Outside a train station near Tokyo, hundreds of people cheer as Sohei Kamiya, head of the surging nationalist party Sanseito, criticizes Japan’s rapidly growing foreign population.
As opponents, separated by uniformed police and bodyguards, accuse him of racism, Kamiya shouts back, saying he is only talking common sense.
Sanseito, while still a minor party, made big gains in July’s parliamentary election, and Kamiya’s “Japanese First” platform of anti-globalism, anti-immigration and anti-liberalism is gaining broader traction ahead of a ruling party vote Saturday that will choose the likely next prime minister.
“Population crisis” is a myth, created by people who want cheap labor. What’s the crisis? What’s so bad about a declining population number? Spell it out!
It’s also possible they are racist.
But if the choice were between racist and greedy, I’m going to bet on greedy 100% of the time.
It’s a massive problem when you have an older population outnumbering a younger population. We have a system that is built and designed around a certain number of able-bodied workers supporting the structures that this labor is built on.
It doesn’t even take very much to wreck economies and send nations into depressions or catastrophic collapse. Wartime in history has hurt small percentages of populations and caused this effect, but the declining birthrates we’re seeing around the world are going to be worse in the long run than even all the plagues and wars if the trend continues.
The problem is nobody can talk about it because so many authoritarians and fascists have coopted the issue and made it about ethnicity and immigration. This is a huge problem so don’t let the narratives spin you around.
Our problem is, once again, lack of community. In a world of information and isolationism, we’re not nurturing each other in positive ways, we’re not sharing love and empathy, we’re not helping each other so why would anyone want to have kids? To say nothing of the incredible costs of living that are basically preventing people from even having free-time, much less 18 years of focus on raising another human being. We don’t have paid leave, we don’t have wages that can support a growing family, we don’t have child-care and healthcare in much of the world, we don’t have incentives to bring children into the world and even for people who have all that lined up, there’s a lot of dread and pessimism towards what the future will be like, so people are also making a moral decision not to inflict more suffering on people who didn’t consent to being born.
I don’t see a solution that doesn’t involve major social reform. Cities will crumble, economies will collapse, and maybe eventually something better will come from it.
Ok, but all of the things you listed are reasons why I would like this kind of economic system to decline. It’s what’s creating these circumstances and problems in the first place.
The problem is that the “decline” is going to be accompanied by a mountain of people living in miserable squalor or simply dying. That’s the crisis that needs a solution. If a change in economic systems can solve it then sure, do that, but coming up with the details of how that’ll work is the hard part.
The biggest issue is probably not being able to play pensions or have people care for the older generation.
Correct. When we hear concerns about a declining population, the concern (typically) isn’t that a population should always be rising, or even that it shouldn’t shrink, it’s more about the long-term economic stability of the age distribution of a population within the demographic pyramid. If your demography skews significantly older, you’re going to have fewer working age people supporting your economy and more post-retirement age people needing to be supported. This can do double damage to government revenue in particular, as they will see a simultaneous decrease in tax income and an increase in pension payouts, and this can lead to a sharp contraction in the available share of the budget for all of the other government priorities.
It’s a bit ironic in this case, as this is pretty common in developed economies, and typically the way you would offset this is via immigration, as that allows you to tailor your requirements to exactly what you need to balance your demography, and so anti-immigration sentiment is only likely to cause a more severe spiral.
…and that means retirees will literally starve and live on the streets? I don’t think it will. It will just be less luxurious.
So wages in care work are rising?
so wages in care work are rising?Who can pay those higher wages? The impoverished older generation? Or three state that is not able to keep up with the costs of pensions?
Who exactly will work those jobs?
Anyone. That’s how the labor market works. There aren’t going to be zero people capable of doing the work, they’re just going to be rare.
The same amount of work needs to be done to keep the economy running as it is, so you’re stretching those people out over a lot of additional jobs. How many jobs do you expect a young person to take simultaneously before they decide “this sucks, I’m emigrating to Canada where you only have to work one lifetime before getting to retire”?
Yeah, or, hear me out on this crazy theory: the supply of labor is low, so wages rise and young people can finally earn more money on just one job?
And then all those bullshit jobs that are not actually producing value get cut?
It wouldn’t be the same amount of jobs.
There is a limit to how much work you can get out of a fixed group of people no matter how much money you throw at them. If you ask me to build a thousand houses in an hour I’ll say “I can’t do that” and it won’t matter if you offer me a billion dollars to do it, I can’t do it.
The reason the population crisis in Japan is called a population crisis is because it is threatening to go past that threshold. It wouldn’t be a crisis otherwise.
Right, and I’m doubting that that is the case, because nobody who claims these things actually shares data and evidence to support that claim.
you might think that japanese boomers have generational wealth in form of real estate. this is not really the case, especially for rural population. houses aren’t built to last, lose value like motherfucker and are commonly demolished after 20-30 years, in part because people don’t like second hand, in part because there’s no point of building anything sturdier if typhoon or earthquake takes it. there is some newer construction that is intended to last longer, but it’s not a very common thing. so a reverse mortgage type thing won’t exist there, and yeah lots of people will get shafted by these conditions
Not to mention that with a declining population the value of real estate is likely going to decline as well since there’s less demand for it. Especially in those rural areas, people are moving to the cities.
If you keep taking out more than was put in the fund to fund the larger population in retirement, at some point there’s just nothing left.
They won’t starve and live in the streets because something will change before society reaches that stage, but theoretically it’s not impossible. In Japan, for example, a significant chunk (unsure if a majority) of homeless people are elderly men.
There’s an excellent video that explains all the ramifications of populations decline and it’s not only an economical nightmare but also a cultural obliteration as well over time. They use South Korea as an example but mention that even the US is heading this way but has another decade or so before it gets really bad.
https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk
if this is all true it makes me wonder how can a country like Russia continue to exist? is it because old people just die and no one cares?
The crisis isn’t simply from a declining total population number. It’s from the demographic shape of that population. Here’s Japan’s population pyramid. As you can see, it’s not really a pyramid - it’s heavily weighted at the older end. As people continue to age that big bulge reaches retirement, and then you have more people retired than you have people still of working age. This causes a number of problems.
Yes, I’m asking you (or other people making the argument that population decline is so bad) to list them.
When an overwhelming proportion of the population is elderly, an overwhelming proportion of the working age populations earnings have to will go to support them. This is measured by an economic ratio known as the dependency ratio which is going to get out of hand for countries like Japan. The strain on public finances paying for pensions and healthcare reduces quality of life for everyone in the country and depresses economic growth as young people working to support the countries elderly population and their own parents have less to invest in the wider economy.
You’re still missing the basic point by talking about the “population decline.” The crisis is not the decline. The crisis is the age distribution.
Here’s a page discussing some of the specific problems of an inverted population pyramid, and it uses Japan as a specific example of a population facing this.
I still don’t see how that’s an issue. Just spend less money on elderly people?
Just let them fend for themselves. That should totally work. I’ll let my 96 year old grandma know that she’s gonna have to hold a bake sale to pay for dinner tonight.
Also, your solution is to spend less money on elderly people, while at the same time there is a growing population of elderly people.
Are you seriously this stupid?
I wish everyone worked in logistics for just like, a year or so. When you grasp how big and complex the systems are and how fragile they are to even small disruptions, you get immediately why demographic changes and population disruptions are incredibly scary.
A nation in Asia collapsing economically doesn’t mean “less people so less expenses” it actually creates ripple effects that can lead to millions of people starving on another continent.
Only to people like you, whose job depends on it. If a nation half way around the globe has economic troubles, I don’t think that’s going to impact me much…
One would think we’d all have a clue after COVID. The supply chain shocks reverberated for years.
I would have thought a single ship getting stuck in a canal basically bringing the world to a standstill would have woken people up, but we treated it like a funny meme 😭
Letting old people suffer in poverty or die of treatable illnesses even though they were promised a decent retirement seems like a bad solution to me, and if it’s happening it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d call a symptom of a “crisis.” And unlikely to go over well with the population at large.
It’s not so much the decline but the ageing. A society mostly consisting of OAPs can’t support itself.