Japan’s population fell by 800k last year as demographic crisis accelerates

https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/27/asia/japan-population-drop-2022-intl-hnk/index.html

by e2e4 • 3 years ago

49 107 3 years ago

yxre• 3 years ago

Japan is a fascinating case. It's GDP is stable despite a shrinking population. Is it only staying stable because of the population change?

If western countries with a similar birth rate problem stopped immigration, would western countries have a similar economic outlook as Japan?

answerisyes• 3 years ago

Growing gdp mostly involves fixing the bottlenecks on production. IT and technological efficiencies, integration between companies usually goes a longer way than importing the 354564th taxi driver

FirmwareBurner• 3 years ago

IT and technological efficiencies, integration between companies usually goes a longer way than importing the 354564th taxi driver

/confused Germany noises

enkid2• 3 years ago

Do you have any evidence of this? The more people you have the bigger the gap usually is.

A_D_E_P_T6• 3 years ago

Japan has 126M people crammed into a nation 10% smaller than California.

California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated.

A managed population decline could be a good thing for Japan, its people, and its environment. They needn't fall for the "population growth at all costs" meme, and I hope they don't.

fendy30022• 3 years ago

Problem is, is it something that can be stabilized / reversed? Or will it be somehing that can spiraling into a continuous decline and dangerous?

I read somewhere that a rather high ratio of fertile-age women there don't want children. Smartphone and abundance of cheap entertainment plus tight schedule and budget of modern world (and more other reasons) makes them prefer childless lifestyle.

pjc506• 3 years ago

When you can easily get a seat on the rush hour subway people's attitudes may start changing.

Really, if _you_ want _other people_ to have children, you have to negotiate with and offer them something. That seems to be missing from so much of this demographic discourse.

nradov2• 3 years ago

A misogynistic culture is probably a bigger issue than smartphones in causing some women to decide against having children.

gizmo• 3 years ago

Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch.

Japan is also not having any kind of managed population decline, unless they choose counterbalance old people dying with immigration. But so far it doesn't look like Japan is eager to embrace immigration. And that will result in a country with many old people and few working-age people. Hard to thrive with such an unbalanced population. That's why the article calls it a crisis.

jfim• 3 years ago

Japan is also 73% mountains, so the populated areas are much denser than a simple population divided by area calculation would give.

NovemberWhiskey3• 3 years ago

Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch.

But relatively little of Japan is actually livable: if you look at Honshu, most of the population is in plains on the coast, and most of the inland area mountainous and hardly inhabited.

For example, about a third of the population of Japan lives on the Kanto plain which represents just 4.5% of the land area.

marcusverus• 3 years ago

Japan is nowhere near the most densely populated country on earth. It's the 40th. Less dense than Belgium, Israel, India, Singapore, and South Korea, just to name a few. Calling Japan cramped for space is a stretch.

This is good rhetoric but poor logic. The mere existence of denser-populated places has no bearing on whether a particular place is too densely populated, any more than the mere existence of more polluted places has any bearing on whether a particular place is too polluted.

Japan is also not having any kind of managed population decline, unless they choose counterbalance old people dying with immigration.

The idea that mass immigration is the only way to manage population decline is absurd and unserious.

michaelcampbell2• 3 years ago

California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated.

Get out of the cities. California is _big_.

danjc• 3 years ago

Physical space has little to do with economic output.

famouswaffles10• 3 years ago

They needn't fall for the "population growth at all costs" meme, and I hope they don't.

It's so tiring reading this nonsense rhetoric over and over again.

Population decline resulting from decades of abysmal fertility rates is absolutely a horrible thing. There's no "meme" here to be had.

When people stop working, they stop contributing to society but they don't stop taking from it.

For as long as human society has formed, the solution was either the working population being productive enough for everyone else or the non working dying off soon after the fact.

When fertility rates are in the shitter for a long time, you guarantee that at some point, the working population will be far far lower than what is necessary to support the rest.

A demographic and societal collapse will ensue. Many benefits and safety nets for many people including the working will cease to exist simply because it can no longer be sustained.

Japan's national pension scheme is "pay as you go", meaning that benefits for retirees today are paid out of the contributions going into the scheme today.

Japan has already reached the point of having less than two workers per retiree. By 2050, that number is projected to be more like 1.5.

Paying some taxes to social security / medicare / etc works out OK when those go to cover 0.5 to 1 dependent per worker. When that 1 workers income needs to support 1.5 .. 2+ things will get ugly fast.

Once this hits in full force, it will last decades. It's that simple.

And it has nothing absolutely nothing to do with capitalism or socialism or communism or whatever -ism you might want to scapegoat. For as long as humans need to work to survive this will be a problem.

The problems Japan is having, South Korea is looking to speedrun. It's so bad that it's too late to forestall a collapse. Even if the country magically started having replenishing birth rates immediately, in at most a few decades, we'll be seeing a collapse that would last at least 20 years. This is the best case scenario. It's straight up apocalyptic.

This is what a population table looks like for a country that had a fertility rate of 6 at year 0 and then an extinction level rate of 1 for decades (SK is actually decidedly worse at 0.78 now).

(148) Year 0: 4 sixties, 11 forties, 33 twenties, 100 newborns,

(194) Year 20: 11 sixties, 33 forties, 100 twenties, 50 newborns

(208) Year 40: 33 sixties, 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns

(187) Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns

(93) Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns

(46) Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns

(23) Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn

It's like climate change. You go decades with everything looking normal at first glance. By the time, everything doesn't look so normal it's to late to do anything other than save your population from extinction. (Assuming you can even do that. A lot of people seem to miss the fact that not one country that has suffered declining fertility rates has managed to reverse the trend despite trying for decades. Not one)

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

I have to admit that it's incredibly amusing to me that humanity could go extinct because we basically just didn't feel like bothering to keep the whole thing going. I'm certainly one of those who doesn't really see the point in it.

But I suspect there will always be some fundamentalist religious groups who will find reasons to reproduce no matter the economic or environmental realities of the future Earth.

tiffanyg2• 3 years ago

Is it really a "horrible thing"?

You yourself mention climate change. There are increasing fights over WATER among PEOPLE [1], even as "freshwater" resources are being utilized to an extent where it's estimated that 1/3 of freshwater species are endangered or at risk of becoming endangered [2], microplastics everywhere [3], OTHER species being accelerated into extinction at a continuously increasing rate in general, etc.

Also, what happened to the "promise of automation" and "promise of mass production"? I thought we were all supposed to be "chillin' on the French Riviera while machines did so much that none of us had to work more than, say, 10 hours per week?" [4] ... I.e., shouldn't we be able to make do with fewer workers?? The even bigger laugh, there, is how much everyone is freaking out about "AI" now.

Decline in fertility in a more "organic" way, now (due to economics, impact of EDCs for years, etc.) is far better (for US, even, as a species) than "keeping the accelerator mashed to the floor as we barrel towards the cliff" [5] (when it'll be "Soylent Green" time for basically everyone, one way or another).

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/04/15/colorado-river-shrinking-cali...

[2] https://bioone.org/journals/journal-of-the-north-american-be...

[3] https://www.academia.edu/download/59765553/Human_Consumption...

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward

[5] https://youtu.be/BGtEp7zFdrc

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

California is full of public lands https://4printablemap.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/nationa...

Non-public lands you will see on there are the coastline, the desert, and the Central Valley. If you drive the northern parts of highway 1, you’ll see many parts do seem very empty in between SF and LA. Compared to the development along the US east coast it is night and day. If you drive through the Central Valley, you’ll be enveloped in farmland. And the desert is the desert, nearly uninhabited. All of these places feel very sparsely populated.

lumost• 3 years ago

California is mostly desert, national forest, and fire country. LA, and SD exist in their current state due to large scale water works that bring water from outside of California.

For an American comparison, the northeastern US is home to 43% more People than California and is only 17% larger. In both California and the US, the population is concentrated on the coasts.

Would it be so surprising that a nation with a large coast, mild weather, and plenty of water would have a large population?

simonebrunozzi2• 3 years ago

Japan: 377,973 km² [0]

California: 423,970 km² [1]

You are off by roughly 9 times. Not a small mistake.

[0] https://www.worlddata.info/asia/japan/index.php

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California

A_D_E_P_T6• 3 years ago

Japan: 145,937 sq.m.

California: 163,696 sq.m.

163,696 - 10% = 147326.4

I said "10 percent" not "10 times." And it does so happen that Japan is roughly 10% smaller than California. (In fact it's closer to 11% smaller, but I rounded it out.)

yellowapple• 3 years ago

California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated.

California also has some rather terrible housing density issues (exacerbated by pro-land-speculator policies like Prop 13), which is a big part of why it feels crowded despite having a fraction of the population per square mile.

RestlessMind5• 3 years ago

California has a population under 40M (39.2M) and doesn't exactly feel sparsely populated.

Tell me you have never been to California, or never ventured out of SF/LA, without telling me so.

A managed population decline could be a good thing for Japan, its people, and its environment.

Is the current decline managed? Doesn't look like it. But would be great to see any sources about their government planning this.

dbg31415• 3 years ago

I think it would be nice to have less people. Like going back in time when there wasn’t as much traffic.

solumunus• 3 years ago

It’s a romantic idea but unfortunately the global financial system is basically a Ponzi scheme that relies on growing populations.

michaelcampbell2• 3 years ago

For people interested in demographics and its consequences, Peter Zeihan (all over Youtube) has a lot of very interesting research into it.

enkid2• 3 years ago

Zeihan says a lot of interesting stuff, but his track record is pretty spotty.

nradov2• 3 years ago

Are the other analysts with more accurate track records? Which major issues has he gotten wrong?

https://zeihan.com/demographics-part-7-the-northeast-asian-c...

davely• 3 years ago

I just finished his book, “ The End of the World Is Just the Beginning.”

It was a pretty fascinating (though alarmist) thesis on how a number of countries are poised for “demographic collapse” due to aging and shrinking populations and what that will ultimately mean for globalization.

fooker• 3 years ago

I have seen people online accusing this guy of being a CIA stooge, and some other people saying he’s controlled opposition paid by the CCP.

If he has managed to get both of these monikers, his analysis must be fairly legitimate.

INTPenis5• 3 years ago

It's funny how headlines like this are instantly alarming, but they really shouldn't be. A natural population decline is the best thing we can have right now. It's not hard to make babies, it's in fact too easy.

Imagine if a breed of deer living in a restricted space naturally controlled its population in relation to the resources of their living space. That would be amazing!

More close to home, but a lot less popular, is the fact that the population of Croatia has also been steadily declining ever since the massive exodus of the last civil war.

From 1990 to 2023 the population of Croatia has declined from 4.8m to 4m, that's an even greater decline than Japan viewed in percent of population. Very alarming if it's part of your culture and language disappearing.

spaceman_2020• 3 years ago

You’re not wrong, but our entire economic system is built on the idea that the pensioners will be supported by a steady stream of tax paying younger workers.

When that stream collapses, paying for the pensioners becomes much harder.

INTPenis5• 3 years ago

Sure, but 800k out of 120m people is nowhere near affecting the senior citizens of the future. Time will tell if it's a stabilizing change that will oscillate around some baseline, or if it will continue to drastically decline.

And even if a drastic decline is the future we're looking at, there is no shortage of immigrants who are willing to take menial jobs for low pay. As far as I know Japan hasn't been an inviting immigration destination so far. There are policy changes to make that could easily inject some population to the country.

pjc506• 3 years ago

Imagine if a breed of deer living in a restricted space naturally controlled its population in relation to the resources in their living space

Indeed. People seem to forget that the alternative to "contraception-limited" is "death-limited". In Scotland, since killing all the natural predators, we have to keep culling the deer in order to maintain the ecosystem.

NovemberWhiskey3• 3 years ago

It's funny how headlines like this are instantly alarming, but they really shouldn't be. A natural population decline is the best thing we can have right now.

Japan's crisis is in the overlap of economics and demographics. The shrinking economically active population cannot hope to sustain the growing population of retirees.

seunosewa• 3 years ago

Retirees will need to accept less support from the working population. Measures like increasing the retirement age will help a lot. Slashing retirement benefits.

famouswaffles10• 3 years ago

This is just wrong lol.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36920150

steveBK123• 3 years ago

Yeah I think the degrowthers and others underestimate some of the ugly political decisions & societal preference that will ensue in such a world.

Paying some taxes to social security / medicare / etc works out OK when those go to cover 0.5 to 1 dependent per worker. When that 1 workers income needs to support 1.5 .. 2+ things will get ugly.

AgentOrange12344• 3 years ago

Your argument seems to hinge on:

“at some point, the working population will be far far lower than what is necessary to support the rest.”

That’s a completely reasonable take in, at a minimum, pre-industrial times.

There is a long dream that “increases in productivity will allow us to live lives of leisure.” This is obviously not how things have turned out, but it isn’t clear to me that we cannot choose this.

Anyway, what percentage of us actually need to work? Where is the point that we cannot cross? I am skeptical that Japan will come anywhere close.

INTPenis5• 3 years ago

But that's still looking at things from a very narrow perspective. You're ignoring that there is an entire world out there of people who are willing to make use of modern global communication.

I've heard in the past that Japan has been notoriously hard to emigrate to, but I could be wrong. Either way, there is a solution.

twobitshifter2• 3 years ago

Japan isn’t naturally controlling its population, there’s no agency behind its declining birth rate, unlike somewhere like China where the one child policy was a purposeful government population control. The Japan population is not tied in any way to Japan’s resource limitations.

On top of that, it is harder to make babies now than ever, given declining fertility rates.

oska3• 3 years ago

there’s no agency behind its declining birth rate

There's the agency of every fertile Japanese couple deciding whether to have children and how many. That's a lot more natural than an extremist government imposed policy like China's One Child Policy.

remote_phone• 3 years ago

Japan needs to move to a 4 day work week. Their culture and lifestyle is sucking the will to live from their young people. Moving to a 4 day work week will help the kids loosen up and feeling confident that they’re not bringing kids into a dystopian matrix-like world where all you do is work and then die.

xyzzy47473• 3 years ago

They should tax people who don't have kids, subsidize child care, enforce long maternity leave, etc.

Maybe the people who have kids should rake in dividends from the people who don't have kids.

willmadden2• 3 years ago

Exactly, pragmatic and effective while preserving Japanese culture. I would add qualifications that the family must be a nuclear family that is otherwise not on public assistance. Just give them huge tax breaks for having 4+ kids. The trend would reverse in 9 months.

xyzzy47473• 3 years ago

I disagree about the public assistance part especially for a country like Japan.

I'm not sure if anyone cares about this anymore, but ethnically Japanese people will become nearly extinct if they don't make some radical changes. They should massively incentivize people - even financially poor Japanese - to have kids. Just because someone has a career in e.g. a Japanese bank moving spreadsheets around doesn't mean they should be favored.

A_D_E_P_T6• 3 years ago

Just give them huge tax breaks for having 4+ kids. The trend would reverse in 9 months.

Hungary has already tried this and it doesn't work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary

"The Second Orbán Government made saving the nation from the demographic abyss a key aspect and therefore has introduced generous breaks for large families and greatly increased social benefits for all families. Those with three or more children pay virtually no taxes."

S.Korea is trying regular cash payouts: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/12/south-korea-splashe...

Evidently much more is required. Or it could be that the problem isn't solely financial. In heavily urbanized countries, most people apparently prefer easy modern entertainments to the rigors and stresses of parenting.

dgrin91• 3 years ago

A tax on not having kids.... That sounds dystopian as hell.

xyzzy47473• 3 years ago

Well one problem is that from an individualistic perspective, it makes financial sense to have as few children as possible (all other concerns aside). There should be government policies such that it's more financially rational to have kids, especially since children are generally a net positive.

Perhaps there should be a tax that starts at age 19, and increases in percentage the longer you don't have children. I am also not sure if it's better to only tax women (since they are the ultimate gatekeepers) or men as well.

If you do have children, especially 2 or above, the government should pay you dividends in some form along with other benefits.

makeitdouble3• 3 years ago

As in many countries with declining population, as the demographic pyramid is inversed, voting power is concentrated on the elder side.

Good luck passing any laws that put elderlies at a clear short term disadvantage ("the country will be better for it in 20~30 years" won't resonate much to a 70 yo couple)

MandieD2• 3 years ago

So I was childless (not completely by choice) until the “happy accident” came along at 40. Part of it was waiting until we bought a house, because I’m Texan enough to have internalized that responsible people don’t have children before they own property (I don’t believe that for others, but I was never quite able to let it go for myself, much like my personal feelings about other social issues)

Punitive taxes on the childless would just ensure that the ones waiting for prudential reasons (savings, home ownership) would be even less likely to take the plunge.

hotpotamus2• 3 years ago

As a man, I'm not capable of having children, so that seems a bit unfair.

famouswaffles10• 3 years ago

Everytime this comes up, I always see the "this good, Overpopulation!" rhetoric and it's so wrong.

Population decline resulting from decades of abysmal fertility rates is absolutely a horrible thing.

When people stop working, they stop contributing to society but they don't stop taking from it.

For as long as human society has formed, the solution was either the working population being productive enough for everyone else or the non working dying off soon after the fact.

When fertility rates are in the shitter for a long time, you guarantee that at some point, the working population will be far far lower than what is necessary to support the rest.

A demographic and societal collapse will ensue. Many benefits and safety nets for many people including the working will cease to exist simply because it can no longer be sustained. Once this hits in full force, it will last decades. It's that simple.

This is what a population table looks like for a country that had a fertility rate of 6 at year 0 and then an extinction level rate of 1 for decades (SK is actually decidedly worse at 0.78 now).

(148) Year 0: 4 sixties, 11 forties, 33 twenties, 100 newborns,

(194) Year 20: 11 sixties, 33 forties, 100 twenties, 50 newborns

(208) Year 40: 33 sixties, 100 forties, 50 twenties, 25 newborns

(187) Year 60: 100 sixties, 50 forties, 25 twenties, 12 newborns

(93) Year 80: 50 sixties, 25 forties, 12 twenties, 6 newborns

(46) Year 100: 25 sixties, 12 forties, 6 twenties, 3 newborns

(23) Year 120: 12 sixties, 6 forties, 3 twenties, 1 newborn

iandanforth• 3 years ago

You're doing the 'exponential trends will continue to be exponential forever' thing.

famouswaffles10• 3 years ago

I'm not lol. That's the point. Even if Japan or South Korea had full reverse right from this instant, a collapse that will last decades is inevitable. That's the consequence of low and further declining fertility rates for decades. The table has already been set.

AbrahamParangi3• 3 years ago

Sadly, their mathematical assumptions are actually very reasonable and conservative. They're not saying "this exponential trend will continue", they're saying "what happens in 30 years to South Korea if the current state continues?"

And the answer is that there will be something like two 80 yr olds for every 30 yr old.

willmadden2• 3 years ago

If this was a crisis, which is highly questionable, isn’t the simple answer to offer generous tax incentives for families that have 4+ children while staying off of public assistance?

locallost2• 3 years ago

It would be a simple answer if it was shown to work. But the results in other countries are at best iffy. I live in Germany and get both tax breaks and cold hard cash per child, but the results are not encouraging. As a parent it makes sense to me, I cannot imagine thinking about kids and having them for tax breaks.

makeitdouble3• 3 years ago

＞ I cannot imagine thinking about kids and having them for tax breaks.

The reverse is true though: many couples wanting kids will bail at the price to pay without serious aids, and feel it would be a disservice to their kids to raise them in too poor conditions. Many couples won't make long term plans (including marrying/having kids) if they don't see a stable financial path down the line.

Now, the gov aids and labor laws provisions need to be significant to have a visible effect (e.g. a hundred or two bucks per child per months won't cut it). I don't know how far Germany went.

SamoyedFurFluff• 3 years ago

Aren’t tax incentives a form of public assistance? Tbh, I don’t understand why not just pay people for children straight up: pay for the cost of daycare, cover the cost of a birth, provide food and clothes fit for a child, offer incentives to employers to employ moms after they’ve finished raising.

pjc506• 3 years ago

Ultimately I think that will work: making parenthood a career, with money and respect.

I note that a lot of people seem to want new adults, as fully formed economic units, but few people seem to want children. More kids running around. Being helpful to mothers. Complimenting people who have lots of kids despite this basically making it impossible to work full or even part-time.

piva00• 3 years ago

Not every social problem can be tackled economically.

dirtyid• 3 years ago

Nordic countries with better welfare nets than JP have tried to carrots and didn't fare much better, much as in raising TFR over replacement.

I think problem will require much more sticks and state coercion, i.e. 90% inheritance tax or inheritance holds unless 2 kids. One stupid but IMO effective policy would be to ban pet licenses, the amount of single cat/dog women who use pets as relationship surrogate is absurd - pet ownership is 80% female in PRC.

Japan’s population fell by 800k last year as demographic crisis accelerates

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