I think they might also need to maybe leave work at a reasonable time.
And not get molested the whole way home by some guy that thinks he’s in the old boy’s club. And not get fired because they’re a married woman now, and need to stay home (literally normal there).
Like, people are losing interest in kids everywhere, but in the core Western countries nobody’s nervous to get married because they get socially demoted in the process. That’s a theme I’ve definitely heard from women over there, and probably why it’s happening faster.
They… they could’ve done this the entire time?
yes. damn. what an idea
Japan: Nah, we’re good.
Also…loosen immigration laws?
I know it’s a very closed off nation with deep cultural roots that is very weary of outsiders…
I know it’s a very closed off nation with deep cultural roots that is very weary of outsiders…
Europe doesn’t get to use that excuse, and neither should they. I don’t care how different whale meat shashimi seems from foi gras, or bonsai from tulip arrangements.
That’s crazy talk, you’d get lot’s of filthy foreigners in that way.
Absolutely! Even if it’s unlikely to happen, we shouldn’t let that distract us from what the best decisions would be.
I don’t mind finding work in Japan… …if it wasn’t so hostile to workers
So far, Japan is near the bottom of my list for western countries to work at, and I would much rather find a job in Korea instead
Japan is near the bottom of my list for western countries
Japan is an Eastern country. In fact, it’s the farthest East county possible.
I think the words you were looking for were “first world countries”.
Nobody takes that to be literally about geography anymore. Japan might be far away from Texas, but it’s politically a lot closer than Russia just a ferry ride away.
Japan is an Eastern country. In fact, it’s the farthest East county possible.
No love for New Zealand huh?
New Zealand? What’s that?
What’s a New Zealand?
Checked my map, it’s not there
It’s an updated version of a Dutch province
its so east that it loops back around to being west
It’s*
Syntax mistake—not grammar
[Pedentry intensitfies]
Appropriate user name, though.
Syntax would be more like sentence structure and order. Contractions are indeed grammar.
Developed*
Depends on your meridian.
Po-tay-to po-tah-to doesn’t really matter to distinguish between them when what I meant was clear, although I probably would’ve said first world if I was nitpicking my post before sending
deleted by creator
Oh fuck, oh fuck, our ponzi scheme is about to enter the find out phase.
Capitalism is totally different from a ponzi scheme. In a ponzi scheme, the profits go up to the person at the top and you always need new people that come in, otherwise the whole thing will fall apart and the people at the bottom will be the ones that suffer. Under capitalism however, the profits of everyone’s work will go up to the top and you always need new workers to come in, otherwise the system will fall apart and the people at the bottom will suffer. Totally different.
otherwise the system will fall apart and the people at the bottom will suffer.
Don’t you mean “suffer more”?
True
Hm. There is a difference.
Once crapitalists run out of “new horizons” to “expand” into, they start cannibalizing their current workforce and raise prices while lowering quality for customers.
Do not be fooled. Quality is going down because profits are going up.
*MarkWahlburg.gif
Maybe this ponzi. Unfunded state pensions use workers contributions to pay current pensioners.
Less workers = less pensions.
That’s still not a Ponzi scheme even if it isn’t sustainable.
I think it actually fits quite well.
A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.
Meanwhile, the current pension system in most countries depend on a growing population to spread out the payments for pensioners over multiple workers.
Ponzi schemes collapse when there aren’t enough investors to sustain the dividends to be paid to the existing investors. Most countries’ pensions rely on an increasing amount of working age inhabitants to pay retirees and are now having issues paying out pensions due to the shift in demographics, that’s why many countries have been increasing the retirement age recently.
There are 2 solutions to this.
- Increasing birth rates, this option is not sustainable in the long term but is commonly preferred for reasons mentioned below.
- Migration. There are currently plenty of countries with a large working-age population and a weak economy. Letting those migrate would solve the demographic issue, but is political suicide.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how these funds work.
The goal is not to pay people with the money from new people paying into the pot. They invest the money and then the pot grows and that money is used to pay out. When the pot is not growing enough - whether because investments aren’t doing well enough, or you designed a you designed an bad system where people can withdraw from it for too long, or any other many possible issues - then yes you functionally end up dipping into the money given by new people, but this is not how it was designed to be used.
You are acting like this is a one-to-one system where you just put money in, then you get money out later, and all of the money given out is 100% the money that people put in in the first place with no intention of growing that money or finding a sustainable way of disseminating it long-term.
Mismanagement/poorly built systems are not the same as Ponzi schemes. Unless you think, I don’t know, US Social Security is also a Ponzi scheme?
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how these funds work.
This misunderstanding is on your side. There is a method of funding pensions refered to as pay as you go (PAYG).
The goal is not to pay people with the money from new people paying into the pot.
This is exactly how many unfunded, state sponsored pension schemes function. No pot of money exists. Only the ability to collect taxes.
They invest the money and then the pot grows and that money is used to pay out.
This is true for private pension schemes run by companies and individual pension schemes. Funded pension schemes are (usually) not ponzis.
State pension plans are primarily funded (in order of what comprises the most) by 1) the government 2) investments and 3) employee contributions.
Pay as you go is about employee contributions, which is typically the smallest pot being contributed. I don’t think you know what you’re talking about.
Mismanagement/poorly built systems are not the same as Ponzi schemes
“Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I’ll have my wife’s brother arrested”
Of course I understand that the money that is put in is invested, but that doesn’t mean the problem goes away when the system relies on the “pot” growing at a certain rate.
EDIT:
Mismanagement/poorly built systems are not the same as Ponzi schemes. Unless you think, I don’t know, US Social Security is also a Ponzi scheme?
I’m not implying that it’s the same, just that the comparison fits better than you might expect.
In most PAYG state pensions the contributions made by workers are not invested. They are paid directly to pensioners.
When did I ever say the problem goes away? I am saying it is not a Ponzi scheme. You were saying it is a Ponzi scheme. Don’t move the goalposts here.
Daycare/Kindergarten is already free across the country for all children starting at 3 years old.
All child healthcare is also free after a prefecture-set monthly premium (usually about 1000 yen).
This policy announcement is specifically about making the 0-3 year old gap free.
Honestly I’d rather just see the government pay more into the shakai hoken (the national insurance that pays for mother/father leave) so people can take more time off from work early on in the kids’ lives.
Making it easier for parents to go back to work instead of focusing what’s good for children and parents seems par for the course.
The only solution is to make childcare paid i.e. every single person that has a child gets a stipend worth a full time job.
Because it is a full time job.
Daycare/Kindergarten is already free across the country for all children starting at 3 years old.
My information might be biased towards the greater Kanto area (Tokyo/Yokohama), but I’m not aware of anybody paying less then 20000 Yen (a little over $100 USD I guess) per month per child for a place in a public daycare (can be more than double, depending on the area/daycare, and much more for private ones).
It’s much more complicated, though. You can receive various support money from the state/prefecture/city, but it’s usually less than what you have to pay. And you’re not guaranteed a place, and the waiting list cam be long (especially in highly populated areas in Tokyo).
I’m not sure why your friends are paying that… Most cities in Saitama, Chiba, and the 23 wards at least I know that the 学費 was set as 無償化.
There are some instances where you don’t qualify for free school if you make too much money. (Or it could just be they didn’t have a good guide at the city office to walk them through the maze of beaurocracy)
Also 23 wards and most of the cities in Saitama and Chiba have daycare and kindergarten entry that’s points based(the larger cities have more kids than daycare spots, which is my favorite bit of irony about the Japanese birthrate problems), the more points you have (points based on need, like are you a single mother, both parents working full time etc.)
Fuck this narrative. Decreased birth rates is a major success
Why are you of that opinion? Something like 30% of Japan’s population is over 65. Low birth rates are obviously not sustainable for them and will have extreme issues for their country if it continues.
Low birth rates are obviously not sustainable
Please explain why this is obvious. Less people seems more sustainable, not less.
You need people who can actually do work to take care of all the old people & sustain human society. “Less People” is not by-default “more sustainable” especially not if it happens all at once; that was in fact a huge problem with cyclical famines & political turmoil in the days before mechanized agriculture.
If some asshole went around raiding hamlets for plunder, or whatever reason, yeah that would mean fewer mouths to feed in that particular area, but it also means fewer hands to bring food to harvest. Which means other regions have to contribute larger proportions of their own food-stock to sustain the needed intake of urban centers. Which means that they have less food to eat for themselves, and less to replant for the next harvest. Which pushes people on the margins of the the agricultural economy into banditry to sustain themselves, which causes us to return to the beginning of our story.
Eventually this cycle of regional depopulation leading to productivity shortfalls, leading to further regional depopulation becomes self-reinforcing & before you know it you have a country-wide catastrophe on your hand & the total implosion of existing society.
Now we aren’t dependent on mass manual agriculture these days, so famine specifically is an unlikely cause of cyclical societal collapse, but the modern world still requires that a shitload of manual physical labor get done in order to maintain the basic infrastructure that gets everything from where it is, to where it needs to be in order for us to all not die. If you don’t have people to fill those positions, then that’s work that needs to get done, that isn’t being done.
The two biggest issues off the top of my head are rural towns in Japan will continue to lose population and completely disappear, and there won’t be enough young working people paying into health care and social funds to support the old non-working population. I think there are a lot of other major negative impacts Japan will face as a country but I’m just not that knowledgable on the subject.
I assume we just have fundamentally different views on this topic because I really wish humanity would change to a more scientific and explorative approach entirely, where we expand outward into space and become a multi-planetary species, which will need a huge sustained population growth to support. I assume you don’t support that.
We need to inhabit at least one other plant on a continuous basis before we encourage exponential population growth.
We are going to be resource constrained on this planet long before we expand to others.
It’s not obvious. Low birth rates are completely sustainable, you just kill anyone who can’t afford to retire and can’t work anymore, and society functions perfectly well.
We have machines that can do the work of 100 people in the past
I’m sure that we could make it work without killing anyone
We also consume bullshit at 100 times the rate. People will be unhappy to see that go away. But yes, we produce more than enough for everyone as is.
While the alternative is everyone who is unable to wotk is killed anyway by the apathy of the system?
We are doing what you are describing already, in the system we currently live in.
What? In the current system we pay retired people money based on past employment as well as just for living long enough, in most countries. Japan can no longer do that soon because without taxing their young to poverty, they just don’t have enough income to fund it.
If you think unemployment or SS pay a living wage you have things to go learn
I specifically didn’t mention SS and somehow you still bring the US into it in a thread about Japan.
I meant most of the world in general which is why I didn’t name any such programs by name.
Old people can’t work and need someone to pay for their retirement.
If there are more old people than young people (population pyramid wrong way round) every young person needs to pay a crapton of taxes so that old folks don’t starve to death
Nah. Food is cheap and plentiful. We don’t need young people working in fields for old people to be fed.
You do understand that just dumping a bag of produce at grandmas door isn’t enough?
She needs to pay rent, get medical treatment and maybe even help around the house because she isn’t as nimble as before
You understand that there will still be a lot of labor available. It’s not like there will NO workers.
“A lot” is relative. If every worker has to pay for 3 people’s pensions and still have enough to live on, how do you think that will go?
Why can’t immigration replace births?
Why should it?
That’s asinine, you’re treating periphery countries like they’re glorified breeding-stock for the developed world’s work-force.
Edit: To make my point more clear, the whole reason why developing nations have higher birthrates than developed ones is because they’re developing/underdeveloped. They lack access to contraceptives, and substantive access to women’s healthcare; and they also oftentimes have economies that still rely to some extent, or a large extent on non-mechanized smallholder, or subsistence agriculture. That, or they otherwise have social institutions that allow for, or require children to enter the workforce. This means that having children in those countries is often an economic boon to a family (because they can contribute to household incomes through work), and avoiding having them can be very difficult for women.
If you solve their problem of being underdeveloped, & hyper-exploited (which you should be doing if you’re a “queermunist”), then that means that they are likely also going to be in a position where they have declining birthrates because there will no longer be an object material incentive to have children, and women who don’t want to would be able to prevent it.
The idea of shoring up a declining population “through immigration” only works so long as you have an underdeveloped periphery of peoples who want to come flock to the West, or to developed nations in search of higher wages & a higher standard of living (or just avoiding Imperialist political meddling), rather than staying at home.
Well, no, birth rates are low because the reproduction of labor is unpaid labor. Yes, development is associated with lower birthrates, but only because no developed country has ever seriously tried to make reproductive labor a real job. Doing so would decrease the size of the workforce for production of commodities.
Now you’re totally right that the people migrating from the Global South are fleeing underdevelopment from imperialism, and that this is itself a factor of underdevelopment. What you haven’t considered is why the imperial core limits migration.
Racism is part of it, but only part of the larger structural base. If they allowed unlimited migration the imperial core would be filled with people from the periphery as they flee underdevelopment. This would at once reduce the availability of labor in the periphery and raise the contradictions of imperialism by making peripheral concerns into domestic concerns.
Migrants influence the society they’re part of, causing agitation against imperialism. This would, ultimately, destabilize the core and allow for development to resume without imperial meddling.
Because Japan doesn’t do that.
There is an -ism they’re pretty big on, it starts with R
Okay, but then we can’t just frame the discussion as “increase birth rates or society collapses” because there’s a very obvious third option that they aren’t taking.
Because Japan doesn’t do that.
They apparently don’t do procreation, either.
Our current growth has almost made the planet uninhabitable. We need degrowth.
“Has almost made the planet uninhabitable” The Earth is definitely worse off since we have proliferated, but this is such a clickbaity untrue statement.
Humanity has and will continue to cause changes to the world that are negative, I agree, and that sucks. But like it or not, humanity is good at adapting and surviving, and we will be fine, even with the worldwide population overall continuing to grow for a very long time into the future.
LoL. You think we’re gonna grow gills or something? How do you think we’ll adapt to food chain collapse?
I’m sure that life will adapt in some form, but most life in the history of this planet has not been human. And we would not be this planet’s first mass extinction event.
This isn’t just about humans. We’re in a mass extinction period caused by humans. We need to lower our population to save other species
So the solution is to rip off souls from the non-existence aether, bring them to this ever-bizarre world in order to condemn them, like Sisyphus, to a lifetime pushing of a social boulder which is fated to always go downhill? (In other words, why the unborn should sustain the faults of an unsustainable society that weren’t their faults to begin with?)
“Unsustainable Society” No matter your opinion on current governments, humanity has been around for an awful long time, and it will likely continue to be around for significantly longer into the future of the universe. In my opinion, that’s pretty cool.
In the grand scheme of things, just looking back over the past couple hundred years, the vast majority of humanity is in a better spot than we were, no matter how bad things may seem on a small time scale.
Yeah, global climate, carbon dioxide levels and even biodiversity are in a better spot nowadays than they were before, huh? That’s pretty cool! /s
You definitely are right some things are worse, but I more so meant quality of life in almost every single aspect for people that are alive. No shit, there are atrocities across the world still and things locally suck in many ways to varying degrees for a significant portion of the population in the world. Either way you can’t argue I’m good faith that the average humans quality of life hasn’t gotten exponentially better over the past thousand years. And I think that trend will continue into the next thousand years.
Because it means less people to fuck up the planet.
Infinite growth is unsustainable. A decreasing population will accelerate the collapse of capitalism, when the capitalists run out of cogs.
I just disagree on the infinite growth being unsustainable thing. Humanity, in my opinion, is destined to expand to the stars where we will continue to grow Indefinitely on a time scale that actually matters to you and me.
Obviously, that could not happen if we somehow all die, but despite all the doom and gloom, I really don’t think that’s likely.
Why is it framed like it’s something extreme?
This was my reaction also. WoOoAh! Free daycare? How radical!! Haha
I read it as snark/sarcasm. Like they are adding something that already should be.
Decent first step, but it’s going to take an actual investment in making parenthood desirable.
Parenthood is already desirable. There’s a biological drive and social conditioning to desire it for most people. The disincentives have just become overwhelming. Children take a hell of a lot of resources. Every aspect of modern society has drained all the time, money, energy, emotional resiliance, social support, etc that people need.
Also the future is bleak in the poly-crisis.
Did you watch the new Tom Nicholas video, by chance?
I’m logically aware that’s the case for other people, but I find it perplexing why often times. I was sterilized in my mid 20s, and I haven’t ever regretted it.
Same. I suspect fomo. I experience that for other things but I never bought that kids thing.
Meh
There are many other social factors that make parenthood undesirable in Japan that this does not address.
Capitalism literally has failed the human race
Always has.
Wait until they will discover affordable housing thing.
Wait until you find out it is normal to tip your landlord there
Usually the newer buildings owned by larger real estate groups don’t do they kept money thing anymore.
I’ve only really seen it in buildings owned by small real estate concerns and old dudes.
It’s luckily getting kind of pushed out as a normal thing, just slowly.
Only once in my life have I got my damage deposit back. That is tipping the landlord a lot of money. The time I got it back was in a terrible situation and I had leverage over the parasite.
They also have security deposits on top of that
Housing in Tokyo is known for being relatively affordable, actually.
ya it’s funny when you watch some videos about “small apartments” in tokyo and only to realize they are still more cheaper and spacious than some NA options in big cities.
less expensive more expansive
Not in Tokyo, but farther out in Tokyo’s residential cities (outside the 23 wards like Chiba and Saitama)
It’s even cheaper the farther you get from train stations. There’s a 30 minute walk “cliff” where residential land prices plummet when you’re more than 30 minutes walk away from a train station.
If I lived in Tokyo, though, I certainly wouldn’t want to be a 30+ minute walk from a train station. That makes leaving home a pretty big task.
30m walking is like a sub-10 minute bike ride. No biggie!
you could always use a bicycle
Housing is pretty affordable in Japan since housing in Japan is not an investment, it depreciates like a car (only the land has value, the house ontop of it has literally negative value since it’s assumed anyone will want to bulldoze it), and their lax zoning allows for continual densification to happen.
What governments and corporations never understand and will never want to understand is that …
… it isn’t about the quantity of life … or even the quantity of people who are alive or are born
… it’s about the quality of life
If everyone lives a comfortable, safe and fulfilling life without risk of poverty or losing everything they have, then they are more likely to have children and raise them to become productive people who will contribute to society.
Otherwise if you don’t take care of people, they will either have no children or a bunch of children that will all grow up to become a burden to society.
There’s a climate catastrophe caused by human overpopulation. How did you miss that?
The climate catastrophe is caused by a hyper-reliance on fossil fuels & deliberately shitty transport infrastructure (i.e. the private automobile & it’s consequences), entirely for financial reasons; not just raw numbers of people.
“Life without risk of poverty”?! That desperation and fear is the only way I can staff my sweatshops!
Maybe we should be less focused on making more people, and more focused on enabling living people to work together to meet each other’s needs?
People will have children. But the only thing that pushes the nationalistic desires to have a positive birth rate is the zealotry around eternal 3%+ growth of financial product. That needs a growing consumer base.
We could be achieving an economic degrowth while simultaneously increasing the standard of living. Instead we have tech billionaires, a venture capitalist class, and a war on women’s(as well everyone else’s) bodily autonomy.
If everyone lives a comfortable, safe and fulfilling life without risk of poverty or losing everything they have, then they are more likely to have children and raise them to become productive people who will contribute to society.
You would assume that, but is it really true? The countries with the safest and most comfortable lives, in Scandinavia, have the lowest birth rates. The countries with the least safe and comfortable lives, in Africa, have the highest birth rates.
Well, countries with higher birthrates have a third option that is essentially negligible in those with lower birthrates, which is not even making it to adulthood. Effectively still less children end up becoming productive members of society. And together with that, due to less available social services, often a goal of having children survive is so they can take care of the parent when they’re older.
As soon as infant mortality becomes a non-factor, birthrates decline drastically as well. And since children are no longer largely seen as a “life assurance” for when parents are older, and the society’s demands for productive members is higher as well, the focus really does shift to the quality of the life and the two types of reasons to have kids are harder to compare. But even among developed nations you can see differences in fertility rates.
Maybe I’m reading into this wrong, but I think the interpretation of fertility statistics may be underestimating/overlooking how much rape and sexual violence contributes to the high fertility rates we’re seeing in impoverished countries struggling with widespread violence.
Countries like the ones in Scandinavia have lower rape statistics and access to abortion which could explain a lot about those numbers and why they are the way they are. Again, it’s a just hypothesis, but one worth mentioning I think.
four-day workweek
/me franticly googling rents in Japan
The way I’ve heard it said is “if you live in a developed country, you could probably afford to move to Japan right now. If you get a job in Japan, you’ll never afford to move back.”
Japan’s cost of living is low compared to developed nations, but their average income is also low for a developed nation.
When you move from the US you lose like half your salary for an equivalent position (more now cause of the relative power of the dollar to the yen).
The people that live like kings are the ones that are in Japan at the behest of American companies on American salaries living at like a third of their American costs.
This is true in Europe too. Salaries in the US are just stupid high in general. They need to be because the US has shit for social services, which must be paid out of pocket.
Case and point: childcare.
rent is cheapish, it’s everything else that will get you. if you’re fine with crushing and all-permeating conformism, ridiculous degree of nationalism and misogyny, how you won’t be ever accepted as one of their own as foreigner and famously toxic work culture, feel free to give it a shot
Housing in Japan is cheap. Smaller than you’re used to but still cheap.
Housing in Japan is treated the same as a car, it depreciates as soon as you move in.
This should be everywhere.
Affordable housing, better working conditions, less working hours, efficient healthcare and better pay. It’s not hard goddamn it.
