Japan’s sexual apathy is endangering the global economy (2013)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/10/22/japans-sexual-apathy-is-endangering-the-global-economy

by padobson • 12 years ago

32 37 12 years ago

shillster2• 12 years ago

Reproductive apathy is not the same as sexual.

notacoward• 12 years ago

Same point I was about to make. From what I can see of Japanese media and culture, there's no shortage of sexual desire or ways to act upon it. It's just acted upon in ways that don't lead to reproduction. In 2015 you'd think we might have moved beyond casually equating the two, but apparently not.

phkahler• 12 years ago

> Reproductive apathy is not the same as sexual.

No, but this is: "More than a third of childbearing-age Japanese have never had sex: 39 percent of women and 36 percent of men, ages 18 to 34"

shillster2• 12 years ago

How does this statistic compare to other countries? I suspect its in the same ballpark everywhere.

adamkittelson• 12 years ago

previous discussion, 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8866601

dang2• 12 years ago

Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8831521

and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8822755

nerdo• 12 years ago

More than half of Japanese are single. 49 percent of unmarried women and 61 of unmarried men, ages 18 to 34, are not in any kind of romantic relationship.

So 12-24% of women are sharing men then? Or would this be an artifact of the age bounding and women pairing with older, not counted men?

NoMoreNicksLeft2• 12 years ago

A little of both, I'd guess. They're not immune to the "hooking up" phenomenon over there, are they?

marktangotango• 12 years ago

Does hooking up qualify as a 'romantic relationship'? Depends on who you ask apparently.

tsotha• 12 years ago

Or maybe there's some disagreement between the sexes on what constitutes "a relationship".

na85• 12 years ago

Wouldn't that be shocking.

peterwwillis• 12 years ago

Or have more same-sex relationships. Or the men are overemphasizing on the lack of romance in the relationship. Or the unmarried women are seeing married men. Or the statistics are flawed.

I think sharing is actually the most likely if you consider the "herbivore men" trend. If more men are unwilling to have a sexual relationship than women, it would figure that the left over "carnivore men" would need to pick up the slack, resulting in sharing.

Poor carnivores.

higherpurpose• 12 years ago

Just wait until they discover virtual reality and the "appropriate accessories".

VLM2• 12 years ago

Isn't their current economy significantly smaller than their current population, the same problem the USA has, but worse? In that case they can either suffer eternally, shrink their population to match their economy, or expand their economy. Apparently #1 is unappealing, they're carrying out #2, and #3 has proven impossible for the past couple decades.

One way to report on the future is to make a "questioning" article that asks what will happen if ... and carefully point out there is no answer. So, much like CO2 emission, this isn't a "if" or "unless" story, this is the inevitable future. Best start thinking about how to handle the Japanese bond defaults, because they're coming. Other than that, there appear to be no real problems at a worldwide scale.

john_b• 12 years ago

"Isn't their current economy significantly smaller than their current population"

I'm not sure what you mean. These are apples and oranges you are comparing here.

VLM2• 12 years ago

Supply and demand. Much like the various ecological simulations of predator/prey or food/consumer.

So if you have an economy that only has space for 90M people as participants yet have 100M population, you've got a very big problem. Immigration, starvation, revolution, they'll find something to do. Or if they're mellow they'll just sit out the supposed societal mandates, after all, what else could they do?

adventured3• 12 years ago

"Japanese people aren't having enough kids to sustain a healthy economy."

The premise of this article is absurd, and flat out wrong.

Japan's big problem is debt, currency destruction, a collapsing standard of living due to the prior two items (zero savings rate, trillions in loans to the government being paid back in debased currency, high taxes, ~45% of tax revenue being eaten by debt servicing costs, and so on).

All of that debt is eating a large portion of the available capital for investment. Without enough private sector investment, you can't grow an economy, you can't bring in higher tax revenue, and so on.

You don't primarily grow an economy through massive reproduction anyway, you do it through innovation and productivity gains. If population gains were the key to massive economic gains, Nigeria would be a leading economy, and Sweden / Denmark / Norway / Switzerland would have spent the last 20 years languishing.

Or take Germany, their population has hardly moved in 40 years. Their GDP has increase nine fold in that time (and is still a dramatic increase accounting for inflation).

Japan's nominal GDP hasn't moved in 20 years. In that time their population has remained essentially flat (+2m). In those same 20 years, Germany's population has actually declined. And in that time Germany boosted its GDP by 77% roughly. By this article's logic, Germany's economy should have spent the last 20 years in dire condition.

The age of robotics is upon us. The last thing you're going to want in the next century is a vast oversupply of human labor. Japan should allow their population to continue contracting, while they focus on replacing human labor with robotics and artificial intelligence / software.

That's where a large portion of the economic growth in the next several decades is going to come from, the vast productivity gains to be found in those two areas.

stcredzero2• 12 years ago

So the problem is not that they don't have enough people. The problem is that they won't have enough people to form a sizeable enough tax base in the future, given demographic trends and the situation of debt/currency destruction. The demographic trend isn't the underlying cause, but it comes at a particularly bad time.

adventured3• 12 years ago

You don't need more people, you need economic growth via capital investment, innovation, productivity gains, and government that isn't wildly fiscally irresponsible.

Again, see: Germany

If your theory were true, Germany would be in terrible financial trouble just like Japan. Their population decline over the last 20 years would have reduced their financial tax base, but the exact opposite happened.

You do not need more people to grow your financial tax base.

Also, without productivity gains and a competitive private sector when it comes to innovation (see: South Korea and China taking Japan's growth by out-competing them), an expanded labor pool will not boost your tax base, it'll make everything worse - you'll still have the social welfare costs of an ever greater number people, meanwhile you'll primarily stagnate existing labor through wage pressure that comes with more workers.

anindyabd2• 12 years ago

It's not just about productivity. As the article says,

"People in Japan tend to live a long time; elderly Japanese are expensive to care for because they spend so many years in retirement and because they're accustomed to a high standard of living and medical care. For any economy to stay healthy, there need to be enough taxpayers to support all the retirees. But Japan's population is shrinking and aging simultaneously, which means that the number of old people is skyrocketing just as the base of taxpayers shrinks."

adventured3• 12 years ago

When you adjust for Japan's fraudulent age accounting, they're not living much longer than Germans. Maybe 1 to 1.5 years tops.

It's just another bogus excuse for the extraordinary mismanagement by the Japanese government over the last 25 years.

srgvd• 12 years ago

Well, the economy might sustain, but the pension system is surely doomed. Which means some drastic political fluctuations, as major (and active) voters will be stripped from their expected (and promised) wealth. And any political disturbance when you are a 3rd economy in the world with 200% GDP in debt might blow up in World's face easily.

If this debt is ever to be paid, this'll be surely done partly with funds now parked at US treasuries. And, of course, any economic issues in Japan will hit China hard as well - which is another major holder of US's debt. So, top-3 biggest economies in the World might go down in instance, sinking others with them.

Japan might try to compensate that by active foreign workforce infusions (like Europe do), - but they are a really closed society still, and their foreigners count is just under 2 mil (compare with 16 mil for, say, Russia, with comparable, though much younger on average, total population size), which is nothing.

jameshart• 12 years ago

Or, concisely: there's a reason GDP/capita is a widely used metric.

glittershark• 12 years ago

Actually, this is probably nothing more than FUD: http://www.yutaaoki.com/blog/top5-mistakes-journalists-make-...

brianfearn• 12 years ago

Well, that blog does still support the assertion that Japanese people have way less sex on average. They're by far the lowest on the graphs...

dkarapetyan• 12 years ago

What a silly analysis. Japanese are not having babies so the economy is doomed. Maybe less consumption and unmitigated infinite growth is not such a bad thing.

maratd• 12 years ago

Japanese are not having babies so the economy is doomed.

Yup. That's exactly how it goes.

Our entire social structure is based on the notion that economies grow and will continue to grow, forever.

The largest component of economic growth is not gains in productivity, which is what most people think. It's simple population growth. Each additional person means an increase in consumption of goods and services, and as a consequence, an increase in production not only for the sake of that person's consumption but also through that individual's labor. That's growth.

Take away population growth and you'll have anemic growth at best and a spiraling depression at worst.

gdubs2• 12 years ago

I'm reading Stewart Brand's book "Whole Earth Discipline" right now [1]. Prior to reading the book, I would have had a similar assumption.

Turns out that population collapse is potentially very dangerous to the environment. Why? Because a rapid collapse in population would cause economic distress and wars over resources. During economic crisis, environmental conservation tends to (unfortunately) go out the window. And war is devastating for the environment.

Anyway, Brand says the world population requires something like 2.1 kids per person to avoid a collapse in population, but is falling below that in many countries. The green movement of the 1960's was very effective at lowering population growth, averting a potential 'population bomb' that was so feared at the time.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Discipline

anindyabd2• 12 years ago

I don't understand. Why would a collapse in population cause wars over resources? If there are less people, shouldn't that mean that there will be more resources to go around for everyone?

lmg643• 12 years ago

Let's try looking at birthrates another way: Japan might be one of the few rational countries in the world.

If the economy is not growing in a way that supports having 3-5 kids per family, with a high quality of life (very important detail)...

...then perhaps the rational response is for birthrates to drop so the population can reach a natural size where quality of life is acceptable for the kids that are born.

Countries that continue to grow their population over everything else wind up being pretty miserable places to live over time.

unsignedint• 12 years ago

It's really nothing sexual, rather economical. If you plot marriage rate by their income level, you'll see it's impacting heavily for lower income group.

For women at least some good chunk of "cannot meet a suitable partner" is pretty much "can't find a suitable partner making good money" and it got to the point, that it's common things people joke about these days. :-) But here's some relevant data[1] about it from the post in the past.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6579574

dang2• 12 years ago

Japan’s sexual apathy is endangering the global economy (2013)

Related Stories