Outside a train station near Tokyo, hundreds of people cheer as Sohei Kamiya, head of the surging nationalist party Sanseito, criticizes Japan’s rapidly growing foreign population.
As opponents, separated by uniformed police and bodyguards, accuse him of racism, Kamiya shouts back, saying he is only talking common sense.
Sanseito, while still a minor party, made big gains in July’s parliamentary election, and Kamiya’s “Japanese First” platform of anti-globalism, anti-immigration and anti-liberalism is gaining broader traction ahead of a ruling party vote Saturday that will choose the likely next prime minister.
Racism and xenophobia aside, how many humans do we need? Our poor earth. A declining population is probably an ok thing. I think it’s the capitalist class ringing the alarm bell as they see their profit forecasts take a blow. How many hundreds of millions should that island hold?
I’m not sure how many people Earth will hold in the future, but we can look at historical data. Source
We know that worldwide human population was around 300 million for most of the medieval age (500 AD to 1500 AD). That was sustainable, i.e. people lived like that for a thousand years without incurring some ecological catastrophe. I’m not sure whether it’s needed to return to these numbers, but it’s certainly possible.
Is it possible there wasn’t much census data between 500 AD and 1500 AD in the regions we’re seeing a big explosion of people?
I’m all for persons voluntarily opting to have fewer (or no) progeny. Certainly, that is my intent.
But, Malthus was wrong on so many levels, and regulating reproductive activity even with the best of intent is going to be abused by eugenicists for genocide.
The already posted SK vid explains how the current social systems in most countries need at least replacement birth rates. It might be possible to have a society that could survive less-than-replacement birth rates, but I don’t see how.
Tax the F out of the rich and give it to child-bearing families. The amount is based on the rate of decline. Hand it out as a monthly stipend, and enforce checks for kids’ quality of life.
Free government-staffed daycare.
3 Months Paid Paternity/Maternity, guaranteed jobs.
Free Fertility Clinics.
It’s going to be expensive AF for a generation or two.
That’s not how to survive with less-than-replacement birth rates, that’s how to get higher-than-replacement birth rates (possibly without immigration). (I will admit that I was unclear that I meant “I don’t see how” to long-term sustain population decreases.)
But, absolutely, to get more birth, you need to have lots of support for child-raising, so that it is seen as more joyful than it is stressful. I know SK is having problems getting the political (or even democratic) will to implement those things, and even if they did all of that today AND birth rate immediately soared, they’d still have a “demographic squeeze” that their current economy can’t sustain.
I don’t think Japan is facing the demographic squeeze, yet. I don’t think you’d find much support for these “COMMUNIST” ideas among Kamiya’s followers, tho.
It’s tunable. You don’t need to exceed, you can run at 99.95 and slowly back down.
Still going to have the geriatric problem, but that seems more approachable.
I want to add that historically, in the US from 1680 to 1880, the population has grown by approximately 3% annually. Source
(In the table, since the growth rate given is per 10-year interval, you have to divide it by 10, roughly, to get 3% annual growth)
This suggests that it should be possible (at least in theory) that the population can shrink at the same speed, i.e. 3% annually. This would mean an average fertility rate around 0.66 children/woman. Currently, in most western nations, it’s around 1.4, while 2.1 would be “replacement levels”, i.e where the population numbers stagnate.
The reason why i think you can have a 3% annual population decline is because it’s kinda symmetric: instead of a surplus in children (which eat and consume resources but don’t contribute through their labor power), you have a surplus of old people (which, mostly, also consume resources but don’t work). So, the situation is kinda symmetric, and that’s why i suggest that it should be possible.
That’s not what I’ve been told, but I’m not an expert.
I imagine part of that is due to an interaction with economics, particularly inflation. A 3% inflation is considered healthy, but a 3% deflation is almost certainly a monetary system in a death spiral.
It’s a delicate feedback loop. Statisticians say that once you reach a certain decline rate, you end up exponentially shrinking and lose most of your middle-aged population in a couple of decades. The lower ages continue to decimate, and the geriatrics end up living in poverty.
Especially in Japan where the reproductive numbers are already barely sustaining.
Taxes have to skyrocket to keep things running, the economy and real estate go fallow. It’s a particularly nasty downward spiral they paint. Supposedly, even if you try to recover, people won’t be able to afford to have kids and they’d need to be having a LOT of kids each. Could be some horrible forced breeding shit if a few generations just to keep us from dropping to unsustainable levels.
Ideally, you evenly distribute the young, working people that are available on Earth. Japan has too few, Africa has gobs. (Although I don’t even know if the trickle of foreigners they’re taking in are from high-birth places)
Unfortunately, whatever the local majority group is is against whatever group isn’t, and that’s how you get history, and history happening again.
This vid explains the situation better than I can (it’s about South Korea but Japan is basically in the same boat)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
From a higher abstraction vantage point, you are not wrong, but you are basically advocating for entire countries to disappear
In biology, a species is considered threatened if there’s fewer than 200 individuals of that species around.
Here’s your short reminder that south korea has 52 million people, so even if people almost stop having children for a generation or two and the population stabilizes at 5 million people, which is 1/10 of what it currently is, it’s still very far away from extinction.
ugh… watch the video and then come back once you ditch the pedantry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
if a country of 52 is reduced to 5, they would literally roll back to per-industrial living
If the entire country wants to enact policies and cultures that would lead to their disappearance then who are we to tell them otherwise?
rational people?
But you are being disingenuous here… it’s not the entirety of Japan, same as the entirety of Murica did not choose to swim in the sewer with MAGA… yet they are forced to by a loud minority and a push over majority
I think we should at least warn them; perhaps they don’t have enough information to connect that outcome to their currently preferred policies. I.e. they don’t actually “want to enact policies and cultures that would lead to their disappearance”. Preventing persons from unintentionally harming themselves seems like a good thing.
Preventing persons from harming others (unintentionally or not) seems like a moral imperative. And, I think there are probably SK citizens that don’t consent to the current policies that will be harmed.
But, at the end of the day, I don’t have any action items. I see it mostly as a cautionary tale to drive my own policy preferences.
Welcome to the era of Misinformation
Why do you think we are here? getting people to vote against their own benefit is how we get Billionaires and eventually devolve into fascism before we step into another WW
Yeah, the hostile information environment is … tough. But, until we figure out how to navigate it, we won’t have a truly global society, and I’m not sure that separate, non-hostile communities/associations/syndicates are a stable configuration.
Critical thinking skills are part of that, but exercising them as a defense in that environment is not something you can sustain indefinitely. Everyone needs time to rest and everyone is going to make mistakes.
Well it’s also the pension system that will become hard to financially sustain. Generally you want the population to at least kind of replace itself to avoid economic upheaval.
you’re wrongly assuming that pensions have to be paid by labor taxes. there is no natural law of the universe that forces that. introduce taxes on the rich and pensions will be easily paid for.
While true, that’s an inherently unsustainable model. Pensions need to be self-sustaining, rather than relying on the next generation to pay for them. It’s ridiculous that one generation basically got a free generation and now every generation afterwards is paying the previous generation’s retirement
There’s the quantatitve thing of currency, but also simply the reality that people actually have to work to provide the things the retired people need. In this case the money issue is modeling a more intrinsic issue. With fewer young workers the retirement age has to go up to maintain a viable ratio of non-workers to workers. Yes technology and such can also help things for the better, but roughly that’s the state of things.
Yes, as people are disabled through aging, they eventually stop “producing” more than is necessary to sustain them. People with excess “production” have to transfer it to them. This can take various forms, but both a “self-sustaining pension” and a U.S. style “social security fund” use money as this method of transfer; the former is a bit more abstracted since interest / market gains (rather than direct contribution) are used, but it’s still the same flow. Making disabled care a cultural norm is even more direct, but also has a lot of coordination problems, and the people with excess production are often geographically (and socially) separated from the people with production deficits.
Of course, the ideal is not just about discontinuing labor participation due to disability, but because we actually want some time insofar as we can afford it.
A mark of, ideally, a bit of ‘overproduction’ is that we can work fewer hours and/or fewer years. If our ambitions and capabilities allow us to work 32 hour workweeks for a decade and then nope on out on retirement in our 30s for the rest of our lives, that would be a pretty good economic state to be in. A fantasy in practical terms, but a concept to keep in mind as a hypothetical if we ever do manage amazing ‘productivity’ without enough ‘ambition’ to consume it all.