- Why is it a crisis for populations to decline to levels of the first half of the 20th century? The world worked just fine back then with that number of people.
There are problems that arise from a population that contains a lot of old people, but that's a problem that fixes itself in a few decades, and balance will be restored.
Pick one crisis: no jobs, or no people.
- If nothing is done they will go extinct.
- The same number of people, but on the way up and growing, compared to on the way down and shrinking, is very different.
- The age distribution is most of the problem. It doesn't help to have a lot of people who need somebody else to be working at the hospital for them. If you skip straight past looking at the period if imbalance the situation looks a lot better.
- stupid question: if by some magic 80% of the population of the planet disappeared tomorrow, what ll happen to the economy and stock market
- Japan's population is 123M, about what it was in 1990. It's a small, densely populated island. It's not a crisis.
- Make life affordable and give time outside work, and the population crisis* will fix itself.
Keep insisting on Draconian hours for unlivable pay, and you get what you asked for.
* Falling population is a political problem, not a social one. It also feels like this is the system working as intended from the higher ups.
- Why do you think that this is true? Look at the countries by hours worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_a... and there is basically no correlation between birth rates and hours worked. Countries with higher hours worked actually have higher birth rates!
[South Korea has a high birth rate for religious groups than non-religious](https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol44/23/44-23....) no religion, 1.13; Buddhist, 1.33; Catholic, 1.16; Protestant, 1.28; and “other religion,” 1.20. This is the same country with the same problems for all groups.
- That’s not it at all. The uncomfortable reality is if women work professional jobs you will have a low birth rate. That’s entirely what the data points at. Having kids is almost entirely cultural.
- It's kinda both? If women work professional jobs too, the men have to work correspondingly fewer hours. Child-rearing is an exhausting battle when both parents work full-time.
We need to normalize working part-time for couples, even for professional jobs, even going so far as it make it a cultural non-negotiable. And/or compensate for the lost income.
Without the cultural shift, it turns into a prisoner's dilemma. When both partners fight through the exhaustion and work full-time while raising children, they can outbid everyone else for houses, schools, and cars.
- Well, related to women getting professional jobs, I've also been told that Japanese women don't want to sign up for life with Japanese men. Women get the coffee, etc.
- Had this assertion been true India wouldn't have been the most populous country on earth.
- > Make life affordable and give time outside work
> Keep insisting on Draconian hours for unlivable pay
Average hours worked in Japan are comparable to the UK and significantly lower than the US, Canada, Czechia, and Israel [0], yet they all have significantly higher birth rates than Japan.
The issue in Japan and Asia in general is cultural. Women are still expected to both hold a career and do all household chores and have 2 kids. In a lot of cases, jobs will de facto fire women if they have kids because of the cultural expectation that they will leave to have kids and become a housewife.
Unsurprisingly, plenty of Japanese women have decided they don't want that life and have decided against marriage. On the other side of the coin, plenty of Japanese women hold off on marriage until they find a partner who can afford to be a primary earner. Unsurprisingly, this means higher educated households in Japan tend to have a higher birth rate than less educated ones [1] as they tend to be more economically stable.
The only developed country which has an above replacement TFR is Israel (even non-religious secular Israelis have a replacement TFR), and it's culturally one of the most pro-children societies I've ever been and much more gender egalitarian than other countries.
All conversations about TFR and birth rates on HN are from a male point of view and never actually as why women don't want kids or maybe don't want to date a number of HNers/Redditors. It's very incel-like in nature.
[0] - https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/hours-worked.html
[1] - https://weekly-economist.mainichi.jp/articles/20250916/se1/0...
- > Average hours worked in Japan are comparable to the UK and significantly lower than the US, Canada, Czechia, and Israel
How trustworthy is that data? It claims to count only employed people, but for Japan it works out to 6.2 hours work per day, 5 days a week. Yet we all hear stories of workers in Japan having basically no life outside of work. And when people visit Japan, they report things like everything being spotless, and trash containers and trucks being washed daily - labor intensive things. Something doesn't add up.
- > How trustworthy is that data
Very. This is the OECD.
> Yet we all hear stories of workers in Japan having basically no life outside of work
These anecdotes tend to be decades old. After the labor code changes in 2018; the new generation of Japanese megacorps like SoftBank, Rakuten, Mercari, and LY normalizing Western work culture; and the worker shortage in the 2010s, work hours reduced.
> And when people visit Japan, they report things like everything being spotless, and trash containers and trucks being washed daily
This is done by guest workers brought in from ASEAN, China, and Nepal in exploitative Gulf-style labor programs that are de facto bonded labor and at least back in Vietnam have ties with organized crime.
The Japanese Ministry of Labor literally has a formal strategy around recruiting guestworkers for janatorial and cleaning work [0].
This is also why the new government is cracking down on such kinds of abuses [1].
- > This is done by guest workers brought in from ASEAN, China, and Nepal..
Japan has only 3.3% immigrants. For comparison, Canada has 23%.
- Yep, but foreign workers make up the overwhelming majority of janitorial and sanitation employees in Japan [0]. Same with agriculture [1][2][3] and textiles/garments [4].
Look, it may feel shocking to you as a Brit, but yes Japanese work life has become significantly chiller and QoL is better than the UK. They didn't have 15 years of austerity as well as Brexit, and were largely sheltered from the Great Recession and Eurozone crisis due to their trade ties in Asia.
They also invested heavily in automation which meant less hands needed for menial work as well as disinvesting in rural and low population regions (most comments about cleanliness tend to be centered within the richer areas of Tokyo).
[0] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf
[1] - https://mainichi.jp/articles/20251121/k00/00m/040/139000c
[2] - https://mainichi.jp/articles/20251121/k00/00m/040/125000c
[3] - https://mainichi.jp/articles/20251121/k00/00m/040/132000c
[4] - https://www.meti.go.jp/shingikai/sankoshin/seizo_sangyo/text...
- Except there is the awkward fact that it is the third world which has higher population growth rates and the nordics have are leaders in low birth rates.
- Africa has by far the highest rates, and the Nordics are far below replacement, but some of the lowest (and noticeably lower than the Nordics) are South Korea (0.7), Taiwan (0.9), and Singapore (0.9). Replacement would require ~2.1.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t...
- Why is this fact awkward?
- They meant awkward in this context because it seemed contrary the theory of the comment above them.
- Consider that the world is complex and there's more than one factor. Conservatives cultures have higher birth rates, as do families with lower educational levels. Both are common in the third world. In developed countries, there's constant conversation about how people are being priced out of feeling safe or able to hit traditional milestones like having children. I myself didnt have kids in a marriage only because we couldn't afford it, and I worked around the clock hoping to soon.
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- While working in Japan, I once asked my Japanese supervisor what he was doing for his next vacation. He responded that he never took a vacation and had, in fact, accrued some ridiculous amount of PTO over many years that he never intended to use. がんばって!
- Americans do that too.
I think europe seems to be pretty balanced. Friends take 5 week vacation in the summer.
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- Awfully careless if you ask me. They gotta keep better track, maybe put AirTags on some of these people. /s
(I'm making fun of the weird phrasing of the headline. It's obviously a serious issue for the nation of Japan).
