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Japan ‘on verge of no longer functioning’ after birth rate plummets to record new low
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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I still don't understand how a falling population leads to a society crumbling.
The only thing a reduction in population does is make domestic labor more expensive. If that increase in expense outpaces the product of your society, that's not on the population, that's on the sustainability of the society.
And that's only the capitalist way of looking at it.
Supporting the older, non-working, population is expensive. You need enough workers paying in to those systems that support them.
Yeah, and not only paying in but actually working the labour intensive health/elderly care jobs.
That scheme sounds familiar. If you drew a diagram to represent the repayment of investments, does it resemble a geometric shape?
Sure, but that still sounds like a self-correcting problem.
In most places, because the economy needs to grow so it stays ahead of its growing loans and debt (overly simplified). To grow, you need more workers and customers. If population doesn't grow, and you don't have immigrants to do the producing and buying instead, things stagnate, very lower interest rates that the system can't really handle, government keeping the economy together with duct tape, general welfare not doing great what leads to even less population growth. But every place is a bit different and its own challenges of course.
If population is decreasing because of decreased birthrate, then the population is aging. And all else equal, an aging population is less productive because fewer people are working.
And that's a problem, how, exactly?
It means things change, because that's what humans do. We adapt. There are still 750k children born in Japan in 2024, vs 1.6m that died.
To me, it sounds like the obvious solution is to make life better for the young. That doesn't have to come at the cost of the old, but that's what the wealthiest will choose.
Less productive means less things for you.
Suppose you ate 100 bananas this year. Suppose you were told that next year you are only allowed 90 bananas, and what's more you will never have 100 bananas a year again. Even worse, after next year you will never have 90 bananas again. And the same is true of everything else you enjoy.
Most people hope, at a minimum, that next year will be no worse than this year. They do not like knowing, for certain, that every year will be worse than the one before. Forever. But that's what happens when productivity inexorably declines.
In fact, in this situation the only way to make things better, for anyone, is at someone else's expense. There is no such thing as a win-win outcome. That makes for a very unpleasant society and it's easy to see why leaders want to avoid this.
In a world where you can automate everything it's not an issue.
We can't, so we need specialized labor to accomplish some tasks and not everyone has the potential to become specialized labor even if they're given the chance.
With people retiring and less people to take their place it becomes an issue, no matter how much you pay people, if there's no one to take a position then the seat stays empty.
It's not emmigration. If it was then what you said about labor prices is correct.
It's about too many old people who will die in the next decade and the lack of new babies to keep Japanese culture going
I agree with you 100%. Capitalists need to complete the logic loop: we’ve built amazing tech, machinery and processes to get incredible productivity gains and production of goods with less labor. So we should be able to get by with less labor, right?…
Sure. Or everyone could get more stuff for the same amount of labor.
Suppose your boss told you, "You've been doing a great job at work. We could give you 10% raise, or we could keep your paycheck the same and cut your hours by 10%." I don't know which you would choose, but most people would take the raise.
Yes this is what I meant. So when we can “get more stuff for less labor” we should be fine with a lower population, right? We only need one farmer now per hectare, not 10. We only need ten workers to build a car now, not 100, and so on.
Technology is only one part of the equation. If a factory upgrades its machines but loses half its workforce, it could end up producing less than before.
In Japan, technology improvements are not enough to make up for an aging population. So either workers put in even longer hours or the country has to make do with less stuff than before. And workers are approaching their limits.