Japan Urged To Use Gloomier Population Forecasts After Plunge in Births (ft.com) 80
Japan must stop being overly optimistic about how quickly its population is going to shrink, economists have warned, as births plunge at a pace far ahead of core estimates. From a report: Japan this month said there were a total of 686,000 Japanese births in 2024, falling below 700,000 for the first time since records began in the 19th century and defying years of policy efforts to halt population decline. The total represented the ninth straight year of decline and pushed the country's total fertility rate -- the average number of children born per woman over her lifetime -- to a record low of 1.15.
But public and parliamentary dismay over the latest evidence of Japan's decline was intensified by the extent to which the figures undershot population estimates calculated by government demographers just two years ago. The median forecast produced by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) in 2023 did not foresee the number of annual births -- which does not include children born to non-Japanese people -- dropping into the 680,000 range until 2039.
But public and parliamentary dismay over the latest evidence of Japan's decline was intensified by the extent to which the figures undershot population estimates calculated by government demographers just two years ago. The median forecast produced by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research (IPSS) in 2023 did not foresee the number of annual births -- which does not include children born to non-Japanese people -- dropping into the 680,000 range until 2039.
Here is a Link That You Can Read Without a Sub (Score:5, Informative)
CNN / AP. [cnn.com]
Reading the article (Score:5, Informative)
Points:
- The discussion is entirely on half the population and fixing their issues
- That is the same government policy, speeches and media push for the last 20 years
Decades of a one-sided push have resulted in a continued decline. Trying the same policy and getting the same result is a failure.
Ideas:
- The government needs to correct the insane work hours still required on men and address other men's issues in order to correct this decline.
Article and the two linked articles
Japan’s annual births fall to record low as population emergency deepens
Story by Associated Press - Published 6:36 AM EDT, Thu June 5, 2025
- The number of newborns in Japan is decreasing faster than projected ... according to government data released Wednesday.
- The health ministry said 686,061 babies were born in Japan in 2024
- a drop of 5.7% on the previous year
- rapidly aging and shrinking population adds to concern about the sustainability of the economy and national security
- promote more flexible working environment and other measures that would help married couples to balance work and parenting
- in rural areas where family values tend to be more conservative and harder on women
- average number of babies a woman is expected to have in her lifetime – also fell to a new low of 1.15 in 2024, from 1.2 a year earlier
- are increasingly reluctant to marry or have children due to bleak job prospects, a high cost of living and a gender-biased corporate culture that adds extra burdens for women and working mothers
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/05... [cnn.com]
- Employees across various sectors report punishing hours and high pressure from supervisors
- It has launched initiatives such as expanding child care facilities, offering housing subsidies to parents, and in some towns, even paying couples to have children.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/01... [cnn.com]
- the total number of babies being born each year will continue to fall – even if women start having more kids – because the pool of women of childbearing age is already so small, and shrinking each year.
- “Even if all of a sudden Japanese married couples started having three children on average the population would continue to decline.
- For women, economic costs are not the only turn off. Japan remains a highly patriarchal society in which married women are often expected to take the caregiver role, despite government efforts to get husbands more involved.
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You say they need to address men's issues, but most of the issues you list are for women.
Gender based issues are a part of it, but the root cause is that boomers feathered their nest based on the assumption that the population and economy would continue to grow forever, and emitted a lot of CO2.
The boomer generation was a very large cohort, which kept their costs (pensions for the previous generations) low on a per-capita basis. They also enjoyed massive wealth increases, not least due to property prices ri
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I guess so....apparently it is too hot outside for young people to fuck....?
Wow...that never was much of a deterrent to me back in my younger days...
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Fucking is only part of the problem (though there definitely is less of that going on).
I don't want to demonize it because at an individual level every woman should have the right to determine if she wants to get pregnant, but realistically we've basically seen that when birth control is widely available and women have a choice on when and if to get pregnant, birth rates fall below replacement levels.
Now, this may end up solving itself from an evolutionary standpoint. Either biological or cultural. Either
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It's just one of many cost pressures that they are facing.
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Re: The end is nigh (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: The end is nigh (Score:4, Interesting)
Japan, like most developed nations, had a social contract where you pay your taxes and get a pension and old age care in return. As the population of working age people declines, and the elderly live longer, the cost of maintaining that promise gets higher.
There are mitigations like socializing care to reduce costs, but they can only do so much. China is experimenting with elderly care robots, but unless than pans out there is no getting away from this being a significant and very difficult problem.
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Plus the mere existence of this promise means that one of the motivations for having kids (ie someone to support you as you age) goes away.
Then you have improvements in medical treatments which keep increasing the number of elderly.
There are lots of other factors in developed countries discouraging kids too - like high costs of childcare, negative career impact and costs thereof, increased housing costs for a larger family etc.
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In the UK the living space available to millennials and gen Z has been steadily decreasing over the years, and quite dramatically in the past 15.
A lot of new homes are too small for a couple, let alone to raise a family in. They should never have been built, and we are going to be stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
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Pension schemes generally work like long-running intergenerational ponzi schemes that won't collapse as long as the next generation is always bigger and/or wealthier than the last. It's not a good system but trading off some "bigger" for some "wealthier" by reducing inequality could mitigate it. Inequality is also the root cause of falling births in developed societies (that the same ownership class that most wants endless population growth prefers to tiptoe around) so it would improve both issues.
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Indeed, and housing is a huge part of the inequality problem. A lot of boomer wealth is in property, and we aren't going to see property values quadruple again, so that was a one off. The only way to fix it is to drive down property prices again.
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I'm not sure inequality is the root cause of falling births.
The reality is no matter how much money you have, you will always have MORE available if you don't have children.
Children are expensive - there's no getting around that. They also require a rather sizeable investment in time which is going to SIGNIFICANTLY cut into your social/leisure schedule. Its voluntarily giving up a LOT to support another person. If you already have children you learn to love them and its less of a problem. But when you d
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Japan doesn't want immigration
Incorrect. Japan doesn't want immigration from any country. Japan has allowed a large number of Nepalese people to immigrate.
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You have to learn to read.
As in comprehending the meaning of a sentence.
For example the meaning of this sentence
Japan doesn't want immigration
is: The Japanese population in general does not like immigrants.
Has nothing to do with what the government randomly allows or does not allow.
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Like, to the point that their culture is in serious risk. Go to just about ANY convenience store and the guy behind the counter will be an immigrant.
This is the case in virtually all developed countries.
Gaslighting writ large (Score:3, Insightful)
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Economies require population growth. From the perspective of not having to compete with others for land, resources, etc., a more manageable population size absolutely is preferable.
Hell, remember when Covid lockdowns had most people at home? Traffic was light and gas was cheap. It's the only part of that situation that I actually kind of miss.
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Yeah, 'the economy, stupid', it's the mantra of neoliberalism - ageing population; import people of child-bearing age from developing nations.
Consequently, Australia has a self-fulfilling housing crisis.
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Economies require population growth.
If that were true, economies would all be doomed. Do you think economies are all doomed?
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Long term yes, the economic model has to change or collapse.
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We are in agreement then. Good to see that some people have an actual understanding of what is going on.
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>"Economies require population growth."
That is a ridiculous statement. It isn't "required." Population growth *can* assist with growing a GDP. And yet, it can also hurt it. It "depends".
And some aspects of economies built on pyramid schemes do require population growth. For example, the USA's social security scheme has required population growth because more benefits have been going out than in for many decades. When growth stalls, the house of cards collapses and we all end up paying yet more and
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Economies require population growth
No it does not.
The best thing is a stable population, then you have not to plan ahead into the unknown.
For what anyone need population growth? Two where should that lead when the planet is full?
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You are slightly correct.
Economies don't require population growth. You can handle the work with robots and you can get tax money from companies. It is just much harder to do it this way, because companies can move out of the country if you tax them too heavily.
Problem with stable population is that it does not provide growth and economies have relied of growth, because that is the only way they can pay back the debt. Other problem is that automation consumes about jobs every year at the rate of about 0.4%
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Stable populations provide growth.
As you can see all over the world as most countries have a stable or shrinking population.
"Growth" is a monetary thing and not a population thing. And has nothing to do with automation either.
Re:Gaslighting writ large (Score:4, Insightful)
Traffic was light and gas was cheap. It's the only part of that situation that I actually kind of miss.
You could hear the birds all the time. I don't care about cheap gas, but cars make cities noisy, ugly, polluted and dangerous. I only realised this in covid when almost all of the cars went and councils allocate more space for everything else for social distancing.
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I"ve been trying to figure out what ya'll were trying to say about no cars, etc.....then it dawned on me that ya'll must be living where they had lockdowns.
Where I lived, sure, traffic was lessened due to more WFH, but it certainly didn't go awa
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Is the packing of people only in Tokyo or is it common elsewhere in Japan. Just because Tokyo has a large population, it doesn't really tell us much about the rest of the country.
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In my experience, after a packed train a mostly empty train will come. If you are the idiot to ride the packed train, that is on you. The Japanese are extremely proud of their trains, and they do a lot to help the environment, where the pure ethnocentricity of your comment surprised me.
Both your post, and the original article ignores the interesting part of this issue. The steepness population decline is bringing its own challenges, where the import of people at some point is going to make Japan less J
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Under typical circumstances valuing cultural diversity gets to be more than enthusiasm for novelty because it's also a desire to protect (at least some, you don't have to deem them all equally desirable) people from being leaned on more or less aggressively to stop doing what they are doing. That changes if you get too close to the line of advocating more hosts be thrown at the problem in order to keep the show going so
Nobody is willing to make the societal changes (Score:2, Insightful)
People basically want everything to stay the way it was from when they were kids. Right around the age of 12 when they started to become aware of the world but were still protected by their parents.
So the kind of societal changes that a functioning civilization with a declining birth rate would require are. Right out.
The thing is the birt
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Promises were made, and promises need to be broken. As an example, in the UK the boomers did really well because there were a lot of them, so the cost of paying pensions for smaller generations that came before them and were thinned out by two world wars was low. They gave themselves very generous pensions, thinking that the economy and population would continue to grow forever.
Of course it didn't, subsequent generations were smaller, and can't afford the cost of boomer pensions and healthcare. Worse still
We don't need the break promises (Score:2)
But nobody wants to do that so we are just going to keep sending into techno feudalism and dystopia.
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They have that already in Japan. Very walkable, smaller cars, great public transport, lots of bikes.
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We have plenty of resources to take care of people but we don't have plenty of resources to take care of them and give everybody a giant SUV that's the point I was making.
And no walkable cities don't sell every single social problem. This is the problem with Americans they want a single simple answer that
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I don't think so anymore (Score:2)
I don't see how we escaped that anymore. Electoral politics w
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Seems like not-enough-people is a relatively straightforward problem to solve, if your country isn't completely awful. You just invite some immigrants in, and presto, you've got more people. There are plenty of people around the world looking for stable, decent places to live, so sourcing shouldn't be a problem.
Too-many-people is a much trickier problem, since nobody wants to be voted off the island.
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No, there actually is a genuine concern here, and it might be unsolvable, one of those "contradictions in capitalism" the marxists used to complain about.
Heres the problem,
On one hand, the basic physics of resource consumption is that theres a hard limit on how much stuff we can dig up/grow/etc and its pretty clear we are pretty close to that limit. At least if we want to have a planet we can actually live comfortably on.
On the other, populations around the world are ageing and once people hit a certain age
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I dont know if this is fixeable outside of massive automation
Why would that be a problem? Japan is one of the leaders in robotics. If they can build thousands of semi-autonomous drones on both sides of Ukraine war weekly, then shouldn't be a problem to create caretaker bots.
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Drone is many times easier to build than a caretaker bot. Perhaps the hardest task to automate, which also consumes a lot of time from the humans is about changing clothes, but it is not the same as changing clothes to a healthy person. Old people will have hard time controlling their muscles, so you have to use force, massage or what ever to get their limbs to the correct position so you can take and put clothes on. It is not an impossible problem for robots to solve, but much harder than just flying aroun
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Depends how many children those working people are also supporting. In pre-industrial agricultural societies an adult's labour could support about 1.5 adults, so 2 childless working people could support one retiree (although in those societies only the seriously ill would be truly retired). In theory industrialisation should allow an adult to support more than 1.5 adults.
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Even if every woman would start having 2 kids, population would still collapse. Japan has about 1.26 birth rate per woman. If whole world had the same birth rate, the population of humans would drop to about 4 billion in 2100.
At the current pace we will most likely hit 10 billion, but after that the population starts to drop. If birth rate drops even by 0.5 points, we will be around 6 billion in 2100.
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Shoving people onto packed trains hasn't been a thing for a couple of decades. They extended the platforms and added more carriages, as well as adding more trains and building new lines. They are one of those countries that actually does infrastructure decently well, and fixes problems.
Japan doesn't really have a space problem, it's more an issue with where people want to live. That's something that can be improved with better transport links, and Japan's excellent mixed land use that allows for offices and
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The issue with declining population is that there aren't enough people working to pay for the retired and elderly in need of care.
You do realize that humans survived for millions of years without an income source right? The problem is our economic system. We just need a better system for division of labor
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Survived being the key word there. I wouldn't like to go back to subsistence living or bartering.
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There is nothing gloomy about an island, where they employ people to shove others into tightly packed trains, from reducing to a more livable population size, where you can actually move through streets and find places to live.
This might be true if the drop in population were controlled, and the government could easily stop this trend once it reaches its desired population. But this drop in population is uncontrolled, and I don't blame them for worrying about it.
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Its only doom and gloom if you want to adopt some Logan's Run style "old people have to die" system or forgo the concept of retirement completely and everyone has to work until they die.
Retired individuals consume resources but do not produce them. Others such as rich people or the disabled who do not work are in the same boat, boat they tend to be fewer in number. They rely on the activities and labor of younger individuals to do the work of making society run (keeping the power on, growing food, construct
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Be more open to immigration (Score:4, Interesting)
The country should be more open and actively incentivize immigration, clearly the Japanese population is not interested in reproducing anymore, which is causing the demographic bomb where the old people will not have an income source of anyone to take care of them, no matter how many robots they build, so be more welcome to young outsiders, specially young couples and families with young kids, give them language courses, cultural adaptation lessons and some money to sweeten the deal, that will help, just don't make the mistake of bringing young single men, that will be worse in every way.
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First I didn't say anything about poor, the point is young couples or couples with young kids, poor or not that is what they need right now, and moving and settling in would expensive no matter who you are, so money incentive would help.
Second, being poor doesn't mean they would stay poor, it is very common for immigrants to a new country to arrive with little money and build a good life by working a lot.
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That is interesting, what holds you from immigrating now? only job offers/opportunities or some other factor?
Living in the Philippines would also have the advantage of being much cheaper, at least today, who knows in 25 years, but would likely still be cheaper to live there and occasionally visit Japan than living in Japan.
Why Gloomy? (Score:2)
Why gloomy when our capitalist greed is killing us all. Theres nothing gloomy about people who wont be born into a civilisation thats in its death throws and a runaway climate with a 5% chance of averting disaster.
Rejoice that millions less people WONT be born into a dying world, because the alternative is far mor gloomy.
Human life is worth almost nothing (Score:2)
Automation, robotics, computers have reached the level, where a lot of manual labor, can be automated away. A declining population will only lead to a better quality of life for everyone.
how does this one sound? (Score:2)
Denim jackets that proclaim There ain't gonna be a tomorrow, bay-bee?
At least, it's a start
What went wrong (Score:1)
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There will be knock on the door from the Thought Police for you in the near future. How dare you contradict the Dear Leader until he contradicts himself?
It will be weird to watch. (Score:3)
No funny? (Score:2)
Again with the missed opportunities for humor, but too late to even contribute to the discussion... My time is too slow for Slashdot time?