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Comment by eip | Hacker News Reader

Japan, much like the earth, has limited space and resources. So I don't really think of declining population as a problem.

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"Japan, much like the earth, has limited space and resources. So I don't really think of declining population as a problem."

The problem is leverage.

Why is it a disaster if GDP growth comes in at less than 1% or so ? Is it really so terrible if we don't grow in a particular year, or only grow 1% ?

The problem is the leverage. We're counting on the growth just to pay the interest.

In the current financial system there is always more debt than there is money to pay it. It's mathematically impossible to pay the interest. That is how slavery works.

It is when you have a massive aging population that requires social services which requires a young population working and contributing to that social services fund.

A massive baby surge right now would actually make the situation worse since you will drastically increase the number of dependents. Increasing young working age immigration might be an option, especially for blue collar jobs that most young Japanese do not want to do. Almost certainly won't happen in xenophobic Japan.

This isn't strictly true. It costs considerably less for the state to support a child than an elderly person. Furthermore, your plan results in a massive baby surge regardless - if you start allowing mass immigration of young workers, many of them are going to have children anyway.

>It costs considerably less for the state to support a child than an elderly person.

I would like to see the numbers on this...

In today's world, a young person is supported for at least 20 years, sometimes more. Life expectancy in Japan is 84.6 yr (the minimum Japanese retirement age is 61 yr, set to increase to 65), so older people are supported for at most 23.6 yr.

Further, older people are most often supported by their own investments and assets, which can be invested in any productive location, rather than by the earnings of a couple of related adults.

But at what point are a procreating mass of young workers considered replacing the native culture? Is it still [insert country with plummeting replacement rates] if [insert labeled high-fertility immigrating group], bringing their own genes & memes, out-populate the host population?

There is a trick to prevent this. In Britain, at first they brought in many male immigrants from Pakistan. Since they didn't have their families or female kin with them, they assimilated well. They stopped assimilating once they brought their families.

For immigrants to assimilate better, it would be a better policy to bring onky one gender. Like say a quota of 500k women from the Philippines and a 500k quota of males from another country.

It is in practical terms.

There are too many people on earth right now, it is unsustainable and growing. However in Japan if they have a lot of older people and nobody to do the actual work society needs (e.g. food, utilities, transport, etc) and or to take care of those older people, then you'll run into a problem.

The problem for Japan isn't a decline, it is too fast of a decline. If the decline happened much slower it might be a non-problem.

If Japan accumulated a sovereign wealth fund during the "boom" times, they could draw upon this fund during the absence of exports due to aging workers. The problem is in the current pay-as-you-go social security system.

Japan's labour force is proportionally higher than at least that of the UK and USA, their debt crisis is much more pressing than any labour issues right now.

Yes. A debt crisis that the US is walking into almost exactly alike, but a decade behind. And nobody cares.

Earth is far from running out of resources. Earth had limited charcoal resources until coal was found and then the other fossil fuels. While fossil fuel is limited at an accelerating rate of consumption (maybe 100 years or more), it doesn't mean there aren't other forms of energy to pick up the demand, given economic development. Think: nuclear, solar, wind.

But really, people aren't just mouths to feed, they are also hands and brains for thinking. Collectively, they add more to each other the more there are, provided they are allowed to develop themselves. The restrictions they face are mostly ideological and political, not related to physical supply or logistics.

To extend that: there is Methane Hydrate in the ocean floor, 6X all the oil we ever discovered so far. Unfortunately that's also carbon. But we're far, far from running out of fossil fuels.

Japan is already harvesting methane hydrate in test wells.

I would like to see a list and calculation of the advantages of a declining population.

In today's economy, white collar workers are not productive for almost 25 years, whereas 50 years ago most people were in partial paid employment by the time they were 16 and fully employed at 18-20.

Off the top of my head I can envisage: cheaper housing, reduced cost of public services, schools, universities and medical care for children.

Eh, we haven't even started to scratch the surface of how many people the Earth can support.

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