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Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

nytimes.com

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Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#61

Post by philwelch »

RyanZAG wrote: post #57
philwelch wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no interest genie either. If no one can invest and earn returns on borrowed money, there's nothing to sustain interest. Inherited wealth isn't enough to sustain anyone but the rich. GDP only measures new wealth anyway, not preexisting wealth. You have to continue producing goods and services. In fact, most forms of accumulated wealth (currency, securities, real estate) are really just shares of these goods an…

I guess I wasn't clear enough. Lets break down the working population into categories: [unique skills - ceos, etc] X people [highly demanded skills - top class engineers, specialty surgeons, etc] Y people [regular required jobs - doctors, pharmacists, designers, etc] Z people [unskilled jobs] A people [unemployed] As the population decreases, the demand for each of the sets should decrease in proportion if per capita…

There actually are limits to physicians per capita. You wouldn't have a functioning economy where everyone was a physician. If the population drops by 10%, demand for physicians drops as well.

For engineers it's a supply side issue--we could productively employ many more engineers than we do, but it would take immense breakthroughs to have a population where everyone could be an engineer. That's what I meant when I said you'd have to selectively cull the unproductive. If you reduce the population, the remaining workers have to be more productive for per capita GDP to rise, and you still haven't shown that this would happen. It doesn't help if you only need 10,000 engineers when you can only produce 0.01 engineers per capita. You'd need this proportion to rise. How does lowering birth rates do this?

In other words--sure, you could probably have a very per-capita rich Galt's Gulch with only 1000 people. But reducing the population arbitrarily to 1000 people will not accomplish this.

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#62

Post by btilly »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #59
sridhar_vembu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to call bullshit on this one. Most of us here, supposedly "conscientious" people, can trace our being here (in the existential sense of "being") to some ancestor with "low consciousness". Birthrates are falling rapidly around the world, yes, including in places you may think are populated with "low conscious" people. The reason is very prosaic: urbanization. As people get crammed into smaller areas, they natur…

Both zeteo and myself are discussing differential birthrates between populations. If population A (e.g. mormons, people of low conscientiousness) has a birthrate of X, and B (everyone else) has a birthrate of Y, with X > Y, then population A will eventually become the entire population. The eventual birthrate will be X. Even if both birthrates are reduced by some exogenous factor K (e.g. urbanization, reducing from X…

Both of you are missing something important. A population with a high birthrate will only achieve that dominance if the children remain in that population. A variety of religious communities have been able to maintain high birth rates, but do not retain all of their children, and their children therefore do not maintain birth rate.

One way to think of this is that, instead of the physical birth rate of people with the trait, what is the rate with which the trait manages to reproduce itself? A trait of "being Mormon" with an average of 6 kids, of whom 2 become Mormon, leads to a Mormon population of stable size, forever having 6 kids per couple.

If the Mormons manage an average of 2.5 Mormon kids per couple, then their population will grow without bound, though they may never be an actual majority of the population. However history shows that culture is malleable. They may grow that fast now, but a rapid social change can destroy the dynamic. (Witness Italy and Ireland, both strongly Catholic, with declining populations.)

Now contrast this with, say, a genetic trait that manifests as a strong desire to actually have children. Eventually you get a population of people who really want children, most of whose children really want children. This type of fundamental desire is more stable than a social construct.

I believe that there are such traits out there in the population. They are much more strongly favored today than in the past. Eventually those traits, whatever they are, will become more widespread, and evolution will have happened.

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#63

Post by zeteo »

btilly wrote: post #62
yummyfajitas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both zeteo and myself are discussing differential birthrates between populations. If population A (e.g. mormons, people of low conscientiousness) has a birthrate of X, and B (everyone else) has a birthrate of Y, with X > Y, then population A will eventually become the entire population. The eventual birthrate will be X. Even if both birthrates are reduced by some exogenous factor K (e.g. urbanization, reducing from X…

Both of you are missing something important. A population with a high birthrate will only achieve that dominance if the children remain in that population. A variety of religious communities have been able to maintain high birth rates, but do not retain all of their children, and their children therefore do not maintain birth rate. One way to think of this is that, instead of the physical birth rate of people with th…

>Both of you are missing something important. A population with a high birthrate will only achieve that dominance if the children remain in that population.

Great-great-grandparent:

> Secular culture has managed to peel away many of their kids in recent decades but [...] that process is about to change

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#64

Post by btilly »

zeteo wrote: post #63
btilly wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of you are missing something important. A population with a high birthrate will only achieve that dominance if the children remain in that population. A variety of religious communities have been able to maintain high birth rates, but do not retain all of their children, and their children therefore do not maintain birth rate. One way to think of this is that, instead of the physical birth rate of people with th…

>Both of you are missing something important. A population with a high birthrate will only achieve that dominance if the children remain in that population. Great-great-grandparent: > Secular culture has managed to peel away many of their kids in recent decades but [...] that process is about to change

Point.

However I, personally, see no sign of that process changing. Popular culture does not have to be good to pull away the children of religious people. It merely has to be attractive. And popular culture is constantly, relentlessly, optimizing for shallow attractiveness.

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#65

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

btilly wrote: post #62
yummyfajitas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both zeteo and myself are discussing differential birthrates between populations. If population A (e.g. mormons, people of low conscientiousness) has a birthrate of X, and B (everyone else) has a birthrate of Y, with X > Y, then population A will eventually become the entire population. The eventual birthrate will be X. Even if both birthrates are reduced by some exogenous factor K (e.g. urbanization, reducing from X…

Both of you are missing something important. A population with a high birthrate will only achieve that dominance if the children remain in that population. A variety of religious communities have been able to maintain high birth rates, but do not retain all of their children, and their children therefore do not maintain birth rate. One way to think of this is that, instead of the physical birth rate of people with th…

I agree with your major point, but Ireland has a growing population in terms of birth rate. The only reason the overall population isn't growing is because of emigration between the ages of 18-25. The birth rate did go down during the boom, but its gone right back up to late 1970's levels during this current recession.

For some bizarre reason, Irish people love having babies.

Full disclosure: I am a childless Irish male in my older 30's, I know many people I grew up who have had kids since the economy went into the crapper.

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#66

Post by nacker »

w1ntermute wrote: post #32
ajross wrote: post #2

This is pretty awful analysis. It conflates aggregate statistics (e.g. GDP) with per-capita ones (birth rates, cost per child). And it's headline is a clear lie designed to draw clicks. Demographic change is a real challenge, and all industrial societies are heading for that kind of cliff. Japan's is larger than most (but smaller than China's), and they are going to get there first. But this isn't the kind of disaste…

It also depends on culture. The article says that Japanese women don't find Japanese men as attractive partners because of low pay, long working hours for them, etc., but there's also the fact that young Japanese men just aren't that interested in having sex or pursuing women. This cultural phenomenon, known as Sōshoku danshi （草食男子）, or herbivorous men[0,1], has to end if things are going to turn around. These men ar…

The cultural changes you mention are not specific to Japan, they are global. For an in depth analysis of the issue I suggest F. Roger Devlin's classic paper 'Sexual Utopia In Power':

http://dontmarry.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/sexualutopia.pd...

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#67

Post by btilly »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #65
btilly wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of you are missing something important. A population with a high birthrate will only achieve that dominance if the children remain in that population. A variety of religious communities have been able to maintain high birth rates, but do not retain all of their children, and their children therefore do not maintain birth rate. One way to think of this is that, instead of the physical birth rate of people with th…

I agree with your major point, but Ireland has a growing population in terms of birth rate. The only reason the overall population isn't growing is because of emigration between the ages of 18-25. The birth rate did go down during the boom, but its gone right back up to late 1970's levels during this current recession. For some bizarre reason, Irish people love having babies. Full disclosure: I am a childless Irish m…

Thank you for correcting me on that data point.

I personally suspect that the long oppression of the Catholic Church under English rule lead to a cementing of how important it is to the Irish people. I further suspect that, in time, Ireland will become as secular as other countries. But that time is not yet here.

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#68

Post by greenyoda »

RyanZAG wrote: post #33

Feels like the article misses the obvious while actually stating it. The reason for Japan's declining birth rate: "Although Japanese couples consistently say in surveys that they would like to have more than two children, they don’t. Part of the problem is Japan’s prolonged economic malaise. Years of stagnant (or declining) incomes have made Japanese men less attractive as potential partners. And economic uncertainty…

Another reason why shrinking population won't magically solve Japan's problems is that they'll have smaller and smaller numbers of working-age people supporting larger and larger numbers of retirees, leaving the younger people even less money to spend on themselves and their children.

This is the same problem that's looming for the Social Security system in the U.S., and probably in most developed countries, as average lifespans increase. (A much smaller percentage of people actually lived to retirement age when the Social Security system was first created.) But this problem will hit Japan first due to their low birth rate.

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#69

Post by squonk »

How much of Japan's population syndrome is directly assignable to Japan's unique policies, versus the nature of first world countries in general?

Japan's population has been essentially flat for the last 6 years: 127,773,000 in 2005, 127,817,000 in 2011. It is headed south as long as the birth rate remains so low. So no question that the rest of the world needs to understand the effects of negative population growth. A decreasing population will test many economic policies that relied on monotonically increasing population to be effective. I doubt we can predict all of the policies that will break.

Re: Without Babies, Can Japan Survive?

#70

Post by greenyoda »

RyanZAG wrote: post #49
philwelch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP per capita doesn't go up when population goes down, because there are fewer people working to produce goods and services. There's no economy genie producing wealth that has to be divided among the population.

A large portion of country wealth is often tied up in land and infrastructure. Wealth generally creates more wealth (through interest and similar), so the same wealth spread across a smaller number of people will push GDP per capita upwards. Higher incomes are also closely associated with better education. If you keep the number of universities and schools constant while decreasing the population, you give a larger p…

"If a family has no children, the estate will move into public control, effectively increasing GDP per capita for the surviving population."

I'd think that families that have significant wealth are the ones that are the most likely to have children, since they'd have no problems affording them.

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