Japan Urged To Use Gloomier Population Forecasts After Plunge in Births (ft.com)
- Reference: 0178032747
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/06/13/0137225/japan-urged-to-use-gloomier-population-forecasts-after-plunge-in-births
- Source link: https://www.ft.com/content/1e7298ee-297f-41f4-b769-aa15f43a08d9
> Japan this month said there were a total of 686,000 Japanese births in 2024, falling below 700,000 for the first time since records began in the 19th century and defying years of policy efforts to halt population decline. The total represented the ninth straight year of decline and pushed the country's total fertility rate -- the average number of children born per woman over her lifetime -- to a record low of 1.15.
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> But public and parliamentary dismay over the latest evidence of Japan's decline was intensified by the extent to which the figures undershot population estimates calculated by government demographers just two years ago. The median forecast produced by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) in 2023 did not foresee the number of annual births -- which does not include children born to non-Japanese people -- dropping into the 680,000 range until 2039.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/1e7298ee-297f-41f4-b769-aa15f43a08d9
Re: The end is nigh (Score:4, Insightful)
More like "Anonymous Clown", and people will wake up to this dangerous nonsensical rhetoric you are spewing, once they see that hey - Japan is actually benefiting from this. Population decline from overinflated peaks is the Y2K of this generation. Except rather than being a purely technical issue, there are dangerously powerful people pushing a dangerously false narrative. Ones that are addicted to endless growth, that only benefit the top 1 percent, while the rest suffer. Not to mention the environmental damage that goes with that.
Re: (Score:2)
Japan, like most developed nations, had a social contract where you pay your taxes and get a pension and old age care in return. As the population of working age people declines, and the elderly live longer, the cost of maintaining that promise gets higher.
There are mitigations like socializing care to reduce costs, but they can only do so much. China is experimenting with elderly care robots, but unless than pans out there is no getting away from this being a significant and very difficult problem.
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> Japan doesn't want immigration
Incorrect. Japan doesn't want immigration from any country. Japan has allowed a large number of Nepalese people to immigrate.
Re: (Score:2)
You have to learn to read.
As in comprehending the meaning of a sentence.
For example the meaning of this sentence
Japan doesn't want immigration
is: The Japanese population in general does not like immigrants.
Has nothing to do with what the government randomly allows or does not allow.
Gaslighting writ large (Score:5, Interesting)
The doom and gloom surrounding population decline is pure propaganda. There is nothing gloomy about an island, where they employ people to shove others into tightly packed trains, from reducing to a more livable population size, where you can actually move through streets and find places to live. The global elites want you to believe that endless growth is a good thing. It's not.
Re: (Score:2)
Economies require population growth. From the perspective of not having to compete with others for land, resources, etc., a more manageable population size absolutely is preferable.
Hell, remember when Covid lockdowns had most people at home? Traffic was light and gas was cheap. It's the only part of that situation that I actually kind of miss.
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Yeah, 'the economy, stupid', it's the mantra of neoliberalism - ageing population; import people of child-bearing age from developing nations.
Consequently, Australia has a self-fulfilling housing crisis.
Re: (Score:2)
> Economies require population growth.
If that were true, economies would all be doomed. Do you think economies are all doomed?
Re: (Score:2)
> "Economies require population growth."
That is a ridiculous statement. It isn't "required." Population growth *can* assist with growing a GDP. And yet, it can also hurt it. It "depends".
And some aspects of economies built on pyramid schemes do require population growth. For example, the USA's social security scheme has required population growth because more benefits have been going out than in for many decades. When growth stalls, the house of cards collapses and we all end up paying yet more and
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Economies require population growth
No it does not.
The best thing is a stable population, then you have not to plan ahead into the unknown.
For what anyone need population growth? Two where should that lead when the planet is full?
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Traffic was light and gas was cheap. It's the only part of that situation that I actually kind of miss.
You could hear the birds all the time. I don't care about cheap gas, but cars make cities noisy, ugly, polluted and dangerous. I only realised this in covid when almost all of the cars went and councils allocate more space for everything else for social distancing.
Re: (Score:1)
Is the packing of people only in Tokyo or is it common elsewhere in Japan. Just because Tokyo has a large population, it doesn't really tell us much about the rest of the country.
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There are more metropolitan areas than just Tokyo in Japan. Urban population makes up 93.1% of the people of Japan. The population density of the archipelago is 338 P/km2.
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In my experience, after a packed train a mostly empty train will come. If you are the idiot to ride the packed train, that is on you. The Japanese are extremely proud of their trains, and they do a lot to help the environment, where the pure ethnocentricity of your comment surprised me.
Both your post, and the original article ignores the interesting part of this issue. The steepness population decline is bringing its own challenges, where the import of people at some point is going to make Japan less J
Re: (Score:2)
There's an important thing to keep in mind about 'cultural diversity' in this context.
Under typical circumstances valuing cultural diversity gets to be more than enthusiasm for novelty because it's also a desire to protect (at least some, you don't have to deem them all equally desirable) people from being leaned on more or less aggressively to stop doing what they are doing. That changes if you get too close to the line of advocating more hosts be thrown at the problem in order to keep the show going so
Nobody is willing to make the societal changes (Score:2, Troll)
Needed to deal with a plummeting population. That's the problem. It's not just the global elites regular working people don't want to make those changes either.
People basically want everything to stay the way it was from when they were kids. Right around the age of 12 when they started to become aware of the world but were still protected by their parents.
So the kind of societal changes that a functioning civilization with a declining birth rate would require are. Right out.
The thing is the birt
Re: (Score:2)
Promises were made, and promises need to be broken. As an example, in the UK the boomers did really well because there were a lot of them, so the cost of paying pensions for smaller generations that came before them and were thinned out by two world wars was low. They gave themselves very generous pensions, thinking that the economy and population would continue to grow forever.
Of course it didn't, subsequent generations were smaller, and can't afford the cost of boomer pensions and healthcare. Worse still
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Seems like not-enough-people is a relatively straightforward problem to solve, if your country isn't completely awful. You just invite some immigrants in, and presto, you've got more people. There are plenty of people around the world looking for stable, decent places to live, so sourcing shouldn't be a problem.
Too-many-people is a much trickier problem, since nobody wants to be voted off the island.
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No, there actually is a genuine concern here, and it might be unsolvable, one of those "contradictions in capitalism" the marxists used to complain about.
Heres the problem,
On one hand, the basic physics of resource consumption is that theres a hard limit on how much stuff we can dig up/grow/etc and its pretty clear we are pretty close to that limit. At least if we want to have a planet we can actually live comfortably on.
On the other, populations around the world are ageing and once people hit a certain age
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I dont know if this is fixeable outside of massive automation
Why would that be a problem? Japan is one of the leaders in robotics. If they can build thousands of semi-autonomous drones on both sides of Ukraine war weekly, then shouldn't be a problem to create caretaker bots.
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Less kids makes sense these days. Sure it will be challenging. But indeed, let's just cope. It is the right thing to do. We don't want to be with 10 000 000 000. That is the real doom and gloom.
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Shoving people onto packed trains hasn't been a thing for a couple of decades. They extended the platforms and added more carriages, as well as adding more trains and building new lines. They are one of those countries that actually does infrastructure decently well, and fixes problems.
Japan doesn't really have a space problem, it's more an issue with where people want to live. That's something that can be improved with better transport links, and Japan's excellent mixed land use that allows for offices and
Be more open to immigration (Score:2)
The country should be more open and actively incentivize immigration, clearly the Japanese population is not interested in reproducing anymore, which is causing the demographic bomb where the old people will not have an income source of anyone to take care of them, no matter how many robots they build, so be more welcome to young outsiders, specially young couples and families with young kids, give them language courses, cultural adaptation lessons and some money to sweeten the deal, that will help, just do
Why Gloomy? (Score:2)
Why gloomy when our capitalist greed is killing us all. Theres nothing gloomy about people who wont be born into a civilisation thats in its death throws and a runaway climate with a 5% chance of averting disaster.
Rejoice that millions less people WONT be born into a dying world, because the alternative is far mor gloomy.
Human life is worth almost nothing (Score:2)
When human life is worth so little that we let people rot away on the street, what is the point of producing more people?
Automation, robotics, computers have reached the level, where a lot of manual labor, can be automated away. A declining population will only lead to a better quality of life for everyone.
Here is a Link That You Can Read Without a Sub (Score:5, Informative)
[1]CNN / AP. [cnn.com]
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/05/asia/japan-birth-rate-record-low-intl-scli
Reading the article (Score:2)
Points:
- The discussion is entirely on half the population and fixing their issues
- That is the same government policy, speeches and media push for the last 20 years
Decades of a one-sided push have resulted in a continued decline. Trying the same policy and getting the same result is a failure.
Ideas:
- The government needs to correct the insane work hours still required on men and address other men's issues in order to correct this decline.
Article and the two linked articles
Japan’s annual births fall