Japan accelerating towards extinction, birthrate expert warns
https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/japan-accelerating-towards-extinction-birthrate-expert-warns-g69gs8wr6?shareToken=1775e84515df85acf583b10010a7d4ba
Japan accelerating towards extinction, birthrate expert warns
https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/japan-accelerating-towards-extinction-birthrate-expert-warns-g69gs8wr6?shareToken=1775e84515df85acf583b10010a7d4ba
35 Comments
It’s the year 2720 and our world is unrecognisable. Wars over resources have come and gone and humankind has ventured into the heavens, to Mars and beyond. Back on Earth, however, in Japan centuries of population decline has resulted in a singular event: there is only one child left.
Far from the dystopian imaginings of a science fiction film, Hiroshi Yoshida, a professor at Tohoku University’s Research Centre for Aged Economy and Society, says Japan is steadily heading towards a scenario where, in 695 years, only one child under the age of 14 will remain. Yoshida, who has been running demographic simulations since 2012, warns that his country may one day become “extinct”.
Read the full article: [https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/japan-accelerating-towards-extinction-birthrate-expert-warns-g69gs8wr6?shareToken=1775e84515df85acf583b10010a7d4ba](https://www.thetimes.com/world/asia/article/japan-accelerating-towards-extinction-birthrate-expert-warns-g69gs8wr6?shareToken=1775e84515df85acf583b10010a7d4ba)
Yes the population is decline (things are too expensive, horrible work culture etc
.) But it will never make the country extinct??? I find this completely ridiculous.
If in 600 years they didn’t resolve the housing and labor issues, they (and by extension, us), deserve the extinction.
>123M people
>accelerating towards extinction
Pick one
As the population shrinks, fewer workers will have to carry the growing burden of supporting the elderly. They will need to give up more and more of what they produce to care for the older generation, leaving less for themselves. This lack of resources, combined with a grim view of the future, makes it harder and less appealing to have children, creating a vicious cycle.
Oh my God this is such a stupid statement.
*Every* single industrial nation has a fertility rate below replacement.
In comparison to a lot of other industrial nations, e.g. compared to Europe, the rate in Japan isn’t that low. They actually had quite a lot of success with the “Angel” programs
Japan’s been populated for thousands of years but there will literally only be one child left at some point? Sounds like bs to me.
Will population decrease? Probably. But will there be one lone under the age of 18 on the island? Nope
No point in having children when the future is bleak for them.
I think Japan will be fine with a smaller more sustainable population
They need me. I can save them. Time to change my username once and for all!
Population projections like this assume a linear continuation of current demographic trends. I don’t know when or how but these trends will eventually change. Japan is shrinking fast but it won’t just disappear.
Japanese leadership has to change the work culture, treatment of women/mothers, as well as affect the cost of living which they don’t seem motivated to do. So it is what it is. Sometimes things need to get worse before they get better.
Let me guess, they should import people to make up for the birthrate 🙄
Oh ffs I think they’ll be fine. We’ve got what….8 billion people on this planet? I think billionaires are freaking out because they’re afraid they won’t have enough poor people to spread across the floor & walk on.
This is such nonsense. I mean there are almost THREE TIMES the people today than there were in 1960. So if the population reduced by a full two-thirds we’d be back at 1960’s levels. Not exactly extinction huh.
This is good for the population and nature.
Why? Because business and government have to rethink the whole “endless growth” concept and start to manage what they have and plan ahead.
Yes I know, this is an utopian idea and they will rather import/immigrate more resources/people.
In the end: Fuck(or lack of it) around = find out
Yeah Yeah old news. I don’t see the jap boomers starting to give a fuck. Work your young people to an early grave!
Why is Japan and its low birth rates always a hot topic? Everyone has a weird obsession with the negatives of Japan and a lot of hyperbole to boot like this title, I’ve noticed, people that can’t even point to Japan on the map probably know about this.
Wasn’t there a time when people were worried that Earth was overpopulated?
Plenty of developed countries have high populations with higher wealth than Japan and also have a higher suicide rate than Japan, that was also hyperbole employed by news articles at one point. The country has such a hole poking focus on it all the time despite being US allies (so no news bias really in terms of US geopolitics) and a pretty well functioning society despite its flaws, which no country is without, I’ve never understood it.
Oh FFS. Eventually the population will reach equilibrium, Japan isn’t going to be depopulated.
Doesn’t Korea have a lower birth rate? Why focus on only Japan?
I somehow doubt that Japanese are going to go extinct. What is more likely to happen is population will drop, societal changes will be forced because of the population drops, and then population will stabilize. This may take decades, in fact it will almost certainly take decades because of the huge lag between people in their twenties not having kids and those 20-somethings growing old and dying. Nonetheless it will happen, and you will not see a day where there are no Japanese in the world.
If Japan’s 🗾 population reduced by a factor of **1 000**, it would still have **124 500** people.
There is no threat of extinction from declining birth rates.
Is there anything that highlights the failures of our current economic system more than needing a constant birth rate? When you need to artificially constrain nature just to make your system work at all your system sucks.
Birth rate naturally decreases as development of a country increases. Undeveloped countries see a high birth rate and low investment in any single child. As countries develop, more resources are put into each individual child meaning fewer children are born, but each one receives higher amounts of physical and emotional resources.
Anyone telling you this is a bad thing puts capital over people, even if they won’t tell you that directly.
Let’s make a system that maximizes the flourishing of all people, not just the wealthy.
I mean they deserve it.
Wherever this happens deserve it. Provide job security to new moms, enable them to return to work and maintain their independence, personhood after having kids. Stop treating women like they are doormats once they have a kid, show respect and share the burden of raising kids. Educate young men to share the housework and childcare. And watch, how women will be so happy to be building families.
Make sure that having a kid ends their career, take away their independence and then treat them like slaves, grind them to the bone by leveraging their love for their kids .. and watch as women stop building families and your country crumble into dust.
I think the Japanese would rather a smaller population. Advances in robotics and AI could make it so they have robotic carers. The alternative is to open their borders which so many on the left are pushing for.
The contradictions of capitalism are reaching comedic proportions.
We must grow endlessly within a closed system or face extinction!
Japan is a fascinating example of de-growth. Their population, especially women, are opting out of providing their own labour (on top of the labour they already provide at work) to produce future workers for ‘the economy’.
Extrapolating that pattern to a future where Japan ‘goes extinct’ without any thought to what human beings consider favourable conditions to have kids just underscores the rationality of that decision.
More to the point, ask Musk et all what proportion of their personal fortunes are they prepared to invest in universal pre-natal care, healthcare, daycare, education etc.
Yes, ring the alarm bells that capitalism broke your next two generations so badly that there’s now a guaranteed *marginal* decline over forty years.
I’ve been curious to what Japan might do when things get really grim. There’s a large diaspora of Japanese immigrants in other countries. Could they offer incentives to people that have Japanese ancestors come back to Japan? I feel like it would fundamentally change Japanese culture. Would be interesting!
The word extinction is so dramatic and unnecessary
Japan and Korea are previews of what is to come to Europe and North America.
The entire economy is built upon the expectation that people are having between 2-4 children as they did from the 1930s-60s. But not only are they producing more products and services than they could sell, they’re raising the price.
So what you’ll have is a zombie economy where companies are simply manipulating stock and selling it to each other and the wealthy in order to appear profitable. Quality won’t matter because the sale of the product(s)/service(s) isn’t what is driving growth, banks buying liabilities and selling them+ private equity firms is.
It’s why politicians are confused when voters tell them the economy is bad. When you read the news and see the s&p500 doing well, and you see GDP going up, but you’re not talking about purchasing power parity or gini coefficient, you’re missing massive context. The economy isn’t in great shape when the people benefiting the most are those who own lots of valuable stock.
People can’t raise their children in houses because houses are being used as investment vehicles. They can’t have time off to spend with their children because they’ll be shamed for not being team players. People won’t enter relationships because they’re too exhausted from work to date+they’re competing against others who have enough money to impress potential partners.
This is not a problem exclusive to Japan (although it may be a more extreme case).
Rich people keep getting richer, everyone else keeps getting poorer, and the government not only doesn’t care, but actively works against non-rich people.
Why would anyone want to bring a child into this cycle of suffering?
The problem isn’t the elderly population bubble or the costly standard of living for young people, it’s the fact that most of the jobs in the current economic system are being gobbled up by mechanisation and A.I. If people don’t have good paying jobs they will not be able to afford making babies. It’s a world wide crisis.
People of the latest generations going into work have a pretty bleak outlook.
– Resources aren’t as abundant, or as affordable as they were for previous generations
– A growing slice of the tax receipts will go to the ageing population, meaning less is available to use for the benefit of the working population
– Many will have seen their parents and grandparents without much in retirement, so will be more prudent with their own savings to ensure they are protected in old age, dealing the need to fund their own retirement, and the retirement of others…
All of this affects the “lived experience”, where many are choosing not to have children to avoid them suffering in a world that doesn’t seem to be improving, despite technological advancements promising so much.
The social contract is being torn slowly but surely.
Meanwhile their politicians will physically fight one another to prevent immigration of foreign workers to Japan.
What’s crazy is that this is happening in South Korra as well. Not sure which country is in the most dire situation, but very very concerning that both countries are extremely modernized and economically on top of the world. But at what cost? Literally running out of humans.