who make 6 figure income are crying for basic level of attention and affection. So I'll never buy into this argument (well houses are expensive you know)
There are tons of men in country who don't even have 6 figure income yet they are married and have kids.
In West, how attractive, popular and bad boy you are matters more than how much money you've.
IDK about east asia but the US population is still growing year over year, so I think it is more specific to eastern culture.
From a recent Astral Codex Ten monthly links email:
> 54: Koreans are not okay:
https://x.com/airkatakana/status/1847964003416543478 ("83% of young korean women think of south korea as “hell” and 80% of them want to leave korea. if your mental model of south korea does not match this, it’s your mental model and not the data that is wrong")
Extrapolate to forward looking fertility rate. South Korea total fertility rate as of 2023 is 0.72.
Interesting, and that's a shame. When I lived in Seoul as an American 10 years ago[1], I loved it. Everything there seemed nicer, more functional, and safer than in any city that I've ever experienced in America. It had an attractive mix of shiny new stuff and ancient stuff. There was natural beauty even just outside of the city, easily accessible by public transit. I'd like to see them open up to immigration because my wife and I would actually consider moving our family there permanently one day if it were an option.
[1] For just a year, and on the US government payroll, so obviously a very different experience from growing up there as a Korean.
While this is probably all true -- none of it deals with culture, family, employment mobility, and social services.
I think S. Korea has a long way to go to meet up with the modern day. It can be very frustrating to see women's rights move forward globally, however glacially, and feel like you don't have those things.
Not just young women, but older people too (~64%). Seems hard to believe they literally think it's hell, without serious societal breakdown. Are immigration and suicide sky high?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea
> South Korea has the fourth highest suicide rate in the world and the highest among OECD countries. The elderly in South Korea are at the highest risk of suicide, but deaths from teen suicide have been rising since 2010. In 2022 suicide caused more than half of all deaths among South Koreans in their twenties. It is the leading cause of death for those between the age of 10 and 39, in line with most OECD countries.
Shouldn't it be even higher if you think your country is literally hell? Maybe they have a more optimistic idea of hell than me. I guess that squares with 3% more believing it's hell than wants to leave.
I still think this survey doesn't make sense, or at least something is lost in transactional.
Additional citations:
https://www.womenlink.or.kr/minwoo_actions/20828
In the past nine years, at least 824 women had been killed and 602 more put at risk of death due to intimate partner violence (IPV)
https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_national/1...
A 2021 study further found that one in three Korean women have experienced domestic violence, with intimate partners responsible for 46 percent of these cases.
I wonder how these rates compare to the US?
declining birth rates are not a problem unless you are an aspiring empire, or if you are surrounded by enemies, or if you have a huge debt.
As GPD falls, the share of debt becomes greater and the burden falls on fewer people. So taxes must go up, productivity must go way up (death loop, adults working more and not seeking families), or welfare spend must go down
This is why debt its called generational theft.
> unless you are an aspiring empire, or if you are surrounded by enemies, or if you have a huge debt.
Or if you depend on future generations to take care for older ones once they reach retirement age, which is all of them. (A savings account can't care for the elderly, so debt doesn't really have much to do with it; you can see the problem entirely while staying in real economic terms without looking at money.)
You can make up for some of that with immigration, but whether people will be very accepting of something like a >50% immigration rate over a single or two generations is also questionable.
I know this seems crazy, but if a country is willing to enforce a one-child-policy might they just turn their old folks into soylent green as well?
It doesn't mesh with existing chinese culture, so I wouldn't expect this to happen in our lifetime, but it wouldn't be the first time malthusian government policy is deployed at large scale.
This. Debt is just 0s on a paper. What actually matters id there are physically less people to take care of the needs of the old and everyone
Who took care of elderly people, prior to 1935 ?
If debt is just 0s, consider you haven't been out much. I dont think you'd get a good receiption for that message in 1950s germany, or today in argentina, or lebanon.
Or you have pension obligations. Or are concerned about your dependency ratio.
Yeah, "surrounded by enemies" comes to mind for South Korea. I served there as an American in defense of the ROK, as generations of American troops have done since WWII, and I think it's ironic that in 100 years they might cease to exist not because of a North Korean and Chinese invasion but because their birth rate simply led to a collapse. (Although North Korea and China have their own demographic problems - I'm not sure if that defuses or heats up the situation.)
how is this bad?
with technology and automation, any nation, will need less and less people
plus rent in japan is super high, and the country seem over crowded
why be alarmed by low birth rate, as long as its voluntary and not caused by an endemic health concern
The socioeconomic system is broken, not the people. Population boom only happened because women weren't empowered, contraceptives weren't wildly available. For the human, this is great, if it is their choice (we should want to support agency and autonomy imho). For the systems? Bad for them. Build better systems. If your economic system requires a total fertility rate floor above what a combination of desired and realized fertility is, you're gonna have a bad time.
People will argue about the cost of caring for the elderly, sovereign debt that will need to be paid back, and so on. Well, perhaps consider the obligations you're originating and foisting on a future that may not pay for them.
Comments I've written with robust citations for this thesis:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41799048
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41661724
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41035224
There is always this uncomfortable undercurrent of misogyny in all these fertility discussions along the lines of "how do we coerce women to have more children?" or "it's a woman's duty to breed." I'd like to hope we are more enlightened than that, but the sentiment is worryingly pervasive.
The doomsayers are probably right, we are in for hard economic times as birth rates decline. But maybe that is a good thing, and we can finally come up with a system that doesn't depend on exponential population growth.
That's not really what's happening - in Korea, there are many young people, male and female, who would be willing to have kids if life is easier. They don't because they can't afford a house, or they don't want their kids to go through the brutal education system they suffered themselves.
Or they are simply overworked and don't have time to raise kids.
So, many "pro-birth" policies are aimed at helping women at work so that they don't have to sacrifice their career. But the government isn't doing much (our current president said people should be "allowed" to work 120 hours per week if they wanted to - and somehow still got elected), and what little policy Korea has is constantly attacked by conservative young men for being "sexist" because it's "feminist propaganda" that victimizes those poor young men.
And every year Korea slides further into population collapse.
At least at 120 hours a week you no longer need a house and can just change at the gym instead.
How much of this is due to housing price increases? It naively seems like rising house prices trigger an arms race in education and productivity among young people to afford housing.
If the labor quota is high enough… then nothing else will happen. GDP will rise, but individuals will steadily be sacrificing family, entertainment, and joy.
That's completely false.
People will say they want to.
But they'll not make necessary sacrifices because it's outside their comfort zone
There are poor countries than Korea where survival is way more difficult, yet they've kids.
It's not about money or affordability, it never was.
Poor people in any culture have more kids.
Your comment is not based in reality and comes across as if "if I was millionaire I'd have kids".
In poorer nations people have more children because, while life is hard, it doesn't get much harder if you have one more kid. You don't have to put your kid to 12 years of education; you don't have to worry about college fund. If you are a subsistence farmer life may actually get easier because a kid is a free labor.
That was also reflected in past Korean society where people frequently said the cost of one more kid is just "a spoon and a pair of chopsticks."
Very different from modern, industrialized Korea, where the lifetime cost of raising one kid equals multiple years of your salary. Unless you don't care about your kids and think they'll just sustain themselves by working in the rice paddy from age six to seventy.
Cost of baby in Modern Korea is risk to female figure, health, risk of death.
That perceived cost is above the cost of living of a baby.
That cannot be fixed by simply offering them more money.
> Cost of baby in Modern Korea is risk to female figure, health, risk of death.
Okay, now you're just making stuff up.
That's the most cited fear in antinatal community
My developer friend in Japan who always wanted a family never received much dates and when he did not one commited.
So he married a woman from India and now they've 4 kids.
It wasn't about money, no one was willing to make this sacrifice for him.
>My developer friend in Japan who always wanted a family never received much dates and when he did not one commited.
I had absolutely no trouble getting dates here when I moved here. There must have been something about your friend that just isn't attractive to Japanese women. Is he religious, overweight, or have a beard? You can't expect a person to be equally attractive to any arbitrary group; different cultures have different standards.
Edit: if he put right in his dating app bios "I'm looking for a woman who wants 4 kids!" I can see why he didn't get many responses from Japanese women.
He only wanted 1 kid but his wife convinced him to have 4.
No one wanted kids, he's slight above average looking japanese man with good personality but whenever he tried to get commitment, he got dumped even if relationship was several years long.
He told me it's because they don't want to take risk.
>whenever he tried to get commitment, he got dumped even if relationship was several years long.
Interesting story, but talking about commitment and having kids is something you need to do before you're even seriously dating someone; it's not something you wait several years to bring up. What you're looking for in a relationship and what you want out of one in the future is one of the most basic compatibility factors in a relationship, so it should be discussed after a few dates or so.
I kinda feel like something's missing from this story.
Other than this, this is not how dating works.
Most people only ask "if you are open to having kids in future"
Followed by rough estimate of timeline which may or may not materialize with the same person.
A lot of people don't really know much about themselves, change their mind later, or give the compatible answers because they don't wanna lose the anticipated benefits of being with this person.
I mean that's a lot of pressure for anybody if it's already a set number. I'd say it's better to advertise that you're open to having kids, or at most that you want to have kids.
Even if you want many kids, your potential partner might want kids, too, but feel pressured to have them right away if you say 4.
This comment is a perfect example of my point…
Explain?
Make this SACRIFICE for him?
Why does he need to breed 4 children?
This reads so awful
What’s the problem with the phrasing? Having kids is a sacrifice, and especially for the woman who has to go through labour.
I don’t think any native English speaker would use this word choice. Probably not a native English speaker… user name implies Indian.
Not just misogyny, but racism as well. The overall human population is still on the rise, but that’s primarily happening in Africa.
i think it's only happening in Africa. Every other continent is experiencing a decline
Many countries have decades of explicit anti-natalist policies, including Japan.
Was it misogyny when official opinion shapers were demanding people have fewer kids, as some are still doing?
Feminists generally supported these efforts.
This is an important point that's usually under discussed. From the 70s onwards, you had multiple governments with anti-natalist policies from Malthusian fears. You had China with the one child policy for urban dwellers, in India max two children were encouraged if you want to be in polite society, feminism encouraged anti-natalist thinking in almost all countries. It was only relatively recently, maybe last 15 years, that concerns about low fertility rates started being discussed.
More likely birth control will filter out anti-natalists in the long term.
“Anti natalism” is not a genetic trait that gets inherited. Any woman can look at what another woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/infant rearing and think they might want to avoid that. Or avoid doing it multiple times.
OTOH there are some with a great desire to procreate even though it might mean (temporary) hardship or doesn't fit with their socioeconomic status. I know several of those.
The ones who shall inherit the earth.
I think that children inherit a lot of their values from their parents, its not all genetics
Evidently, not for this topic, since outside of a couple cult-ish tribes, total fertility rate dropped precipitously across the globe.
>“Anti natalism” is not a genetic trait that gets inherited.
Citation needed. There are many things influenced by genetic traits. So many that I think the burden of proof is that you'd have to show that there's no influence of genetic traits here. Add to this memetic influences, and it's clear evolutionary biology that those that want to produce children will have more offspring and thus at some point antinatalism should be reduced as a portion of society.
It is possible for genes to influence the desire to birth more children, but it seems apparent to me that humans are capable of sufficiently complex cause and effect analysis that genetic influence would be insufficient to drive this specific decision making process, since it’s not a snap decision and there’s so many opportunities to reverse course.
Human beings are the only animal (that I am aware of) that can short circuit the process of reproduction by completely de-linking sex and pregnancy.
It is possible that evolution resulted a trait (cognitive plus physical ability to manipulate nature) that ultimately is not conducive to procreation.
And it is possible that in a million years, perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, or humans don’t exist but some other species exists with a different mechanism of reproduction, or humans figure out how to make babies in artificial wombs, or humans start living a lot longer, etc etc.
More likely social evolution will take care of it long before biological evolution. Muslims have fertility rate of 3.1, for example.
Yes, that is what I meant with
> perhaps humans continue to exist because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant
I guess technically it should be “because a tribe removes women’s ability to not become pregnant, be financially independent, and physically independent/secure”
Well more typical would be something like the tribe that survives into the future has always removed women's ability to not get pregnant while the other tribe dies off.
I guess there are two types of social evolution, or evolution in general... One is where one tribe changes its customs over time, so evolves through intra tribe competition. Another is where you have multiple tribes with different customs, so evolves through inter tribe competition. Reality would be a mix of these two models.
>Any woman can look at what another woman goes through during pregnancy/childbirth/infant rearing and think they might want to avoid that.
They can, but then in some cultures, their religious leaders will tell them they need to go through all that, many times, or else their god will be angry with them.
Yes, I was alluding to that. My greatest concern for my daughter or her kids is the eventual loss of women’s rights simply due to shrinking of population of tribes that support women’s rights and proliferation of tribes that do not.
Yes, I don't have a daughter, but I'm also very concerned about that. It feels like there's an assumption that the tribes that don't support women's rights will adopt that cultural mindset over time, but I'm not so sure it's a good assumption.
Desire to have kids is driven by mostly fear, uncertainty, death.
This is partly why poor people with little social safety net have most kids.
The more safeties exist in a country, the less kids are there.
Simple as that.
Completely wrong in my experience.
Poor women have children because they often don’t have the choice not to have children. That is why every single country when women gain rights and financial independence, the total fertility rate plummets.
Lower and middle class people in developed countries have fewer kids because they want to provide a home with their kids’ own room, be in good school districts because they are afraid of what happens if their kid doesn’t get into a good college, etc. The fear of not being able to provide a certain minimum quality of life prevents many from having kids.
It actually switches back to richer women having more kids because they have more security of owning their home, affording childcare while still being able to save for retirement, having health insurance, etc.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-12/the-ri...
> 83% of young korean women think of south korea as “hell”
The page shows 78% of young men with same opinion. But -- what other countries do they think would be better?
I just find it hard that these times, it's more like heaven from human history point of view.
At least in there, there's no active war (there is a threat but bullets aren't flying around or you have problem acquiring food and water), and cities are moderately safe, you can buy stuff with a few clicks, many entertainments to choose from, convenient phones etc etc. And you get to take advantage of those without earning a fortune.
It's so absurd to think this is some sort of hell. They don't know actual hell like past and some present people are experiencing.
Why don't those people appreciate the situation they're in?
The working culture in South Korea absolutely seems like hell compared to most of human history. People had much more free time in agricultural societies, and they mostly spent it outdoors, instead of slaving it in the offices doing meaningless work to make shareholders richer.
People starving, born with disabilities/incurable diseases, people at the front line of a war, especially if critically wounded, people caught as a prisoner being tortured, people living their lives as a slave with physical violence and any other serious situations I couldn't imagine, seem like worse than someone at least with physically safe condition and possibly a way to escape if one wants to.
Exactly. And hedonic adaptation makes all that entertainment with phones, TVs etc meaningless.
Lack of free time is hell. Especially if you spend all your days in the same drab office building. Office work is fine in and of itself, but humans are meant to move, to be outside for a good portion of the day. Work-life balance is more important than the latest gadgets.
Hedonic adaptation. Humans can quickly become accustomed to circumstances, rich or poor, and then they can start criticizing it. This is in fact one of the prime drivers for innovation in the world, because those that thought everything was already good enough wouldn't be the ones innovating.
The term "Hell Joseon" was widely popularized (Joseon is the old name of Korea, and incidentally still the name used for North Korea in Korean, Chinese and Japanese). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Joseon
"Escaping Hell Joseon" is apparently a thing: https://asiatimes.com/2019/12/75-of-young-want-to-escape-sou...
I think only a small percentage of respondents have brought their aspiration into practice, but they obviously think other countries are better than Korea. I'd love to see a poll asking them which countries they would prefer.
I don't think they are entirely wrong. Economic hardship and uncertain future for young people are prevalent in all developed economies, but South Korea also suffers from terrible work-life balance and strict work culture (probably significantly worse than Japan on both counts). And recent admissions scandals[1][2] have made Koreans even more skeptical about the fairness of the system. I'm not sure if Ivy League universities are any better, but the Korean scandals were really in-your-face.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/disgraced-ex-sout... [2] https://graphics.straitstimes.com/STI/STIMEDIA/Interactives/...
>The page shows 78% of young men with same opinion. But -- what other countries do they think would be better?
The women: most western European nations probably.
The men: South Korea 30+ years ago
It doesn't matter what they think, Hell and Heaven are relative not absolute
Humans do not operate in absolute metrics, it's always relative.
No. Pollution, likely microplastics are preventing and interfering with reproductive behaviour.
Understand, we are complex beings. The desire to reproduce is not conscious. It is innate and compulsive. And if you interfere with that hormonally derived urge, this is the result.
It's not about money. That's on the conscious side. People had scads of kids during depressions and recessions, even when the pill was available, having kids was more important than not.
And if you looka around the world, the amount of children has nothing to do with the country, or culture. Women oppressed or not, it doesn't matter.
And what culture is more unique than Japan compared to the West? It's not culture, for the entire planet has a collapse in birthrates.
We're going extinct.
> We're going extinct.
I think that is hyperbole, but I agree with your general take.
Maybe we are just at the top of the human population sigmoid curve and this is a normal collective correction. We've hit the carrying capacity of the post-industrialized world. Food isn't the limiter as much as an unconscious 'perceived opportunity for growth'.
It’s amazing that rather than recognize that the rich have too much and we too little, we’d rather organize around them hoarding so much wealth that the population declines.
Like we could not imagine a fairer distribution that would incentivize more people to have children in a positive fashion.
I think we might even go the other direction - circumscribe the rights of women directly to increase the birth rate, Handmaids Tale style.
People don't want to have kids even with all the incentives in the world. For many, it's now a lifestyle choice. And I mean, who can fault them, no one can be forced to have kids (unless you want to go through some unsavory means).
What incentives? That really depends on where you are. In the US, having kids is horrifically expensive. You can look forward to tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills, even with good insurance, just for one hospital birth. Then having to pay tons of money for medical insurance for your kid, plus all the other regular expenses that come from child-rearing. Don't even get me started on the costs for daycare. In the US, there's enormous disincentives to having children.
Here in Japan, it's much better: all medical expenses for children are free. There's also a cash bonus for having kids. Daycare is still a problem though, but the cost isn't nearly as awful as in America, however availability is a real problem.
Child birth is a small fraction of the cost.
The real costs add up in the 40 hour work week. School, daycare, and even the legal frameworks those operate in are intended for at least one parent to live close to the child and work at most part time.
By and large millennials in the US were the first generation where both parents were raised to work for a variety of good reasons. How many jobs really let parents cut out at 4 to commute home for a 5pm pickup?
Now consider the childcare and opportunity costs of raising children.
>How many jobs really let parents cut out at 4 to commute home for a 5pm pickup?
That's an American problem because of its car culture. In better societies, there's public transit, and/or cities/towns are walkable, so kids can just walk home by themselves. Here in Japan, kids are far more independent and have no trouble getting themselves to and from school, even with non-working parents.
Does that apply when they are under 3?
Kids aren't going to school at 0-3 years old.
Not the US, I mean in Europe, specially Scandinavia. They've tried so many things to incentivize people but still people don't have kids. It seems to be that as countries develop and get richer, the number of kids born tends towards zero.
Scandinavia didn't try anything that could help. Let them try inexpensive houses or 20k Euro tax rebates per child.
>I think we might even go the other direction - circumscribe the rights of women directly to increase the birth rate, Handmaids Tale style.
Given recent events, I think the Republic of Gilead will be a real thing in the USA before too long.
> the amount of children has nothing to do with the country,
What a baffling comment to post under an article about the birth rate of a specific country and quite different from that of many others.
I like to joke that microplastics are responsible for social changes, and I don't deny that it has some effect but it is probably minor in the grand scheme of things
How is it bad? Economically, it's a burden. Older people are more expensive, and the ratio of young to old people has certain economic implications too. As you pointed out, there are good and bad aspects to it, but the bad aspects are real and not histrionic mirages.
It's also a political burden, in two senses:
1. directly: in a democracy where the majority of voters are 60+ years old and retired, politicians will end up seeing the old and retired as their base and pandering to them; and this will lead to them implementing policies that serve the old and retired, to the detriment of those of working age. (See: literally anything about Japan's work culture.)
2. indirectly: social mores evolve over time, but this mostly occurs within the more-flexible, still-identity-forming minds of people of young ages. You can think of "modern" social mores as viral memes that spread easily between the "young" nodes in a social network; but which won't spread to/through the "old" nodes of the network. A a "top-heavy" society, where the old greatly outnumber the young, doesn't have the mean virality coefficient necessary to allow "modern" social mores to spread and achieve fixation. This in turn means that younger generations will feel they are living in a society that is "stuck in the past", with "outdated" thinking, where they cannot affect meaningful social change, despite everyone in their own (usually generational-cohort) social circles agreeing with them.
For a while I've also had the gut feeling that the average age creeping up does something to the general mood of a culture. Young people are naturally more restless, ambitious, daring, and when the median person is very "settled" in their ways and closer to death than birth I think a certain vitality is lost.
Not only that, but the young have to support the old in their retirement. This becomes a huge problem when there are multiple elderly per young person and the young find that they are spending most of their time and effort supporting the aging population. The elderly start being seen as a burden on society.
Said differently, many government programs for citizen retirement benefits (eg Social Security) are structured as Ponzi Schemes that require population increases over time so later generations can pay for earlier generations.
If population is declining, it breaks how these programs are funding because there’ll be less n the younger generation to pay for the more people in the older generation.
putting the problem in terms of economics isn't incorrect, but I think it can be framed in a slightly more human and horrifying way:
As a fact of nature, young adults must do the hard labor necessary to keep the world operating. Historically, there have always been more of them than there were people physically incapable of doing that work: the old and very young.
If there are too many old people and not enough young people, who will take care of the old people?
what’s your take on AI replacing jobs?
Only bad if the country has promised the old a lot of benefits that need younger people’s hands to deliver.
It’s like asking why suicide is bad, you have a civilization without the will to propagate itself.
Change isn't necessarily bad, but rapid change usually is. And reproduction rates that more than halve the population per generation is an extremely rapid change.
I think a cascading series of negative economic effects from less consumerism, leading to societally destabilizing conditions is a concern.
It doesn't matter that we increase the birthrate if quality of life is continually degrading.
It's also backwards.
Structure society and economy in a way that makes it appealing to have children (both in that the hypothetical parents feel safe in doing so without endangering their own quality of life, and in that they can imagine the hypothetical children to be happy too), and people will have them.
People that think it’s purely an economic problem are wrong. Economic and political solutions are not enough. You also need social solutions too. Like make it cool to have kids and solutions that allowa women of child bearing age to be around other women who have young children
Having children in modern society is pretty isolating. We had it very good because our neighbors have children of similar age and we could share the burdens of cooking and watching them while simultaneously also seeing other adults. If both parents work and you do all your chores you have approximately zero time to socialize outside your immediate vicinity. It takes a village but nobody has a village any longer
It’s bad because at this rate South Koreans will literally be extinct within 100 years.
What do you mean by "need less people?" Normally, technology/automation is thought of as reducing the need for labor, but the total amount of labor needed is still proportional to the total number of people.
There are many roles that haven’t been automated yet, including elder care.
I’m skeptical that nurses could be enhanced by automation to the degree of them managing more patients, but with the same quality of care as they do now.
Because people make societal level choices that lead to low birth rate when things are terribly wrong with the society that demands less people for one reason or another
> plus rent in japan
Is that all of Japan? or just select cities?
The desirable cities with lots of jobs. OTOH, some rural towns are so desperate for people they'll give you a house for free (or nearly free).
https://www.rethinktokyo.com/free-houses-japan-countryside
Just select cities. I had a decent bachelor pad from 2014 to 2020 that was 55,000 yen (~$550 at the time) with no rent adjustment over that time either, and I'm in an urban area of ~1 million people. Current place is ~82,000 but with the Yen getting body-slammed by the US dollar it's not that much more expensive.
> why be alarmed by low birth rate
Cause it signifies national decline.
> as long as its voluntary
"Voluntary" is such a tricky word. The low birth rate was entirely manufactured by societal norms instituted by the elites. Not just in japan, but in much of the world ( US, china, russia, EU, etc ).
> and not caused by an endemic health concern
Declining population is an endemic health concern. If you don't put a stop to it, the nation eventually ceases to exist.
Who tf cares about "the nation". There's only one thing that matters: me.
> There's only one thing that matters: me.
Right. And how your nation does directly affects you.
Not enough workforce to fund the retirees pensions is one thing.
capitalism expects growth, and has a big ole problem when that doesn't happen.
structurally we're not set up for it.
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> how is this bad?
It's bad when a species goes extinct. Especially when that species is humans.
Humans aren't going extinct any time soon. The world population is projected to level off at 10 billion near 2100.
> Humans aren't going extinct any time soon.
Soon in years, no. Soon in centuries, yes.
Be careful with extrapolation. A few decades ago Malthus thought we were heading for overpopulation.
That is a good point.
And actually it's not all humans who would go extinct, it's modern urban/semi-urban more-liberal people. There are pockets of often-rural highly religious populations that are well above the replacement rate right now. Basically Kamala Harris supporters are going extinct and Donald Trump supporters will populate the future, unless something changes.
In Japan, it's the rural areas that are going extinct while the urban areas are increasing in population. We'll probably see the same thing in the future in the US as well.
No, not unless the US changes its zoning laws drastically. They won't allow new housing in the cities, so the only way to increase population is if hordes of homeless people move in and camp out. However, the urban areas can increase in size, so that large areas are basically gigantic and growing suburbs.
Well even in Japan it's all urban sprawl. Tokyo is the largest metropolis in the world, so if the US follows suit, it would similarly grow outward not upward. Solving zoning law issues seems to be extremely difficult as NIMBYs explicitly vote against solutions as it harms them directly. I understand why they vote that way, but we would need top down solutions which are hard to come by politically.
>Well even in Japan it's all urban sprawl. Tokyo is the largest metropolis in the world
This isn't true (the urban sprawl part): while Tokyo is the largest metro area and does have a lot of sprawl, it's also continuously growing upwards, and not that much outwards because there really isn't much room left on the periphery (ocean and mountains are hard limits). Older, smaller buildings are regularly being knocked down and replaced by new, taller buildings.
Yes, so absent limits like geography, it seems cities will grow outward, and upward only when they hit those limits.
I don't think so at all. Growing outwards only works if you have an instantaneously fast transit system. There's a reason the real estate in central Tokyo is some of the most valuable in the world: because it's close to everything. The farther out you go, the less valuable land is, because it takes time to get to the center (or anywhere else).
This is of course true in American cities too, but zoning laws largely prevent new (and taller) housing construction close to the center, so they have no choice but to build outwards. In Japan, building upwards is much more feasible, only requiring that you acquire some desirable existing property first. (Of course, there are some limits to what you can build on it, but it's nothing like in the US so it's much easier to get approval to build some nicer and/or bigger/taller.)
I live in a depopulating regional capital city of Japan, and we're still building upwards. In the past 4 years or so, I can count at least 7 large (12+ story, 150+ unit) condo buildings that have gone up. People want access to entertainment and short commutes to their jobs.
The thing that needs to change is zoning in cities. We don't let people move into our big cities in the US the way they do in Japan. That's the only change we need.
All of the other species on the planet might disagree.
That's ok. They don't make the rules. We do.
Are there any Japanese people here that can shed any light as to why government interventions aren't helping?
Not Japanese myself, but have some Japanese friends. From what I understand, the cost of living is very high, and women are typically expected to stop working after marriage or childbirth, meaning the men have to bring in a fair amount of money in order to support a family, especially a family with multiple children. Given the price of larger dwellings in larger cities, this is not easily accomplished.
For obvious reasons, the countryside is far cheaper, but very few young couples want to start a family out in the middle of nowhere.
Market Imposed Labor Quota is so high that people aren't allowed to raise their own children. Amazing.
It's not different in the US - talk to any tech couple and you'll either hear about nannies and babysitters or a stay at home partner. Housing prices are high enough that you either must choose a very long commute with a stay at home partner, or the nanny/babysitter route. Stay at home partnership is very unappealing as Millennials were majority raised by divorced parents. Often by the parent who was stay at home and found themselves in perilous economic circumstances.
Anecdotally, I'm not seeing many babies in my extended high school network. I have a daughter, but honestly could not afford more children despite both my partner and I working at top-tier tech firms.
Barring a major change in circumstance, which reduced costs/competition - I would expect the birthrate in the US to follow that of Asian and European economies.
Yep, 100%.
also, working hours remain unofficially very long with things like after-work activities, so it has the double whammy of making it nearly impossible for women to balance career with housework and also making it hard for men to contribute to housework at all.
Not Japanese either, but I have lived and worked in Japan long enough.
> From what I understand, the cost of living is very high
The cost of living in Japan is not as high as it used to be and lower than many other countries. There is relatively high inflation now, but that's due to a weak Yen and relatively low interest rates. If anything, Japan's cost of living has hit rock bottom in absolute terms.
>Women are typically expected to stop working after marriage or childbirth
That's also quite outdated. This is called "kotobuki taisha" (can be roughly translated as "Congratulatory quitting") and it used to be the norm, but nowadays most of the women return to work, usually after taking a maternity leave and childcare leave, which are guaranteed by law[1].
There is still an issue of old (or old-fashioned) bosses and colleagues who either push women to quit after childbirth or passive-aggressively hint them that they should be taking better care of their children by being full-time moms. That behavior is called "matahara" (maternity harassment) and its frowned upon, but unfortunately still quite common[2].
> men have to bring in a fair amount of money in order to support a family
The cost of raising a child is high and probably a factor in choosing to have fewer children, but I don't think Japan is different from most other developed countries here. Public education is quite comprehensive in Japan, and private spending on education is lower than OECD average[3].
> Given the price of larger dwellings in larger cities
Large dwellings in Tokyo and other central metropolitan areas are expensive, but you have to keep in mind modern Japanese houses are quite small by international standards, even in rural areas where land is cheap. Old Japanese houses were larger, but this is just the standard for new Japanese houses. The norm is probably somewhere around 70-120 square of meters of floor space (i.e. all floors combined). I've yet to see any Japanese person complain about the size of Japanese houses, this doesn't seem to be a concern for anyone (except for us foreigners, who got used to a different standard of living).
If you're fine with a not-too-large house, you could get a house in the suburban area around Tokyo with a 2 hour commute, with mortgage for a while. But land prices rose quite a bit recently (not sure if this is true for all areas), and with the recent interest rate hikes, Japanese mortgages are not quite the nearly-free money they used to be.
In short, I think most of the factors above are outdated. High cost of living for single-income families and workplace hostility towards double-income families were probably strong factor in the previous decades, but not now.
I don't know if there is any accepted conclusion on the most relevant factors that affect Japan, but for me the following factors ring true:
1. Lack of daycare facilities (hoikuen): Japan has two types of pre-primary education: preschools (youchien) and daycare centers (hoikuen). Youchien end too early for working parents, and they traditionally structured around the assumption of having a full-time housewife. The mother is expected to do a lot of busywork like making bento (lunchboxes), sewing uniforms, attending various events, handling regular feedback the teacher, etc.
Hoikuen is a better fit for working moms, but there seems to be a shortage, and there are long waiting lists for daycare centers in some areas. The situation seemed to have improved significantly over the last couple of years, but this was a big issue in previous year. If you can't find a daycare center, it's kinda hard for a mom to return to employment after childbirth.
2. Nomikai Culture: Japanese companies tend to constantly have Noimaki (drinking parties) after work. Depending on the company and role, these can range from once a month to 3-4 times a week, and from optional fun to implicitly mandatory. In many companies, they could be optional in theory, but schmoozing during these parties is important for promotion and relationship with your customer. This culture took a strong hit during COVID-19, and seems to have never fully recovered since. So this is another factor that may be improving, but still affected birthrates over the last 10 years.
3. Matahara: As I've mentioned above, women who choose both career and child-rearing might still suffer some harassment at work. Women who don't need to rely solely on their husband's income. Naturally, stay-at-home-dads are barely a thing in Japan.
4. Limited unskilled labor immigration: Most western countries have accepted a large number of unskilled immigrants who by definition tend to be less educated. Women education is widely accepted to be the number one factor in determining birth rate, so having high unskilled labor immigration artificially pumps up your country's birth rate as long as that immigration trend continues (the original immigrants would typically get closer the country's birthrate within a generation or two).
Until recently, Japan severely restricted immigration of unskilled employees, but that has been changing too over the last few years. There are still many limitations that keep education levels higher than "completely unskilled", such as requiring Japanese language proficiency and professional exams and training, and visa recipients cannot bring their family to Japan until 5 years later (and even then with some restrictions). So I don't expect seeing big shifts in that direction for the next 10 years.
[1] https://archive.is/yPcOF#selection-1581.143-1581.149 https://mataharanet.org/en/what-is-matahara/
[2] https://mataharanet.org/en/what-is-matahara/
[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/private-spending-on-...
The lack of daycare is indeed something that comes up on the regular. I had assumed this was an expense issue (daycare is typically expensive just about everywhere unless heavily subsidized). But maybe it's a supply issue instead? Is there some kind of stigma against running a daycare? Seems like a relatively easy (and probably effective!) thing for the government to encourage.
Shinzo Abe (RIP) implemented a bunch of daycare reforms as part of his "three arrows" campaign. These included massively reducing the cost as well as increasing investment into availability.
In just a few years it went from being so expensive it was not worth the mother working a part time job because that money would completely go to daycare to being 100% free until the kid turns 4. Availability also went from long waiting lists in most cities to now only having waiting lists in a small handful of districts (mostly in dense areas of Tokyo where just finding the room to build them is hard but also in my rural area where the salaries were so low all the daycare workers moved to higher salary areas and hiring was impossible).
So while it's not perfect it has gotten much much better in a relatively short time.
A two hour commute would be considered unusually long in most of the rich world and is almost certainly a negative factor for more children.
I think he means in total, as in 1 hour each way. That's not unusual in America these days either. The difference in Japan is that, in Tokyo or other big city, that means sitting on a train most of that time (probably reading a book or looking at your phone), not actively driving.
Japanese commuter trains don't have a ton of seats; there is some bench seating but that's it. So it's possible you might be standing for much of it, which is significantly less comfortable to do activities with.
As someone who did a standing hour-long commute on a subway train for a good portion of my life, I wouldn't really think of it as something desirable.
Here's a story (from the same web site) about a small Japanese town which is enjoying success on this front:
https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14730746
My (non-Japanese) take: With a few local exceptions, the Japanese governments' interventions are all politicians eager to be seen "doing something"...without having to do anything particularly difficult. For deep, complex socioeconomic problems, "do something" interventions almost never succeed.
There is a theory that urban living and culture results in lower fertility, and Japan is very urban. It's happening everywhere, so probably not something easily fixable without some kind of revolutionary changes.
Just wait a few centuries and evolution will have fixed this.
Sorry, which country with declining birth rates has government interventions that are working?
France, and not even by much
No. In France birth rate is sustained by immigration, and its higher fertility rate. The birth rate of the native population is well below replacement rate. So technically there is population growth, but it's not the same as before. I highly doubt Japanese are willing to go this route.
Indeed. Paying for babies works very poorly in practice.
>France spent heavily on family policies (see chart 3). Since the turn of the millennium it has disbursed 3.5-4% of GDP a year on a mixture of handouts, services and tax breaks, meaning it has the highest pro-natalist spend in the OECD club of mostly rich countries. But in 2022 fewer children were born in the country than at any point since the second world war.
>[...] In France each extra child over the past decade has cost [$2 million].
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/21/c...
https://archive.is/0139y
None, by definition, right? Because the ones where policy works don't have declining birth rates.
Problem is that it is hard to measure if a person is raising a future productive member of society, so a government cannot simply pay for one.
The government can pay for babies, but incentivizing the production of just babies while not being able to incentivize the raising of the babies such that they become productive members of societies is going to be very counter productive.
I don't think that's the problem. It's the same issue insurance faces when setting prices. The government knows how to price insurance and hire actuaries.
Most of this decline isn't driven by a change in current fertility rates, but instead by a persistent trend downward in number of reproductive-aged adults. That was locked in by the fertility rates 20-40 years ago. These things move in the timescale of decades. Even if policy were reasonably successful, it would be a quarter of a century before things stabilized.
Extending these trends to 2124, the population could potentially fall below 50 million from the 124 million today.
However, life extension technology could vastly change this.
life extension technology will only increase the parasitic senior population and will the nail in the coffin for society at large
The answer probably lies in the wealth distribution in Japan. In the US 50% of the nation owns 2-3% of the nation wealth. For Japan I haven't been able to find this number, but I bet it's closer to 0.5% and that's why common folk there are permanently stressed and cannot afford kids.
There's an interesting analogy between lifecycle of nations and stars. When there's few people, they are dispersed over the land - that's the gas cloud stage of a star. As the number of people grows, the gravity pulls them together, they are forced to interact more and form a society with rules. Further growth of density starts amplifying certain animalistic traits, and a government is created to prevent the descent into anarchy. The gov essentially cools down the society, slows it down, and prevents certain runaway reactions. But the mass of the nation keeps increasing and its star slowly turns into a white dwarf: a super dense and rigid structure where not much is happening.
Wealth is savings. If you don’t save, you don’t have any wealth. But by income, the bottom 50% are responsible for 20% of the productivity / income. They are probably more than 20% of consumption, given the others save more than they consume out of their income.
So distribution of consumption from bottom 50% is closer to 33%.
https://www.bls.gov/cex/pce-ce-distributions.htm
> The [white dwarf]'s low temperature means it will no longer emit significant heat or light, and it will become a cold black dwarf. Because the length of time it takes for a white dwarf to reach this state is calculated to be longer than the current age of the known universe (approximately 13.8 billion years), it is thought that no black dwarfs yet exist.
Might get lucky there, unless
> A carbon–oxygen white dwarf that approaches this mass limit, typically by mass transfer from a companion star, may explode as a type Ia supernova via a process known as carbon detonation
The US a pretty big outliner in inequality, it's much worse than any other developed country. https://g.oxan.com/analysis/GI267313/2022-02-14-JAPAN-capita...
The bottom 50% are at 5.8% wealth share in Japan (same as in, e.g., Sweden) https://wir2022.wid.world/category/glossary/#tab_672cf68aa3d...
I'd love to see a more granular view of the birthrate specifically urban vs. rural