If the Japanese want people to work 80 hour weeks (and go drinking with their boss every night) maybe they should make polyamorous marriage a thing. Kids are a lot easier to deal with if you have help.
From what i heard from people and read online, i really don’t understand how people even do that. Japanese work etiquette is bananas. But that aside, my job is somewhat high demand, but i draw the line at work hours. I work 42 hours a week and not a second longer. That opens up enough times for some hobbies, enough free time and everything. But if i had kids, most of that would be gone. So if you’re a work horse, you’re expected to give up everything, except work and raising kids.
Literally: they don’t go home, that’s how
Hearing about salary men sleeping on the streets or in train stations is one thing, but when I actually finally saw them in person it broke my fucking brain
Imagine the homelessness issues of a major Californian city but instead of homeless people it’s a bunch of clearly drunk dudes in suits who all vanish by morning
My wife cried hard because the realization hit that hard
Yeah. Only rich people should have exclusive access to women.
You seem sarcastic, but biologically speaking, the children of rich parents are much more likely to be born rich themselves. Isn’t that a direction we want to evolve into for humanity, given that being born poor has so many negative outcomes?
If we can all be rich, then sure.
Otherwise it’s just a tool to breed average people out of the gene pool. The end result are rulers and servants. Guess which one your kids will be.
Keep in mind, the only reason why some people don’t have enough is because others have too much.
I think we all largely get what you’re speaking to but I feel compelled to highlight that you can’t breed average people out. “Rulers” and “servants” are social classes, and not “in the gene pool.”
The message got a little muddled there.
that you can’t breed average people out.
Actually, you can. I’m referring to the middle class and their increasing difficulty in raising a family. A significant amount of them are choosing not to, which literally means they don’t get to carry on their lineage.
I’m not going to get into the whys, but very poor people do not have the issue with reproducing that the middle class has.
There is no “middle class”. There’s labor and capital. You’re either serving or getting served. I know very well where I’m at. :/
Duckduckgo “myth middle class” and take your poison of choice.
That’s not entirely true.
People in the middle class have disposable income that lower class people do not. Many of them have enough wealth to live comfortably for the rest of their lives without ever having to work again.
biologically speaking, the children of rich parents are much more likely to be born rich themselves
Bro, what? Biologically speaking? What are you talking about?
The kids of rich people are rich because their parents are rich. They grow up to be rich because they have their parents wealth, which they either use to create more, or just stay rich.
The fact that they’re rich has nothing to do with their “biology”.What are you proposing anyway? That only rich people procreate and then somehow eventually everyone will be rich? If you can do simple math like addition and subtraction, you’ll realize that that scenario is not possible.
Plus wealth generally means power and connections, all of which makes it easier for someone to get wealthy.
Microsoft would almost certainly have never become what it is if Bill Microsoft wasn’t wealthy enough to have a family computer ahead of most people being able to have one at home, and his mother wasn’t friends with an IBM chair.
Naturally, IBM would be much more likely to hire someone who comes with the recommendation of a higher-up than Afferige Mann, who is applying based on an ad in the paper, and has only worked retail.
Plus wealth gives a safety net. It didn’t matter for Bill if the first few Microsofts failed, he can try again until he hits it big. Afferige has non-such luck. If he starts a company and it folds, he may not have the money to start another.
me and my ex already both tested poor before we had our first baby, so we went ahead with the abortion because the dotor determined he was going to be born poor anway
That’s a form of eugenics. More specifically, it would be classed as “positive social eugenics”.
Clarification
The use of the term “positive” does not mean it is a “good” thing. It just means that individuals with percieved “desirable” traits are encouraged to mate more than the “undesirables”. Conversely, an example of negative eugenics would be murdering/sterilizing the “undesirables”.
“Social eugenics” simply means that the “desirable” trait is not genetic, but rather a social construct, in this case wealth.
This problem is not isolated to Japan. Countries all across the world are facing the same issue and have been for a number of years.
Create a shitty, miserable, society with no rights or support, and people do not want to bring children into it… who’d guess?
The flannel has been wrung dry to the detriment of the working class; there is no where to go, no more water to squeeze from them. This is global society / capitalism falling apart.
Countries all across the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Isn’t it interesting that the more “developed” countries have the lowest birth rates.
It’s what follows education. It’s the largely uneducated areas of the world that still raw dog like there’s no tomorrow.
Solid racism. People aren’t raw dogging because they didn’t learn how sex works in school. Even if your correlation is “accurate” (according to imperial definitions/measurements of “education”), that’s not causation.
People also tend to have more kids when the life expectancy of their kids if very low. Colonized people have low life expectancy because their labor and resources are exploited by the privileged.
My understanding is that lower fertility follows higher female education for several reasons, including that women in school - and with access to birth control - prefer to wait until finishing school and starting a career before having children. Countries where women have fewer educational and fewer career opportunities, people often start having babies sooner, and more babies overall.
Another oft-mentioned factor is social safety nets such as social security (as much as that can count as a safety net). Areas with no or weak elder support outside of the family tend to have bigger families. Shockingly, this was also the case in the “developed” world back before they developed. Ask older adults in the USA how many brothers and sisters their grandparents had and it is probably a lot more than the next generation had, and the next, etc.
Do colonized people have lower life expectancy or do their children? Or both? Certainly, exploited people may also be living in (and unable to escape from) a society with poor elder care and insufficient safety nets such as social security or other retirement options. Which, of course, makes having lots of kids a totally rational decision. And also limits the ability of many women to participate in the economy outside of the home, which can also slow the development of the country / area’s economy.
Pointing out an objective fact isn’t racism, it just is.
This is just fucking dumb
So apparently under Sharia law, Muslim men can have anal sex with a girl under 8, and vaginal with a girl over 8.
And Muslims can openly lie about what is and isn’t true under Sharia law???
No, Muslims cannot openly lie about what is and isn’t true under sharia law. Islamic jurisprudence is a thing. It’s pretty important to Muslims to know what they can or can’t do.
There are different traditions (remember - there are Sunnis and Shias as the largest groups, some more obscure splinters, and splinters off of Sunni and Shia). Not everyone accepts the same Hadith, and there are, ya know, like more than thirteen centuries of interpretations and various schools. (Like, people get Islamic law degrees - that’s kinda why the medieval Muslim world was pretty well known for education, you needed the madrassas to be teaching people this stuff)
I have never heard the idea that anal sex was permissible in Islam. The Hadith cited in my link I think are direct enough that basically all traditions would accept them outright.
I don’t understand the 8 years old distinction bit (maybe something to do with the heinous child rape involved in bacha bazi - but that would not be considered permissible by Islamic scholars)
Even if they did want children, without the support systems, it may not be feasible for them to have kids. Having them might mean choosing to starve or go without a house.
Even if you’re in a country with a public health care system, a sick/young child means having to take time off work to care for them.
Capitalism is the best we’ve got. Even North Korea has acknowledged this. With other systems people starve en masse. My hope is that we get over the taboo of regulation. Capitalism fucks up real-estate and wealth distribution. And health-care should 100% be government funded.
Seems super likely that capitalism is going to be a major factor in our extinction. Maybe we could have a bit less of it and actually survive as a species
I actually agree with this. Capitalism presumes infinite resources.
The major shareholders have voted down your proposal.
It seems like you already understand some of the limitations of capitalism. Look into why regulation has gradually been rolled back in the US since the 70s. Why did politicians start to agree with corporate execs demands for lower regulation. Keywords to look up - regulatory capture.
On a separate point, there’s plenty of famines that have occurred in capitalist economies due to capitalist exploitation - that is make more money, at the cost of of creating a famine. Some estimates put the deaths due to famines under capitalism higher than those under socialism. I used to simply know only of the famines under socialism and not know of the famines under capitalism.
Finally the capitalism we live in since the Great Depression is significantly different than the capitalism before it. Socialists, actual Marxists in western counties, yes the US included, were actively involved in the policies that created the welfare states across the west along with the regulatory regime. Some of FDR’s economic advisors were Marxian economists.
That was the compromise to save capitalism from imminent worker revolution. The unregulated, no-safety-net version of the system had lead to the conditions for such revolution. The socialist policies that averted the revolution in have slowly been dismantled over time and the system is reverting to the pre-Great Depression state. Faster in some countries than others.
If you want to reform capitalism to the point where it can no longer revert to economic liberalism (free market fundamentalism), you’d have to almost completely eliminate wealth accumulation. You could only do that by changing the ownership of the means of production. E.g. all employees in all corporations become equal owners (or controllers) of the machines and therefore the decisions on sharing the wealth those machines produce, instead of those decisions being made by a tiny number of major shareholders. You’d also have to significantly expand the industries operated by the government. At that point you end up with socialism. And yes socialism doesn’t mean central planning and no markets. Capitalism doesn’t mean no central planning and just markets. We do plenty of central planning in capitalist economies across governments and large corporations.
I’m not asking you to change your mind today. Just pointing out a few things to look into in case you haven’t.
Exactly its not some mysterious problem no matter how much the government and media try to frame it as one, people of the age to have kids have no time for kids and no money for kids so no wonder they have no desire for kids.
I still don’t understand the obsession. Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up. Things can shrink, it’s ok. Not everything lasts forever. At some point you can abandon areas and let them decay.
Isn’t there a protection where there may not be any new Japanese births by 2050? That they’ll essentially cease to be (pure Japanese)?
Not everything has to be a ponzi scheme where line go up.
Yeah sure my personal cup of coffee is not a ponzi scheme AFAIK.
But global capitalism? Definitely a ponzi scheme 100%. Literally destroying the planet to prop it up.
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This is just like a stock crashing because the quarterly profits did not exceed the very high growth expectations more than a lot, they only exceeded a little.
Theres a difference between going down, falling down and crashing down
I fully agree, but also, the whole concept of a pension plan only works if the next generation pays it forwards. Meaning this generation is paying for the current retired group, and no one will pay for them.
You make the mistake of assuming that pension plans have to be paid by the next generation. Why not use a wealth tax instead?
Give them some days off.
Japanese workers get more days off than American workers.
Japan 26
USA 10
Japanese on average don’t work longer than Americans (2017)
#39 United States 1,765.00
#43 Japan 1,738.36
Don’t get me wrong, they have a crazy work culture, but it’s worse in the USA.
The biggest issue that no one ever wants to talk about is …
… it’s isn’t about the QUANTITY of life
… it’s about the QUALITY of life.
If people are able to have a comfortable, stable and prosperous life, with plenty of their own free time to enjoy without worrying about losing everything then they’ll make time and an effort to have a family and children.
If all our wealthy overlords ever want to do is squeeze every penny out of us all the time, then people will be less likely to want to have children.
It also strongly correlates to women’s rights and access to education. The more educated women are, the less likely they are to have a lot of kids.
https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/health/female-education-and-childbearing-closer-look-data
It’s why you see a renewed attack on women in some developed countries, especially in the US.
It’s either developed countries or the US, you can’t have both
Which is the plot to Idiocracy and why the movie is no longer a fantasy and it is now a prophecy.
I love that movie, except for the premise which is actually based on eugenics.
I wouldn’t say that it’s entirely eugenics. Most of the point they were making is environmental factors like having uneducated parents that don’t enrich the child’s life or being too poor for education because the parents were too poor because they had 10 kids. It’s where we are headed because they are trying to actively destroy our education system and force people into unwanted births.
First, the comparison and core of the intro is about reproduction. Second, welcome to the Internet, where not everyone is from the USA.
But the movie was based in USA
I think it is a wonderful movie exactly because it is applicable everywhere. Berlusconi was already walking that path in the early 2000s in Italy.
You mean eugenics, but it shouldn’t be an ideological position, reality in this case is that intelligence is actually very inheritable, around three quarters is a summary of decades of research.
Yea sorry, I accidentally anglicized.
Skimming over the link, I can see that a clear explanation is still lacking and that environmental theory is showing results.
Believing it is mostly genetic reinforces the claims of the class who has access to better education to maintain those accesses and resources.
Intelligence is inherited, but evenly distributed over the population/across (so called) ethnic groups You’re skimming over a wikipedia article, but the guy you’re replying to isn’t off the mark.
Here’s what happened in America.
In the 1960s the “Women’s Lib” movement started. They got a lot of press coverage because it was a good stroy, but didn’t actually change things a lot.
In 1973 the Oil Embargo hit and suddenly one job wasn’t enough for the family to survive. Lots of wives had to go out and look for work to keep paying the bills.
The Right has been lying that women getting jobs is what destroyed the one income family.
Tying the mortgage repayment rate to the median salary of a single individual would go some way towards fixing things then, but that would mean putting price caps on houses which would devalue the currency and also need anti-cartel laws (eg. Laws mandating a maximum amount of homes one can own, as cartels might see artificially low prices as an opportunity to buy up more houses).
Artificially constraining parts of banking and all of residential real estate is likely to have other unforeseen effects on the economy, but may still be worth it.
Another alternative is starting a state bank in which citizens can be part of a rent-to-own mortgage, with minimum but achievable life time repayments. If they don’t meet those minimum payments, the house is sold and the profit from the sale is portioned out between the state bank and the mortgage payer in proportion to how much % they paid off.
That’s a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
Frankly, I LOVE the idea of cartel laws for ownership of residences.
How do you put price caps on houses? They vary so much in price depending on location. A shack in San Francisco costs the same as a mansion in the middle of nowhere.
No this kind of centralized approach is doomed to fail. We’re much better off with Georgism with a land value tax and the total repeal of zoning laws. People should be able to build what they want, where they want, and the land value tax captures the increases in property values as a result. When a neighbourhood becomes too expensive to afford for single family households it gets converted into apartments.
All of our housing problems come from meddlesome local politicians, their NIMBY supporters, awful zoning laws and easements, and a terrible property tax system which disincentivizes development. A very simple land value tax system along with the total removal of local politicians’ power over housing development solves all of these issues.
You think the gubberment is the problem, think we can know when house prices are too much for families to afford, but can’t possibly know the same to figure out appropriate price caps, think we can’t have centralized federal laws, that “people should be able to build what they want, where they want when they want”… and that developers should be given family homes when they become too expensive so they can “replace them with apartments”.
Look bud, we’ve seen these pro-Capialist libertarian “free” market solution already. Lots of what you’ve said has gotten America where it is today: to an unlivable oligarchy.
People want something different. I’m fine with Georgism, but the rest of what you’ve written is clearly thinly veiled Libertarian and Free Market economics.
You’re just reproducing the ideology that benefits people like Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk - putting the wealthy in power.
I’d prefer a highly regulated, legally transparent, auditable, government system in power. Not people rich enough to build apartment blocks whenever and where ever they want.
Your ideas are incorrect and we’re seeing that in realtime.
Libertarians like you are LYING when they say centralized systems are doomed they’re too inefficienct the most obvious way to disprove that idea is to look at the world wars, what happens to industry during world wars? It gets NATIONALISED. Centralized under government power, we do this in war time because it’s highly efficient - despite the free market propaganda you’ve swallowed whole.
Where as Libertarian become traitors and mercenaries in war time. You may not realize it, but you’re arguing for the wrong team (are we the baddies? Yes, you are), the team that lets Nazi in, and if they have enough money, sits them in the position of advisors and department heads right next to the president.
We want democracy, rights, the freedom of a garanteed place to live… By putting that in the hands of people with “no price caps on building anything anywhere” you’re looking to destroy that freedom. You’re taking security from the poor and exchanging it for freedoms exclusively for the rich who can afford it, developer cartels, and corporations.
So you’re just reproducing the system we’re already in… That’s not a solution. That’s just reproducing the problem.
These people worship their god almost identically to the way religious brain-rot peasants of the dark ages did, it’s just their god is “The Markets,” thinking it bears mircales through human sacrifice and suffering, except for the Divine bloodlines of their billionaire Kings and Queens their suffering is spared because “Where would society be without
Kingsbillionaires.” They think they’re so smart and ahead of the game, they think their bank account proves it, when really they’re dumber and less significant than a medieval peasant. Centrist free-market libertarians are a horrible, gutless bunch of egotistical twerps out there.
People should be able to build what they want, where they want
I’ll be sure to build a toxic waste dump right beside your house.
Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.
It’s not city hall zoning laws stopping you from building toxic waste dumps. When I said people should be able to build what they want, I was talking about mixed density housing and mixed use / light commercial.
There are some good people here on Lemmy but my god are there an awful lot of obtuse, blockheaded teenagers! Get a clue!
Sure, if you can pass the environmental requirements. And of course if any of the toxic waste leaks onto my property I’m gonna sue you for everything you’ve got.
Good news! Trump is not only rolling back environmental regulations, but dismantling them entirely. Which means pretty soon, you will have no legal recourse whatsoever to any toxic waste that leaches onto your property.
And yes, my business would very much be a “light commercial” business.
That’s a win win, as theyre probably getting a big cash payment when struggling, and the state bank then gets to relist the home.
I like your ideas, but where do they live once they get foreclosed on by the State?
They use their profits from the house sale (which may be substantial depending on how long they’ve been there + market inflation), to rent somewhere.
That nest egg (which they’ve been paying into all this time) would give them breathing room and time to recover and get back on their feet to try again at a more stable point in thier lives.
It’s a win win because the mortgage payer gets a lump sum, and space to reassess what went wrong. The state bank gets the unpaid percentage of the home’s sale price, and then to sell the house again (under a new rent to buy mortgage arrangement).
P.S Part of how this works financially is that most of the money in an economy is created by loans issued from banks, those banks then buy Government Bonds periodically… A state bank would be another entity doing much the same thing, just with a specific purpose in mind.
Sounds like you figured it out, since the debasement of the gold standard we locked away an inelastic good behind a mountain of debt, where prices rose to whatever interest rates would allow, providing a massive first mover advantage to those born prior. Then we wonder why nobody has kids.
If housing didn’t continue to rise how many boomers would hold it as an investment instead of downsizing and buying an appreciating asset?
This is also why Bitcoin will keep going up and everyone should own at least a little, it leverages the cantillon effect as central banks get looser and looser due to aging demographics and shrinking aggregate demand.
The more appropriate fix would be no land ownership by people or countries that don’t reside in the US, a banishment of investment companies from purchasing houses, and a hard cap of like 5 properties for any individual or company that can be owned as rental properties.
Far too many people/corporations are being landlords as a big business.
and also need anti-cartel laws
Bring it on. Maximum 5 “homes” allowed per person, 7 for any family unit, children under 25 ineligible for ownership except as a post-death inheritance.
Anything above those limits is landlording-as-a-business, and combined with laws that make ANY business ownership of residential properly illegal, would force landlords to actually work for a living by getting day jobs.
Plus, have an extended “speculation tax” that hits any place being sold with a 100% tax on the first 2 years of owner-occupancy, with a straight-line decline to 0% in the eighth year. Any home being sold where the owner has never lived in it for a minimum of 2 years? 100% tax on the sale of the house straight out of the gate, with all proceeds going to a fund for first-time home owners. Exemptions, of course, for military deployment or death or a few other issues that cannot be leveraged for fraud.
one of the more racist nations on earth, i wish them a very happy depopulation and dissolution… kampai!
While I do not share the sentiment of “let them finally die”, I am very curious what will win: wanting to survive as a country and society or that bullshit worldview they are known for by anyone who learns anything more about Japan than just cool tech-anime-sake combo
I do hope they will change and survive. Ikkyu Sojun has earned a very special place in my heart (the one, who was a monk, son of emperor, who got a particular letter from his mother that is now famous among anyone who learns anything about Buddhism in Japan)
they are literally killing their own population growth with their racist national policies, I’m not killin em, but hey, sucks to suck
fear of decline
Damn there must be so much evolution now
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Should they bring millions of indians, africans and arabs to help them? We are seeing how its working wonderfully in the west.
Good. We need to depopulate by 50%. The earth can’t have 8 billion people. There are less than 30,000 polar bears in the whole world.
Another insane figure: wild mammals make up only 4% of all mammal biomass in the world, the other 96% is humans and our livestock. That 4% includes all whales, elephants, bears, etc.
It certainly can, if properly managed. But that’s not profitable, so we don’t do it.
Carrying capacity of the earth is something like 15 billion with current technology, our wastefulness and overconsumption (of the rich, globally speaking) is the problem. Which reduction in population can mitigate, but not fix
But do we want to keep heading to capacity? We could have artificial scarcity eliminated with wealth redistribution and waste reduction (cars, fast fashion, food waste, many many etc). The more humans on the earth, the less possible this becomes.
World population is projected to peak out at about 10 billion, likely less because of climate change, so we won’t be getting much closer to the 15 bil limit anyway.
I don’t think climate change will prevent reaching that number, but it will increase the suffering. If we don’t start reversing climate change I believe we will try to adapt to it until we reach the limit of our ability to adapt before we perish. If we are lucky, a small fraction of the species will survive long enough for something to be able to change, but I’m talking a really long time.
Sorry, can’t do that under capitalism perpetual growth
I know the left really (and rightfully) hates capitalism, but this isn’t a capitalism problem; it’s a society problem. You’ll always need a certain amount of labor to sustain non-working portions of the populations. Thanks to advances in technology the necessary working person percentage is decreasing but you still can’t have the majority of the population be elderly people who will never again be productive.
Other system are more stable, Egypt lasted for thousands of years, the Ottoman Empire was fairly stable without growth for a 1000. Capitalism is the the system were part of the profit is reinvested into new machinery ‘for efficiency’ to undercut competition. Once we do not have competition because there are only 2 or 3 companies (Coke and Pepsi), they fix prices and work to corrupt government to become an Oligarchy. This is why people make the state that we are entering a ‘post capital’ world.
Egypt lasted for thousands of years,
It’s called “ancient Egypt” for convenience’s sake, but it’s not just one continuous state; it’s many states that either succeeded or competed with each other as the country went through cycles of rise, decline, fragmentation and reunification. For a more familiar example think of it as another, much smaller China.
the Ottoman Empire was fairly stable without growth for a 1000.
Uh… No?
I think it’s entirely possible if we reduce waste and redistribute wealth. The US pays farmers to NOT grow food to keep the price up. Total insanity.
If wage growth went up at the same rate as GDP, one part time worker could support multiple elderly people.
If wage growth went up at the same rate as GDP, one part time worker could support multiple elderly people
Then prices would have to go up at the same rate, and one part time worker would not be able to support multiple elderly people at a reasonable quality of life. It’s not about money; under capitalism money is a shorthand for how much power one has in and over society and isn’t directly convertible into useful goods at a constant rate. What you need to be looking at is total productivity, because that’s the bottleneck here. If X working people can only make Y things a day and X+Z people need 2Y things a day to survive then a society with X working people and Z non-working people can’t survive.
I get what you’re saying, but I feel like you are ignoring how much automation has allowed one person to do the work of many in the recent past. If allowed, this should continue to improve.
Edit: by recent past I mean the last 50-80 years.
line must go up forever
I believe Japan has less inequality than the US. Not sure on that, but I think it’s true. I think in this case we see work culture playing a role. The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan. No one has time to even think about having kids when you are a company man there. It’s similar in the US.
This is why we need to do something now. Japan has been unable to offer enough of the right incentives to turn their birthrate around so how do we do any better? Act now. They waited until they had a problem before trying to turn it around and it hasn’t worked. Social and economic inertia is very difficult to turn but maybe if we start now, we can have different results. Japan never had much immigration to fall back on but we can use that to buy more time. We have a chance as long as we keep encouraging and welcoming immigration…… shit
I’d be more interested in altering the material conditions that lead to low birth rates than relying on churning through the global population. We’re already doing immigration like you said and have been. It still sucks to live in these conditions.
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan.
China too.
…and most other countries that aren’t in Europe.
Nah, China is especially bad, they have 9-6-6 after all.
I’m not disagreeing, just saying China isn’t the only country with worse working conditions than the US. From a global perspective things are actually pretty good in the US.
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan
What about North Korea?
Not really relevant. I mean technically there are countries with child slavery so I guess if you want to entirely miss the point on purpose you could go with one of those.
Even as economist talk about the Lost Decade (really, two decades) in Japan, the unemployment rate has always been relatively subdued compared to the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRUN25TTJPA156N
From about 1.7% in 1990, and then two spikes that just about reach 5.0% in 2002 and 2009. Not only that, but that’s the range for people 25-54 years old, which isn’t equivalent to the headline number typical in the US. There is an equivalent in published US data, and you can see it’s much higher and spikier than Japan:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000060
This doesn’t mean everything is OK for the working class in Japan. Housing prices are astronomical, requiring 100 year multi-generational loans. Working culture is also far more stressful. However, I think it’s fair to ask who the “Lost (two) Decades” is really affecting.
requiring 100 year multi-generational loans
This is the first I’ve heard of this and the fact that it’s real is insane to me.
I guess it works pretty differently to our system where you borrow x money at y interest rate then? Because otherwise a slight interest rate change has a huge impact, or paying slightly more back would reduce the time to pay it by decades.
Because it’s BS. It’s glaringly fake and calls into question the rest of the claims of the post.
Housing prices aren’t even insane, especially outside of Tokyo. And the property prices don’t even go up. AND you can get 35 year housing loans at under 1% interest. The main reason housing prices have gone up at all is that construction materials cost have gone up due to inflation, Ukraine war, covid supply and demand issues.
It really is. In the US I mean. I work 6 days a week 9 am till whenever the fuck I’m done. Sometimes at 1pm and some nights I’m not home by 7pm.
Luckily I’ve negotiated less work orders on Saturday later in the morning so I have some kind of decline of work towards the end of the week. It took six years of constant work to get even that. Otherwise it’s 7 work orders a day and I drive around 150 miles a day. (I work in household appliance repair. So I travel from home to home.)
It’s a thankless job I get micromanaged in. The only advantage I have is that appliance repair techs are always in high demand because there’s so few of us and I’m good at my job so my boss can’t really fire me.
I live and work in Japan, and it definitely is not a very condusive environment for younger Japanese people to have children. My wife and I are both foreigners, and we are in out late 30’s and just had our first. The country has some really great benefits and support services for having children, but we definitely would not be able to do this if we worked for Japanese companies, and with the Japanese work mentality.
While it IS getting better, work being the central pillar of life and the expectations from the older generations are still very much a thing. The long hours of paper pushing, the culture of promotion based on age and time served rather than innovation and hard work takes a toll on people. If you are not living in the office in your 20s to show your dedication, you are looked down upon, at least accoridng to my Japanese friends.
Immigration could help fix some of this. Japan is a desireable, largely affordable country, that is safe when it comes to raising children. Living here as a foreigner though has specific challenges, and your job prospects are pretty poor unless you are lucky, and access to housing and just general living can be challenging, even if you can speak Japanese.
I just got a new job in Kyoto, and I currently live in Tokyo. I would say around 40% of the houses we applied to look at would not even let us see the properties because we are foreigners. That’s 100% legal and totally ok to say here, and I take that in stride. In Australia (where I am from), they would either just tell you to piss off, or show you the property knowing you don’t have a chance, so at least they are upfront about it here I guess. Getting a credit card is a massive ordeal, which you kinda need here because debit cards are increasingly hard to find, and they don’t even work for all bills and systems, and getting a bank account … it all just snowballs.
Also anything outside of the major cities is kinda dead. I love it, but living and thriving there in places that have more space that would probably promote having big families, is nearly impossible, or at least impossibly boring. This is not unique to Japan, Australia is largely the same outside of the main cities.
Not sure what the fix is. But annecdotally I see these articles all the time, and yet there are kids and younger families always around, so not sure if it is as serious as they are saying, or more media hype?
I’ve always had this silly dream of running a large, wealthy tech company, and attempting a startup in Japan, not reliant on business with other Japanese companies, that promotes a healthier work culture, and then stuffs the high productivity results in the faces of other companies. As a stretch goal, it could even locate out in the burbs, with an investment in better infrastructure access.
Japan has so many great things about it, but the major points around banking, sexism, and seniority really twist the image.
Its hyped by FT and more economy driven outlets because it makes them nervous. The replacement rate of births was always enough to support retirement pension plans. Now it’s not.
Japan is way ahead of the curve on this inevitable trend than other countries so it will be really interesting see how it adjusts and what markets are affected by this.
In terms of buying a house, is remote work really not a thing in Japan? Living in a remote village sounds lime a dream. Otherwise, are there no towns/villages where foreigners sort of band together and are allowed to buy property? Just curious about how Japan functions
Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like “buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian”, just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.
Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it’s more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.
As far as “how is Japan adjusting” to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can’t be automated.
Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.
Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.
Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn’t escape. And, of course, government jobs.
Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan’s Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.
I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn’t say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.
I am lucky enough to not have an English teaching job, and never have. But unless you are highly specialized, or somehow manage to start your own thing here, there seems to be limite scope as a foreigner to really have a strong career.
I am actually moving to Shiga Prefecture in a few days. It’s going to be a big change from living on the outskirts of Tokyo for the past six years. Excited to see how my perception of life in Japan changes from the move.
Inflation, daycare, and work-life balance are the complaints I hear most. A ton of the jobs and good education are in Tokyo so people want to be there. This overloads all the daycare and other systems. Since corona, the floodgates have opened on price increases and inflation. Since 3/11 energy costs have been rising and things with Russia also hit (after nuclear, tons of fuel is needed and is imported, often from Russia).
Having more things in other parts of the country that still paid well would help. Where I live (in Tohoku) daycare slots are plentiful and there are all kinds of subsidies for kids. The only jobs here, though, are fishery, forestry, agriculture, etc. My town is less bad because a lot was rebuilt after the tsunami, but the lack of people also means a lack of tax which also means infrastructure suffers. Rust and crumbling things everywhere.
Is an element of this to do with sexism too? I haven’t seen it mentioned but my understanding is women aren’t treated well, particularly in the workplace, leading to wanting to stay single and childfree for a better life.
The olds expect women to quit basically when they marry or get pregnant. Worker protections are better these days, but the view is still there with some. Some couples do have to have one spouse quit because of the whole daycare thing in some areas, though.
There is a wage gap between men and women and fewer women are in positions of power, though the latter at least is slowly getting better.
Not having a child won’t cancel societal expectations of the older generations. Women are often still expected to serve tea and do other things in older/traditional companies.
My company is a westernized Japanese company and we do have a number of women including in higher roles (though none on the board, I think). I’m in a remote IT role so I don’t generally hang out after work with non-IT staff to hear real opinions or the rumor mill, though.
My wife was treated well and fairly by her small japanese company, but she has experienced some discrimination previously.
In our village, we do have work we do in the community every month or two (mostly cutting grass, litter picking, and maintaining shared spaces). Some things are definitely typically done by the men or women with women doing the inside cleaning and cooking at events with men doing the outside work. We’ve already broken that mold some as I’m also the cook (I baked things to bring to our last event).
Japan will literally collapse into fire before they allow immigration
Well, that’s why Western right wingers look to Japan. But the difference is that, Western right wingers are looking to regress back into the olden days when women were baby-churners, whereas I don’t hear from Japan wanting the same (there are some but they are not significant enough to sway public opinion).
I’d like to take the part of the baby churning plan where a homemaker is part of each household. Like, subtract the misogyny where it’s automatically assumed it would be the woman but households with children take a lot of work.
I’d love to be a stay-at-home parent, but I make more money because I have the outside genitalia whereas my partner has the inside genitalia plus chest ornaments, so she’d be the smart choice. That’s literally the biggest difference (beyond her being a much harder worker and my having a disability), yet I make 1.5x her salary. Humans are fucking stupid.
We only make it because of our two incomes, so no one gets to stay home or have kids. Yeah America!
They want the fantasy of a one income household but aren’t willing to increase wages to make it reality.
The right wing uses this as a dog whistle to rally the uneducated.
It’s easier to immigrate to Japan than the United States. There are lots of work visas and long term residency can be pretty quick with a professional position. Many of the clerks you see in Japan for ordinary jobs are immigrants from South Asia.
A lot of countries are headed there. America isn’t keeping their population growth in the replacement category either. Why do you think abortion and immigration are such an issue in America? They want the white people reproducing, not the immigrants. Wherever there is a super strict, racist or almost racist, immigration policy, look at their population growth.
Try “to function as a society” when the biosphere becomes unlivable. The biggest and root cause of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change is human overpopulation:
- https://phys.org/news/2023-04-population-growth-main-driver-carbon.html
- https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2017/07/co2_saved/giv-3902H9Q7lx2HE5M7/
The fact that the biggest and root cause of a mass extinction event is being reduced, is a good thing.
Only morons think we’re overpopulated.
