Japan births hit record low, population down by largest margin in 2023 | Hacker News Reader

Japan births hit record low, population down by largest margin in 2023

japantimes.co.jp

20 pointsmupuff123426 comments

Bit of a mystery why we're focusing on Japan. Global fertility is below replacement rate [0]. China and South Korea seem to be more extreme cases.

We seem to have stumbled over the solution to overpopulation. Wealth. Not many people saw that coming. In some ways, this is the best possible outcome as it beats war, famine, plague and dealing with the tax office as ways to conclude the story of civilisations.

EDIT And obviously I'm exaggerating. There are a bunch of countries still having lots of kids; but this is hardly a Japanese phenomenon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate

> We seem to have stumbled over the solution to overpopulation. Wealth.

I'd be careful about drawing that conclusion. Wealth historically has been associated with a higher fertility rate.

There's almost certainly multiple factors at play here, but my guess is that cultures where women are less free to pursue careers and where religious values promote childbirth have a demographic advantage. And it just so happens that these cultures are also poorer on average.

If you look within multi-cultural countries you'll find that populations which hold conservative religious values in regards to sex, and population that are less likely to promote women's rights tend to have higher much higher fertility rates.

I think those factors are correlated and causal. It is rather challenging to get wealthy with a culture that bans half the population from working for religious reasons.

> It is rather challenging to get wealthy with a culture that bans half the population from working for religious reasons.

It's going be interesting to see if countries with a below replacement birth rate will continue to economically outperform long-term. Although per-capita they should continue to prosper.

>> We seem to have stumbled over the solution to overpopulation. Wealth. > I'd be careful about drawing that conclusion.

Right reason wrong conclusion. Look at the living standards of people in EU. People are educated enough to know a childbirth is huge financial burden. When both people in a couple work and barely can afford a living the only way they get a child is to have an accident and they are religious enough to not have an abortion.

Poor people back in the day did not have tools to prevent babies. Or did not care as children were treated... more liberally.

Wealth or rather lack of it, combined with contraception and basic financial understanding make for no babies.

Its not a rocket science.

A point to support it. There was a credit union in US whos CEO made a snap decision and gave everyone 75k base salary (10yrs ago or so) a follow-up with employees... house ownership through the roof people have babies and are more productive (to no-one's surprise except other CEOs and economists)

What?!?! Paying people a decent salary (doesn't even have to be amazing!) increases productivity, morale, and encourages people to purchase homes and have families?!

Mind. Blown.

> > We seem to have stumbled over the solution to overpopulation. Wealth.

> Wealth historically has been associated with a higher fertility rate.

Two different definitions of "wealth". "Wealth" meaning "at least industrial revolution non-poverty levels of wealth" has been associated with declining birthrates, pretty much worldwide, across many decades. "Wealth" meaning "among the top 1% of your society" has been associated with higher birthrates.

TFR is collapsing to irrevocably below replacement levels in wealthy muslism countries as well. My friends in the region have cheap housing, relatively well paying jobs - are religiously traditional - the women want families, enough that the educated ones quit to become full time moms. They have the resources (like nannies) and the family pressure to, but still end up settling for 1-2 kids for less than >2 TFR. At least that's the pattern. Maybe they'll get bored later in life and have another one, but seems like no one wants to deal with more than 1 kid per parent, or driving mini vans.

In Japan this has been going for a while, so I think people have more awareness.

OTOH, I've been reading more articles about this problem in SK and China, I don't think there's a particular focus on Japan.

Fertility is sub-replacement in East Asia, Europe and arguably the entire American continent (there are a few pockets with natural population growth).

We may as well focus on places that speak English; then everyone on HN can follow the news and review the stats. Asia is nice and all, but we can't read up on what is going on so easily. I'd bet a dollar their journalists aren't much better than ours and are getting a lot of the story wrong.

Fertility rate in Europe and North America is sub-replacement, but mostly not that bad as in East Asia, with added benefit of being able to fill the gaps with immigrants almost at will (which East Asia can't really do for a couple of reasons).

> We may as well focus on places that speak English; then everyone on HN can follow the news and review the stats.

I'm kinda perplexed about what your problem with this submission is. There's no problem with looking up the stats even if you don't speak the native language, e.g. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

My problem with this specific article is it is paywalled and so I'm not going to read it.

More generally my complaint is that noting that Japan's birthrate being down is that it is like observing the sky is blue. The globe has been seeing declining birth rates for 60 years. There are a large number of countries where birthrates are hitting record lows (picking some from a theme; the UK, US, Canada and Australia).

It isn't news, focusing on Japan isn't interesting and picking a country where the official documents aren't in English makes it harder to research the truth if there is a disagreement on a point of fact.

> focusing on Japan isn't interesting

I think that's just your imagination.

If I search "births" on HN, most of the top results are about US drop in births.

japan has been in the media since the 1980s, considered the 'the future' of the world. I think that idea still holds in the mind of many readers.

what happens in japan will eventually come to pass in the US - one can both hope and fear

Japan's population has been far lower in the past; as long as they resist the subverters who call for more immigration , they will be fine over the long haul.

Small population isn't a problem, getting there is - quick fertility rate drop means you'll need to support many pensioners from not that many productive workers.

Push comes to shove, they're just not going to get sufficiently supported and die unceremoniously. History is full of tough times fucking unlucky generations.

You're forgetting that many of the countries suffering from low fertility rate are democracies. The elderly can vote and they will vote for their interests, leading to governments raising taxes and putting pressure on the productive generations. This in turn could lead to the young people leaving for countries with smaller tax burden, which would further exacerbate the problem.

JP/SKR health spending are ~10% GDP, slightly above OECD average. I think there's threshold to how much politicians can appease geriatric bloc policy, there's limits to taxation and what can be allocated to welfare net, and that threshold is probably going to leave a lot of elderly mostly on their own. Many elderly in those two countries are already working to not die, and dying alone when not working. The thing about elderly voting blocs is you can appease to them and then ignore them, they're not spry enough to meaningfully protest.

This will end one day when the forces driving the reduction reach an equilibrium with the forces driving growth; Japan's population won't ever go as low as even 50 million people, but the path to equilibrium could be painful.

On the bright side, I think Japan is socially / culturally well positioned to suffer through this change. Taxes will likely go up significantly, but the young overburdened Japanese are unlikely to emigrate in large numbers (which would exacerbate the problem), older people are often in good health and choose to work, there's this communal attitude to solving problems.

The problems with depopulation is that there is no permanent vacuum. If the countryside is empty it will refill, whether you mean for it or not. Whether this is good or bad is not the point here, but that it will happen. Japan is an island nation that doesnt encourage migrants, so they may put it off. The best thing they can do is make a controlled immigration scheme.

> If the countryside is empty it will refill, whether you mean for it or not.

Can you give some specifics on how exactly this would happen if Japan does not allow it? Japan is not US where illegal immigrants can find jobs etc.

Lets say Japan's population keeps falling. It should be remembered that the demographic pyramid will be inverted, with mostly old people. In that case there would not be enough military aged persons to run an effective military. AI and robots could help, but any invaders would have AI and robots too.

Potentual invaders would not necessarily be another nation state. It could be roving groups of displacees who took up piracy and invasion. See the Sea Peoples at the collapse of the Bronze Age.

Population of Japan is projected to be 50 million (25 million of those in productive age) in 2120, that seems like enough to defend the relatively small island nation.

Source: https://www.jcer.or.jp/english/new-population-projection-how...

> It could be roving groups of displacees who took up piracy and invasion. See the Sea Peoples at the collapse of the Bronze Age.

They'd have no chance against an organized professional military, esp. in foreign environment, no chance to blend into the local population etc.

Japan is actually doing pretty well - the real wonders are South Korea, China, Singapore.

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