For the fourteenth year running, Japan's population has slumped to a record low. The non-foreign population dropped by nearly 900,000 — an unprecedented fall.
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have. Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future … then they will be more likely to have a family.
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have.
And working age people are necessary to make (and keep) life manageable, comfortable and sensible. This isn’t a hypothetical; they’re suffering the effects already. We’d need to lean a lot more into automation before society can function as an inverse pyramid.
Japan is notorious for unnecessarily complicated supply chains to bolster employment. And for unnecessarily ripping up perfectly fine pavement and concreting hillsides that don’t need it. Again, to bolster employment.
But this idea that more people leads to lower quality of life… that’s 1980s overpopulation panic talking.
Japan’s quality of life is suffering because they don’t have enough working age people to support their society.
Literally, we are going to have some difficulties in the coming decades because we don’t have enough people.
I’m not saying more people is always better, or that we have no limits. But when there are more old people than young people, that’s a bad situation, plain and simple.
Nah, tax the billionaires to bring money back to the working class and to fund the nursing homes. There are enough resources to support an elderly population, it’s all just being hoarded by assholes.
offer me eternity,
and I’ll trade a cup of coffee and a dime looking for a handout
on behalf of those who have so little time
but who wants to live on just 70 cents a day? padding your pockets doesn’t make this a better place
“cereal and water” is a feast for some you
say
your price-tag on existence can’t cover your double face
quality or quantity: a choice you have to make
dipping in the icing
bringing home the largest turkey from the field
breaking all the piggy banks, scooping up the booty
licking all the right holes, bolstering the payroll
why reduce life to a dollar amount per day?
and why let the world think this is the American way?
your uneaten greens are a feast for some you say
survival and living are concepts you can’t equate
quality or quantity: don’t tell me they’re the same
On the one hand, yes having a child with a higher quality of life is better than having many children.
However, there’s a good Kurzgesagt video about how the severe decline in birthrate can doom a population. Basically, if a population is not at the very least replacing itself, it will run out of young workers to keep the country going and vastly skew the proportion of elderly people to young workers. Small, rural towns will not survive since young people will flock to cities for work.
Though the video is based on Korea, the same concepts apply for Japan as well.
The logical, healthy approach to natural population growth and maintenance would be to provide social protections and supports for families and young people to grow into a society where they are encouraged and helped to start a family of one or two children in order to supply a healthy steady supply of new people for future generations.
Unfortunately, our world is governed by sociopathic wealthy overlords who demand more from people and want to give less to them. It’s not all their fault because the majority of us all sit around and just passively accept it as just a normal part of society. What that will probably mean is that in the future it will be a strange form of population control where children are no longer born but they will be manufactured and bred in order to provide a steady supply of human resources to keep the profit driven capitalist machine running for wealthy overlords.
From the look of how we managed our society in the past century … we won’t solve this problem sensibly, or with any empathy for society as a whole but rather try to deal with it from an economic and financial point of view. The wealthy owning class don’t see humanity as a whole that should be supported in any kind of healthy way … they see humanity as a source of wealth and a group of thinking individuals that can be taken advantage of to extract wealth for owners rather than for the whole of society.
Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future … then they will be more likely to have a family.
Somehow India is an exception to this. People worry about the future and still have kids. Nearly every married couple I know has at least one child or planning for one.
It’s because it’s not quite true. Reproductive rates are inversely correlated with wealth and education. If you’re poor, you need more kids to help the family (and, morbidly, even more kids in case some die due to lack of healthcare), especially once you yourself become elderly. When you’re secure, you end up not doing that.
But if you’re secure, but the world sucks, you say “why would I want to bring a child into this?”
If you want to maintain a population, you need to create the conditions for people to want to have kids, and give them the opportunity. Separately, you should also want to give your citizens a high standard of living.
I keep saying it all the time
It isn’t about the QUANTITY of life
It’s about the QUALITY of life
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
It makes more sense if you just concentrate on making life more manageable, comfortable and sensible for the population you already have. Once you have a comfortable stable population of people who no longer worry about their future … then they will be more likely to have a family.
And working age people are necessary to make (and keep) life manageable, comfortable and sensible. This isn’t a hypothetical; they’re suffering the effects already. We’d need to lean a lot more into automation before society can function as an inverse pyramid.
Or, we could transition away from people doing made up jobs that don’t need to exist to doing things that actually need to get done
I’d be interested to hear what you think a made up job is
Japan is notorious for unnecessarily complicated supply chains to bolster employment. And for unnecessarily ripping up perfectly fine pavement and concreting hillsides that don’t need it. Again, to bolster employment.
There are many, many, BS jobs in Japan.
And they still struggle with youth unemployment.
Fewer people would be a godsend.
But this idea that more people leads to lower quality of life… that’s 1980s overpopulation panic talking.
Japan’s quality of life is suffering because they don’t have enough working age people to support their society.
Literally, we are going to have some difficulties in the coming decades because we don’t have enough people.
I’m not saying more people is always better, or that we have no limits. But when there are more old people than young people, that’s a bad situation, plain and simple.
Nah, tax the billionaires to bring money back to the working class and to fund the nursing homes. There are enough resources to support an elderly population, it’s all just being hoarded by assholes.
offer me eternity,
and I’ll trade a cup of coffee and a dime looking for a handout
on behalf of those who have so little time
but who wants to live on just 70 cents a day? padding your pockets doesn’t make this a better place
“cereal and water” is a feast for some you say
your price-tag on existence can’t cover your double face
quality or quantity: a choice you have to make
dipping in the icing
bringing home the largest turkey from the field
breaking all the piggy banks, scooping up the booty
licking all the right holes, bolstering the payroll
why reduce life to a dollar amount per day?
and why let the world think this is the American way?
your uneaten greens are a feast for some you say
survival and living are concepts you can’t equate
quality or quantity: don’t tell me they’re the same
On the one hand, yes having a child with a higher quality of life is better than having many children.
However, there’s a good Kurzgesagt video about how the severe decline in birthrate can doom a population. Basically, if a population is not at the very least replacing itself, it will run out of young workers to keep the country going and vastly skew the proportion of elderly people to young workers. Small, rural towns will not survive since young people will flock to cities for work.
Though the video is based on Korea, the same concepts apply for Japan as well.
The logical, healthy approach to natural population growth and maintenance would be to provide social protections and supports for families and young people to grow into a society where they are encouraged and helped to start a family of one or two children in order to supply a healthy steady supply of new people for future generations.
Unfortunately, our world is governed by sociopathic wealthy overlords who demand more from people and want to give less to them. It’s not all their fault because the majority of us all sit around and just passively accept it as just a normal part of society. What that will probably mean is that in the future it will be a strange form of population control where children are no longer born but they will be manufactured and bred in order to provide a steady supply of human resources to keep the profit driven capitalist machine running for wealthy overlords.
From the look of how we managed our society in the past century … we won’t solve this problem sensibly, or with any empathy for society as a whole but rather try to deal with it from an economic and financial point of view. The wealthy owning class don’t see humanity as a whole that should be supported in any kind of healthy way … they see humanity as a source of wealth and a group of thinking individuals that can be taken advantage of to extract wealth for owners rather than for the whole of society.
Somehow India is an exception to this. People worry about the future and still have kids. Nearly every married couple I know has at least one child or planning for one.
I don’t get it.
It’s because it’s not quite true. Reproductive rates are inversely correlated with wealth and education. If you’re poor, you need more kids to help the family (and, morbidly, even more kids in case some die due to lack of healthcare), especially once you yourself become elderly. When you’re secure, you end up not doing that.
But if you’re secure, but the world sucks, you say “why would I want to bring a child into this?”
If you want to maintain a population, you need to create the conditions for people to want to have kids, and give them the opportunity. Separately, you should also want to give your citizens a high standard of living.