Japan’s birthrate is low. But why?
[NOTE: This post was inspired by some comments in today’s open thread.]
The Japanese are failing to reproduce in anywhere near replacement numbers. The population is therefore skewing older, and it has a negative effect on the economy already. It’s been well-documented that this is happening. But why?
Here’s a 2017 article from The Atlantic that attempts to tackle the question:
The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.
But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the United States: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.
“The gender stuff is pretty consistent with trends around the world—men are having a harder time,” says Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University…
The article goes on to say that Japan’s workforce used to have stable, lifelong jobs, but now a great many workers are what’s called “irregular”:
According to Kingston, the rise of irregular workers in Japan began in the 1990s, when the government revised labor laws to enable the wider use of temporary and contract workers hired by intermediary firms. Then, as globalization put more pressure on companies to cut costs, they increasingly relied on a temporary workforce, a trend that intensified during the Great Recession…
In a culture that places such an emphasis on men being breadwinners, this has serious implications for marriage and childbearing. Men who don’t have regular jobs are not considered desirable marriage partners; even if a couple wants to get married, and both have irregular jobs, their parents will likely oppose it…
Women seeking full-time work frequently find themselves in irregular jobs too, which also has implications for raising a family, because the hours are unpredictable and the pay is low. But it is more of an obstacle for marriage if a man doesn’t have a good job—roughly 70 percent of women quit working after they have their first child, and depend on their husband’s salary for some time.
So there’s a cultural lag between expectations based on the past, and present-day economic realities in Japan. And of course, when women work, they don’t need a husband to survive (especially if they’re living alone in those tiny apartments featured in today’s open thread).
And then there’s the situation of the nature of the “good” jobs:
Knowing that people in their 20s and 30s are desperate to get regular jobs, companies hire lots of young people and force them to work long hours for little to no overtime pay, assuming that most won’t be able to survive the harsh conditions, Konno said. Japan has long had a culture of overwork—there’s even a Japanese word, karoshi, for death by overwork—but Konno says that it has worsened since the Great Recession…
The result is that even Japan’s “good” jobs can be brutal. People who hold them may earn enough money to support families, but they often don’t have much time to date, or to do anything but work, sleep, and eat.
Of course, that was also true long ago (and even today to some extent) of the upward-striving poor in the US. Many of our ancestors worked round the clock and barely had time to see their children. But they still had children (birth control being an iffy proposition at the time), and their hope and dream was of a better life for those children.
I think the Japanese – and to a lesser extent, young people in the Western world in general – have somewhat lost that dream.
I wrote a post in 2017 on the Japanese aversion among younger generations to sex itself – that is, sex between two actual people. In it I linked to this article:
Nearly a third of Japanese people are entering their 30s without any sexual experience, according to research.
The country is facing a steep population decline as a growing number of youngsters abstain from sex and avoid romantic relationships.
So it’s certainly not just reluctance to marry. In the article’s interviews with young Japanese, some men said they fear rejection if they ask a woman for a date, and a woman cited the ready availability of porn that some men substitute for the risks (emotional and otherwise) inherent in sex between two people.
Whatever it is – and I think the phenomenon is multiply-determined and hardly limited to Japan, although Japan may be the canary in the reproductive coalmines – it is an ominous sign.
What is so very fascinating about this issue is that the populace seems mostly unwilling to accept the solution which is often suggested in this country, viz. the importing of large numbers of foreigners to make up for the low native birthrate. Culturally, the Japanese are not averse to the appreciation of things foreign, but there is no desire, amongst the citizenry, to welcome large numbers of immigrants, even though the other two solutions (robots and more Japanese children) have yet to materialize. Perhaps the adoption of policies conducive to the creation of stable families, including various financial incentives (as in Orban’s Hungary), would be worth some consideration by the Japanese.
I almost made an offhand comment on the last thread, but it seemed too crass for a morning open thread. But that male Japanese coed isn’t going to be inviting a woman back to his place for sex, unless they want to do it standing up. But the female coed, she made her whole floor a comfortable place to sit, sleep, and do other things. She’s a cute girl, a bit clever with her study in architecture, and probably a good find for a young man. I’m not sure about a guy who sits in a tub for hours.
From the glass half-full side….
One may also see this as part of the ongoing renegotiation of the boundary between living for oneself vs living for society, which I would argue is an inevitable consequence of a world growing safer and more prosperous.
How many Japanese sons watched their fathers, uncles or grandfathers work themselves, figuratively or literally, to death? How many thought to themselves, “That’s not going to happen to me”?
j e
I think the solution of the youngest generation, in the US, Japan, and other places, is actually to need less. The notion of needing a large labor pool starts with the idea that you need things from that labor. When I was a child, I wanted a nice home, a car, a multimedia center (including tv, stereo receiver, multiple speakers, plus a few source boxes like cable box, game system, and vcr/dvd/blu-ray system), my kitchen needed everything (fridge, stove, oven, microwave, dishwasher, and the sink), a large closet for all my clothes with a washer and dryer to keep them clean, and oh, perhaps a phone for the house.
Now, that multimedia system is a phone or tablet with good headphones. A multicooker is fine when going out is miserable, but eating out is common (and one of the few major labor markets needed). Clothes and keeping them clean seem to be the last bastion of required space, and that’s the most important for those interested in procreating. Those not interested in dating and sex have simpler clothing needs. Nobody wears three-piece suits and complex dresses.
That’s my observation of the youngest generation here and the UK, where I’ve travelled often. And the earlier video suggested to me the same in Japan.
South Korea apparently has an even lower birth rate than Japan, despite parents getting paid by the govt if they have kids, for 18 years (more for the 1st 5 years, then it drops a bit)/
The reasons seem to be what your quoted articles say for Japan — women are encouraged to work and establish a career before looking to “settle down.”
I watch a lot of k-dramas anymore and I’ve noticed this for most of them — they’re stories of men and women in their late 20’s and early 30’s who are “finally” finding love. I know they’re fiction, but fiction reflects reality, so.. take that with the proverbial fistful of salt and all.
Alana Semuels is the author of the article. She’s paid to turn in copy on time. She’s not paid to think straight.
But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the United States: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.
This could have been lifted verbatim from scores of pieces appearing in liberal magazines and on Op-Ed pages between 1979 and 1989. Alana Semuels evidently fancies Japan is suffering from declining real income or fancies that there are diseconomies of scale in forming households or, if you really want to be charitable, fancies that all gains in real income over the last 40-odd years have been enjoyed by people who have entered middle age. And it’s always the governments job to generate ‘opportunities’.
According to Kingston, the rise of irregular workers in Japan began in the 1990s, when the government revised labor laws to enable the wider use of temporary and contract workers hired by intermediary firms. Then, as globalization put more pressure on companies to cut costs, they increasingly relied on a temporary workforce, a trend that intensified during the Great Recession…
Again, salaried and hourly workers who had ‘lifetime employment’ amounted to about 30% of the working population ca. 1980. They had lifetime employment due to practices which the clanking boss-ridden business unions in the United States would never agree to: a portion of workers compensation is given in the form of a bonus which is a function of corporate earnings. Earnings decline, your nominal pay gets cut; no layoffs.
Domestic product per capita (nominal) in Japan is 78% higher than it was in 1980 and 20% higher than it was in 1990. The employment-to-population ratio in Japan bounces around 0.60, quite normal for an affluent country. The highest unemployment rate recorded in the last 60 years was 5.5%; it was between 3% and 5.5% during the period running from 1995 to 2015 but has otherwise been below 3% since 1960. They aren’t suffering present-tense economic problems. Their problem since 1990 has been a dearth of economic dynamism.
If the expectation of married couples is the wife quits working when she marries, yes, they experience an earnings cut. The question is why that expectation should abide when it generates so much loneliness and frustration to so little benefit. Housekeeping in urban Japan isn’t onerous; the median quantity of space in a Japanese dwelling is 215 sq ft per person. The population’s increased by 16% in the last 50 years and they’ve done a great deal of building in that time, so I doubt space per person has been declining.
She needs to look to questions of psychology, culture, and even human biology.
How many Japanese sons watched their fathers, uncles or grandfathers work themselves, figuratively or literally, to death? How many thought to themselves, “That’s not going to happen to me”?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/643765/japan-monthly-working-hours/
Working hours per month hardly differs in Japan from that in the United States. There may be a larger standard deviation in that figure and it may have been higher 40 years ago.
Modernity is toxic. It’s that simple.
More broadly, you cannot institute legal and social equality for women and expect to have any kind of stable civilization as a going concern after (best case, I guess) ten generations.
Re the Japanese, the commenter who said that many young men are opting out of a lifetime of Salaryman wage slavery is correct. Also there are plenty of parallels with the Mouse Utopia Experiment (look it up). Eventually you reach the point where when all survival needs are effortlessly met for multiple generations where the adults become sexless preeners and loners.
Few other things about Japanese society you may not know. Your humble servant has lived and worked in Tokyo in his younger days and has seen and… well… done a lot. Plus I tend to go down social anthropological rabbit holes in places I live and swap anecdotes and ask locals lots of questions. Especially of the women… who are more likely to open up to curious foreigners. I don’t think need to draw a diagram here.
Anyway… a few things.
The Salaryman Slavery thing is real. You can see the difference between a guy just graduated from Tokyo University (I hired a few out of final year Engineering and Computer Science back in the day) and another who has just turned 30. Those 7 or 8 years working in a big company have destroyed him already. He’s not a zombie or a husk of a man, but he’s a company man. There’s no joy or spark left in him.
That’s the bit everybody focuses on – the 6- (sometimes 7-) days per week start early work late take no vacations take no prisoners work culture for men. Most unmarried women OL’s (Office Radies :P) have regular hours and don’t work much more than 8 hours per day. They get to have hobbies and do general reading and hang around in galleries and coffee shops trolling for the younger me and worse 😀
Still… it gets worse.
Just because Modernity and no-fault divorce and all its other horrid ills are poisoning Japanese society doesn’t mean that aspects of traditional culture don’t still exist. Some of these are still very strong and *combined* with female emancipation and legal equality make for an extra toxic mix which further discourages marriage. What worked very well back in the Old Dispensation may mess things up doubleplusungood when mixed together with modernity.
1. Eldest sons have very serious and deep familial responsibilities. And as number of children per woman has been shrinking for several generations, more and more single males are eldest sons. So… Wife of eldest son is expected to look after son’s parents. Obligations in Japan are no joke and are socially enforced. You don’t get to be a rebel and opt out once you’ve taken the ticket. So many women will simply refuse to consider getting married to an eldest son.
2. Japanese traditions about marriage in some ways quite accurately reflect human female evolved sexual nature — which is basically to lose sexual interest in her husband after some years. That’s the Seven Year Itch to y’all. Studies have shown it can often be more like 4 years. Living in the cave with Ogg, no matter how good a provider and protector Ogg is, it makes sense to sneak in some other genes behind Ogg’s back once you have Ogg locked in with offspring. After all, she’s genetically programmed to want to preserve *her* genes, Ogg or Ugg are just passengers. Well… Japanese culture intuits the Part I and traditionally did the sensible thing and cut her throat or sold her into a brothel if she tried Part II. Now with female equality and no fault divorce, woman simply cleans out the man when she’s had enough of him.
But it’s well understood by all Japanese that after a wife has one or two children that she totally switches off sexually as far as husband is concerned and around the home morphs into the Perfect Stay at Home Japanese Mother and Housewife. Husband (who must go to work early and come home late 6 days/week) is treated outside the house as Paterfamilias and inside the house as an especially retarded idiot child — which he is in matters domestic because he has zero available time to be around to know or learn anything about what is going on at home. It’s a galling, shitty, rotten row to ho (sic).
Japanese young guys know that the sweet lusty young thing they’re banging in love hotels on when they still have energy after working insane hours will inevitably and invariably morph into the Japanese Mother. To them as well as their kids. Many are now opting out of a Mug’s Game altogether.
Which explains the Old pre-90s Salaryman culture of going out with the boss after work and misbehaving on expense accounts. That’s the only time they could ever feel alive. There’s much less of that these days as Japanese Big Business is not riding as high as it once did.
Now, not every guy is a Salaryman. Probably only 25-30% of the male working population. Thing is that Salarymen for all their shitty lives are the desirable husbands for women. Women generally even less interested in non-white collar guys.
It’s a total Shit Show. In plenty of ways I could go on with different but also messed up stuff in China. Mind you so is the situation between the sexes in the West today similarly borked. But it’s more fun and in some ways easier to look at a more alien culture and take it apart because distance allows for more dispassionate dissection and study.
FWIW and not especially related to this topic is the fact that Japan is becoming ‘Poor’. Economy has stagnated since early 90s. Rural Japan is no walk in the park. Everyone is old and looks beaten down. There’s a lot of ruin in a country and they don’t have Blacks and Hispanics and God Knows What and they still enforce standards and don’t have the rot of ‘Tolerance’. And plenty of accumulated Old Money. But for the young, it’s no bed of roses today.
@ArtDeco:
There you go with statistics. Statistics can be made to say anything.
There’s a huge difference between what a Japanese employment contract might say about working hours and vacation time and what actually exists in the moment on the ground in base reality outside of a spreadsheet table.
It may shock you to learn that there are even countries where businesses keep three or four sets of accounting books. Traumatic thought, I know.
Rather than the diagnoses listed above, I think that the withering away of Japan’s traditional culture and all of its social structures, relationships, and values, topped by their loss in WWII, has led to a general loss of “civilizationial confidence” that is one of the major causes, if not the major cause, of their drastically declining birth rate.
“Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy.” 2017 Atlantic Article
That gave me pause as, according to Wikipedia;
“The economy of Japan is a highly developed free-market economy.[23] It is the third-largest in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth-largest by purchasing power parity (PPP).[24][25] It is the world’s second largest developed economy.[26]
In 2018, Japan was the world’s fourth-largest importer and the fourth-largest exporter.[31] It has the world’s second-largest foreign-exchange reserves, worth $1.3 trillion.[22]”
Given that robust an economy, it seems like there has to be other explanatory factors for why good jobs are scarce.
Also, neo points out that a lack of good jobs did not prevent “the upward-striving poor in the US” from having children.
Which leads me to suspect that the deeper motivating factor is cultural. Specifically, women’s education and careers.
Years ago when I was a Demography grad student, I wanted to write my thesis on why Germans were having so few children. My theory was that Germans were too pessimistic about the future (or maybe pessimistic is the wrong word, perhaps nonchalant is more appropriate). I had to change topics because my advisor thought that the topic was more about my opinions than actual data.
Anyway, I still believe this is true. Raising children requires a lot of effort and money and I believe, in an increasingly secular world, a lot of young people just don’t think it’s worth the trouble. I think a lot of people who have grown up in affluent societies with no strong religious belief just don’t see the point in sacrificing their material comfort to raise children.
I don’t see a solution to this. It looks like Western civilization will just peter out as it makes way for people who still believe in something.
When sexual complementarity is dead, people find that they really don’t like each other very much.
But I would guess it is inevitable that once a society becomes safe for the weak, and the stronger are subsequently hemmed in by old rules which the weak then leverage to compete against and even take advantage of them (like the liberal grandmas in burning cities crying out for help to those whose lives they have been busy undermining), there is not likely to be much motive for continued interaction with the devalued or antagonistic; or at least commitment to the welfare of the other reduced to an occasional … sex urge outlet.
It is not after all, as if most people are so sexually attractive anyway that they are irresistible despite their obvious neuroses; even accounting for wide divergences in taste. LOL
I mean how many 8s, 9s, and 10s are there in a random population? How many 7s for that matter?
I had a conversation with a black man who is divorced, the other day. He was bemoaning – how shall I say it – confronting on the one hand the mercenary and coarse nature of the females usually available to him, and on the other, their unreasonable expectations and sense of entitlement.
He said to me [and this was embarrassing to listen to, but I put up with it because he has certain limitations that make him vulnerable and in need of someone to express himself to ] : “You know, I just would like a nice looking woman to hold sometimes. I’d even consider a woman of another race.”
Figuring I’d take advantage of the subject he had broached, I said,
“Oh yeah? Do you mean you would like an Eskimo woman or an American Indian? ”
“No.” he laughed.
Since he just stood there, I said: “Oh, you mean a nice looking woman from Mexico, or maybe a Chinese woman?”
“No, I don’t want one of them”, he said.
“What do you mean? Maybe an Arab woman or a Guatemalan?” I asked
“Oh, no, not an Arab, or the other”, he said.
“Well what’s left that you would accept?” I asked …
I wanted to make him volunteer it. If that can be called volunteering it. And he did.
My guess is that as genetic therapy and engineering progresses, we shall see a reemergence of sexual dimorphism in all its manifestations; simply because those who can disengage from the uncongenial, and reengage with the congenial, will. Assortative selection by design. Or by designer selection. And also because there is no continuing moral reason presently why they should not do so; anymore than there is any reason why some kid from Kentucky should pull a second wave feminist out of a ditch filled with frigid water and waste.
“One humanity” as a serious moral theory is dead and all but buried by progressive metaphysical assumptions; if it was ever really alive in any freight bearing sense in the first place.
From the recorded interviews I have seen of Japanese during the postwar recovery and boom, a lack of civilizational confidence is the last thing they were suffering from.
Instead, they experienced a new enthusiasm as they astonished even themselves with what they managed to create in about two decades.
Now since the 1980s or 1990’s? I really would have no strong opinion and certainly no insights based on first hand knowledge or even reliable reports.
I do know, as I have mentioned before, a few Japanese. And as I have previously mentioned, one of them who decided to stay in America and become an American, shocked me with his harsh view of current Japanese social mores, and what might in a secular sense, be called a callousness of spirit.
He said that the fact is that the Japanese really don’t like each other very much, or have much sympathy for each other. All that collective consciousness they once were famous for, was not based apparently on actual interpersonal sympathy or compassion. At least according to Tadaki.
Stationed in Japan, outside Tokyo, in the mid 1960’s and would sometimes pass through the Shinjuku railway station and saw how in a hurry commuters would sometimes step right on the drunks who were lying on the steps leading up to the trains.
Pretty cold.
@SnowOnPine:
Re Stepping on Drunks:
It’s nothing personal. They don’t know them. They don’t see them.
Anyway you cannot have a clean and safe big city with tolerance and compassion for drunkenness in public spaces.
Frankly I’d call legislating to force White working and lower middle class children to be schooled with Black children Pretty Cold, myself.
@DNW:
For sure much truth in what he said. However still need self-selecting sample discount to be applied.
Misfits Expatriate. Ask me how I know.
Z:
Don’t play with Occam’s razor.
@Om:
That’s a good line. More like that please.
Some relevant charts here, though some of the data is a little old:
https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate
Note especially the chart ‘births per woman by income level’
Gregory Harper,
I was rather taken aback when I traveled to Germany in the late 1980s to meet my wife’s relations. All of her cousins thought it was odd she and I were marrying. Some of them were already living with someone of the opposite sex, but they wouldn’t even consider a marriage contract if children were not involved, and they also seemed to have no desire in having children. It was exactly as you theorize. They were very open about viewing children as a burden and limiting their time to enjoy vacations and travel.
I would expect Japanese birth rates since 1980, or so, trend very similarly to Western European nations’ native populations. French, German, Italian, English, Dutch, Swedish, Swiss… (and even the Irish a bit later) natives stopped having large families, even smallish families. I’ll bet their rates are similar to native Japanese. To be clear, I am referring to ethnic natives in those nations.
I suspect the main cause is as j e writes above, unlike France, Germany, Italy and the rest; Japan never welcomed large numbers of immigrants to their shores when their own kids stopped having kids. My guess is it’s mainly racism? The natural immigrant worker source for Japan would seem to be The Philippines, and other Asian countries have accepted Filipinos as immigrants, but Japan has not.
The Turkish immigrants in Germany have bigger families, as do the Somalis in Sweden. The locals do not.
Re: Stepping on drunks–
The explanation for this behavior lies in the fact that those commuters had no connection with the drunks–not from the same family, clan, or village–so the drunks need be given no consideration.
RE: Importing foreigners as a solution to Japan’s declining birth rate–
From what I have read, as a foreigner in Japan no matter how well you learn the language, marry a Japanese, or pretty much live as a Japanese and conform to their social and cultural norms, you will never really be accepted as “Japanese.”
I’ve seen it reported that even Japanese who spend a large amount of time overseas are apparently looked at askance when they return to Japan.
P.S. It is extremely hard for a foreigner to obtain Japanese citizenship, and Japan only grants a handful of foreigner’s applications each year, and usually only to someone who will make a very unique and/or outstanding contribution to Japan.
Dependency ratios explain most of the decline in fertility.
“One humanity” as a serious moral theory is dead and all but buried by progressive metaphysical assumptions; if it was ever really alive in any freight bearing sense in the first place.” DNW
It’s not dead, as a reality cannot die. It can be ignored and denied. It can be forgotten and then rediscovered. Regardless of race or etnicity, we all can reproduce together, we all laugh and cry. We all bleed red.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…”
“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (Act III, Scene I)
Let’s step back.
The world is too crowded, we’re never going to run out of people. So why is a shrinking population a problem? The US was a much more pleasant place when we had 200 million than 300 million. I wish it could shrink by a third.
Now imagine a society that had a fixed working population. Every retirement replaced with a new grad, every birth by a death. This is still a major, major problem only because of our economic model of a always expanding money supply, ever expanding benefits, ever expanding government (world wide). It requires an ever expanding population.
We’re in a giant Ponzi scheme. Population shrinkage in itself not a problem with today’s giant staring point of population size – only when humanity was small. It is only a problem now because of our economic and monetary systems.
@ David Foster > “Some relevant charts here, though some of the data is a little old:”
Fascinating! I liked being able to select countries to view on most of the graphs, and the time-selection ones were outstanding.
That was especially true in the Religion subsection.
Here’s a more detailed study on the religious factor, although only for the United States.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2021/10/28/looking-for-signs-of-life-study-the-birth-rates-among-religious-faiths-in-america
Here’s a deep dive into the data for religion, marriage, and child-bearing, but somewhat older.
https://www.pewforum.org/2015/05/12/chapter-3-demographic-profiles-of-religious-groups/
What supposedly follows from that? What moral freight is borne along by that train of observations?
You need another premiss in the imperative mood, don’t you.
But you recall, that I stipulated as I always do when making that or a similar assertion, it is as an ostensible moral axiom that it no longer implies any prescriptive implications on the basis of the progressive kind’s own underlying metaphysical assumptions.
Now a conservative may imagine that he can construct a demonstrative syllogism and thereby deduce an ought from an is, a value from a fact, but no progressive grants the validity of such an argument.
They have cut the protection once theoretically offered by their own presumptive humanity off at the knees, three ways to Sunday, and there is no recovering it. And I mean in three ways: 1, through deconstructive and category busting nominalism, 2, through the so-called fact/value dichotomy and the emotive theory of moral propositions, and 3, most recently through a theory of subjectivity which renders categories intersubjectively unreal, no matter how much whining about lived experience some particular noise making thing, does.
There are no.longer any like kinds – in their stipulated version of reality – to even employ as part of the major premiss, in a moral argument. Whether they grasp the consequence or not.
So we never even get to the question of muddling facts and values.
Ok. Gotta stop. Will look in tomorrow.
whatever:
You are correct that it’s economics that make it a problem, for the most part. But that is still a problem.
There are other problems as well. When there is an excess of unattached men, societies become more violent. That’s another problem.
Also, the question is: how low will it go? When will the trend stop? What does it mean and what does it reflect? Ennui? Depression?
The world is too crowded,
It isn’t.
we’re never going to run out of people. So why is a shrinking population a problem?
Europe in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval period (3d to the 7th century) give you a picture of what a demographic death spiral looks like.
As for our own time, we’re talking about people restricting their child bearing to provide income and sweat equity care for the older generations. One man with four elderly grandparents does not sound inviting.
The US was a much more pleasant place when we had 200 million than 300 million.
We had 200 million people in 1970. No, it was not a ‘much more pleasant place’. It was better in certain respects and worse in others. The ways in which it was better were largely in bits of unbought grace. People born after about 1938 do not (by and large) have the character of people born before that. We’re all the poorer.
Now imagine a society that had a fixed working population. Every retirement replaced with a new grad, every birth by a death. This is still a major, major problem only because of our economic model of a always expanding money supply, ever expanding benefits, ever expanding government (world wide). It requires an ever expanding population.
That’s not our economic model outside your imagination.
We’re in a giant Ponzi scheme.
We aren’t.
The cultures of Asia are fascinating.
China for instance, has its own particular population problems, which have great social and economic consequences.
Speaking of Japan and China, first Japan and, now, China were supposed to surpass the United States as the premier economic power, and perhaps China eventually will, especially with Democrats at the helm doing their best to sabotage the American economy.
However, China’s economy may not be as powerful as it appears.
Take, for instance the possible impending collapse of the gigantic Chinese Real Estate Developer Evergrand Group, which has a reported $300 Billion in debt and has recently been reported to have failed to make interest payments, with more massive interest payments coming up in the near future.
See https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/china-evergrande-shares-halt-trading-2022-01-03/
Real estate, so I understand, is the one way a common person in Communist China can invest their money and hope to grow it, and apparently many tens of millions of Chinese have sunk all of their money into speculative investments in real estate–into apartments they will never live in but hold in anticipation of perpetually rising prices, to then sell for a profit (based, it seems, on the “greater fool theory”), profits which are then reinvested in yet more real estate.
However, according to reports, many of these apartments are very shoddily built, and there are even many “ghost cities”–huge but empty cities built on spec by developers which look good from afar, but which are deserted and crumbling just a few short years after they are built.
See, for instance this startling and extraordinary video from ADVChina at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKbLB_T-IjY in which the two people running ADVChina motorcycle in and take a detailed and up close look at examples of this shoddy construction.
And see also another ADVChina video on this subject at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPwtUTrwKRI
and finally see this “60 Minutes Australia” documentary on China’s frantic building efforts and Ghost Cities. At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ie6zd3Rwu4c
Perhaps the best refutation of the argument for NOT having children—IOW, the best argument FOR having children—is China, having finally admitted after several decades that its One-Child policy was a total disaster.
(So if one thinks having children flows mainly because of a religious injunction, think again!)
Yes, it’s a worldwide (1st world) phenomenon, with the main difference in Japan that they don’t allow immigration. I’m pretty sure the birth rate in the US among natives is below replacement, and for sure in many European countries.
In addition to more women working and being financially independent (I would wager marriage rates have declined), I’d add the fact that we’ve socialized the care of elderly parents. Traditionally parents could have children with the expectation that those children would care for them in their old age. Governments have socialized that, so the elderly have guaranteed income regardless of whether they have children.
Re: my first comment about Japan above.
I view their declining birth rates, in their particular case–really from some predictions their demographic death spiral–as fundamentally a spiritual /psychological problem, one that cannot just be reduced to economic causes.
Similarly, I see the generally declining birth rates throughout what used to be called “Christendom” as being due to spiritual causes; in our increasingly decadent, nihilistic, and pessimistic era far too many people have just lost the zest of life, the will to have families, to live a full, challenging, and eventful life in the real world, and not in the artificial and illusory electronic world of imagination.
Very relevant to the arguments above is this recent Mark Styn analysis at https://www.steynonline.com/12011/america-sticks-out-its-tush,
and particularly the two quotes he uses from two recent Popes i.e.
…”That’s a bit of an over-simplification, but it’s certainly clear that “barring a miracle” the future is post-western. Mr Kilpatrick continues:
” In 2004, shortly before he became Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger made a similar observation about the future of Europe:
‘There is a strange lack of desire for a future…’ ”
and
“To come back to where we came in – the dearth of children in the remnants of Christendom – ex-Pope Benedict observed a decade and a half ago:
“Children, who are the future, are seen as a threat for the present; the idea is that they take something away from our life. They are not felt as a hope, but rather as a limitation of the present.””
In addition to more women working and being financially independent (I would wager marriage rates have declined), I’d add the fact that we’ve socialized the care of elderly parents. Traditionally parents could have children with the expectation that those children would care for them in their old age. Governments have socialized that, so the elderly have guaranteed income regardless of whether they have children.
1. Women accounted for 1/4 of the working population in 1930 and 1/3 in 1957. They accounted for 46% by 1995. It’s hardly changed since then. The catastrophic decline in the propensity of young people to marry began around about the year 2000.
2. Prior to 1940, retirement for most people tended to be of quite limited duration, so your children wouldn’t be taking care of you for more than a few years in most cases. People had private savings; pensions appeared during the 1890s. Farmers who owned land could rent it out.
3. Senile people were prior to 1955 often housed in state asylums.
4. Total Fertility Rates did not fall below replacement levels in this country until around 1970; they’ve gone up and down since then, generally bouncing around replacement levels.
I also recommend Claire Berlinski’s book ‘Menace in Europe’, in which she discusses, among other things, the reasons for the decline in European fertility rates:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/44959.html
DNW,
“Regardless of race or etnicity, we all can reproduce together, we all laugh and cry. We all bleed red.” GB
“What supposedly follows from that? What moral freight is borne along by that train of observations?”
Humanity’s biological reality is not dependent upon morality. That is putting the cart before the horse.
Conversely, moral preceps that ignore, deny or reject our common biological reality by definition lack objective confirmation and thus legitimacy. To be logically valid, morality must be consistent with our common biological reality.
That is the “moral freight” borne along by that train of observations.
“Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal.” R. Heinlein
That applies whatever the race or ethnicity.
Art Deco, honestly I don’t see how any of your points refute what I said. Culture and behavior don’t change at the drop of a dime. The big surge in women joining the labor force was followed by a big drop in marriage rates and fertility. And yes, people have other resources to draw on for retirement, but children were always part of the picture. Even when people on average had short retirements, there was the risk of living longer than average and running out of assets. I don’t claim this is a huge factor–probably women joining the labor force is more important–but I wouldn’t dismiss it. Your SS benefit does not depend on how many children you have, even though as people have fewer children, SS becomes insolvent.
Art Deco, honestly I don’t see how any of your points refute what I said. Culture and behavior don’t change at the drop of a dime. The big surge in women joining the labor force was followed by a big drop in marriage rates and fertility.
There was no ‘big surge’. There were incremental adjustments upward at various rates. Masses of my grandmothers’ contemporaries had work-a-day jobs in 1930. If anything, the lifetime probability of a woman being married was higher in 1990 than it was in 1890. You drag this phenomenon out for generations, there’s no discernible effect, then in 2000 women who are contemporaries of my grandmother’s great-grandchildren manifest a 30% decline in their propensity to marry, and you attribute it to wage and salaried employment. Because you feel like it.
As for the decline in fertility, there’s an important vector there you do not acknowledge – the redistribution of labor from the farm economy to other enterprises. As late as 1920, about 30% of the households in this country had at least one foot on the farm. By 1970, it was around 4%.
And yes, people have other resources to draw on for retirement, but children were always part of the picture. Even when people on average had short retirements, there was the risk of living longer than average and running out of assets. I don’t claim this is a huge factor–probably women joining the labor force is more important–but I wouldn’t dismiss it. Your SS benefit does not depend on how many children you have, even though as people have fewer children, SS becomes insolvent.
Children are still part of the picture. Either you don’t know many old people, don’t know many middle-aged people with challenging older relatives, or you’re just not paying attention.
AD, I’m dropping this, since you resort to straw men and ad hominem. I never claimed these were the only factors that matter, nor did I claim that children no longer help their parents, only that the existence of social insurance enables the childless (for whom children are obviously not part of the picture).
Heard some time back that there’s a kind of weird fad among Japanese late adolescents into young adults. It’s a kind of self-induced gloom. Parents can hardly get the sufferers to leave their room for meals.
Don’t want to do anything at all, including date/have sex.
Re: Birth rates.
Not to be missed is the fact that recent analyses also show a halving of sperm counts for men in the West over the last 40 years.
See https://www.haaretz.com/science-and-health/.premium.MAGAZINE-western-men-s-dropping-sperm-count-is-a-titanic-moment-for-humans-1.5466078
Richard Aubrey, I recall reading stories a few years ago about how young Japanese men are addicted to porn as an alternative to actual relationships, presumably more so than men elsewhere. Here’s one story, though it’s behind a paywall. Obviously this a symptom rather than a root cause.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japan-sex-problem-demographic-time-bomb-birth-rates-sex-robots-fertility-crisis-virgins-romance-porn-tokyo-a7831041.html
Richard Aubrey-The Japanese term for this phenomena, and for young people who practice this form of “acute social withdrawal” is “Hikkomori” –
Some evidence for my diagnosis of Japan’s precipitously declining birth rates as a spiritual/psychological problem, and not just one of economics.
I know that the basis and history of Japan is very different from that here in the West but, even given that, from my perspective as a westerner some strange things/preoccupations are going on in Japan.
Prostitution is officially illegal, but to judge from various Youtube travel logs, “Love hotels” are everywhere.”
Apparent Japanese preoccupation with “Manga,” very often very violent and sexual adult comics.
Japanese preoccupation with cutesy, infantile cartoon characters, usually with high squeaky voices, etc., etc.
@ GB,
I usually quote, but this time I would end up fisking so much that I’d never get anywhere near finishing.
So, what again is your point with regard to the establishment of universal interpersonal claims ( i.e. moral imperatives) on the basis of traits such as the possiblilty of fertile copulation, laughing and bleeding?
So, because Sentinelese islanders of the present day, or Brazilian cannibals of the 16th century presumably bleed and laugh and can successfully impregnate a Canadian woman, I have what duties toward them on what basis? They, being the same nominal species and all …
Again, recall that we are speaking of presumably and as I carefully stipulated, one moral species here, whether it is stretched to include Germans, or Eskimos, or even God forbid, Canadian premiers.
So I’m still looking for that trigger premiss where we transition from description to prescription. And an explanation of how that works.
You might have one. Aristotle did and he had a mechanism; though his category might not have been as necessarily expansive or defined by precisely the same conditioning traits as yours. Progressives, however, don’t.
I do not insist that they get themselves one either. As I am content that they experience the fallout from not having – rejecting actually – one.
They are what they have made themselves, when it comes to moral considerations or human concern.
It isn’t punishment. It is just drawing the circle (of concern as they themelves might say) according to their own conceptions. We don’t let liberal Grandma die in the social fire which she has ignited as punishment of some sort; but rather because she has on her own terms no justifiable call upon the sacrifice of a morally unlike kind.
AD, I’m dropping this, since you resort to straw men and ad hominem.
The terms ‘straw man’ and ‘ad hominem’ do not mean what you fancy they mean.
I never claimed these were the only factors that matter, nor did I claim that children no longer help their parents, only that the existence of social insurance enables the childless (for whom children are obviously not part of the picture).
You didn’t bother to mention any other factor that you thought mattered other than women with formal sector jobs.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/lucille-of-the-libs-marriage-honor-jones-divorce/
Rod Dreher writes about how the editor of The Atlantic, Honor Jones, got divorced from a husband she still loves (sort of). To “find herself”.
With some notes on the movie The Secret Lives of Dentists about a husband staying with his cheating wife, for the sake of the kids.
Marriage is for the kids. Kids are the future of civilization.
If you live “in the moment”, kids are a huge time sink. Raising kids is great, but a huge amount of kid-raising time is boring. Our youngest (of 4) is 16, just about my height (his two older brothers are an inch or two taller). He doesn’t like anime, tho the 3 older kids did, the two middle siblings quite a lot. I did like some of the Naruto stuff.
The https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate are good, but a quick reading didn’t reveal discussion about their metric “total lifetime fertility” of a woman (actually XX females who can become pregnant, but it’s not yet that woke). One big issue is that many women who do have kids have them later. Obviously population growth is faster if a woman has 3 kids at 20, 23 & 26 rather than 30, 33 & 36, but that’s not quite really what is being measured.
j e solution: ” the importing of large numbers of foreigners” – NOT so good, if you love your culture. Foreigners are … alien, foreign, non-native. America is a great melting pot (was?), but the American Dream is available for all, in theory. America should have more legal immigration (maybe?) but only AFTER they stop illegals and deport the illegals here. Japan has no “need” for immigration, tho they might start accepting it more.
Like Zaphod quoting another: “many young men are opting out of a lifetime of Salaryman wage slavery”
Snow on Pine : general loss of “civilizational confidence”
but while it’s a real loss for all “developed” countries, especially Japan & Germany, I think women in the workforce PLUS estrogen Pills to push promiscuous sex are both bigger reasons. Those Pills will someday be determined to be a big part of the “halving of sperm counts”.
Gregory+Harper: a lot of young people just don’t think it’s worth the trouble.
(You can edit your name to get rid of the “+” and save it to fix this issue)
whatever is more correct than Neo: Population shrinkage in itself not a problem
SS will never be “bankrupt” – the Fed/ Treasury can, and will, print money (and we’ll get stuck with the inflation tax). It’s already doing this, actually – the SS “Trust Fund” is merely PR.
China’s 60 million excess marriageable men might become a huge problem. Too many men should make it easier for the most desirable women to be choosy, but lots of men will do without mates or kids (unless polyandry? nahhh).
Such a trend of downward pop will stabilize as a higher percentage of kids born are born to women who prioritize families and kids over slave-wagery self-actualization and promiscuity. This cultural change will very likely happen before the genetic drift of high IQ women with few kids vs low IQ women with lots of kids results in significant lowering of women’s IQ.
I suspect modern married life with a responsible, loving husband is, for many career women, too much less interesting than 50 shades of vague future dreams and fantasies and less responsible whimsy following.
Ennui more than depression, tho more of both than in prior decades.
Art Deco.
You mentioned likelihood of women being married in 1890 versus 1990.
Could be the Civil War. About 900k dead young men, some unknown number crippled into social and economic uselessness. I believe MS’ top line item in the state budget was prosthetics.
So out of thirty million people, there were maybe a million more marriageable young women than young men. By 1890, this cohort would cluster around forty-five years old.
In today’s population, that would be about nine million more young women contemplating serious dating than prospects.
Kid’s fiction in those days, immediate post WW I–Poppy Ott, etc.–frequently featured the maiden aunt. A stock character; like the Irish noncom and Scottish engineer (Star Trek) from actual reality.
Marriage is for the kids. Kids are the future of civilization.
Disagree. Marriage is for every stakeholder. The parties, the children, the grandchildren, the elderly parents of the couple. It’s a whole ecosystem of symbiosis and division of labor.
Could be the Civil War. About 900k dead young men, some unknown number crippled into social and economic uselessness. I believe MS’ top line item in the state budget was prosthetics.
Steve Sailer quoted some data from Victorian Britain a while back. Astonishing % of women never married. I think it may have been around 1/4.
Tough life for the lower orders and getting oneself, as a man, into a marriageable situation, economically at least, not necessarily easy.
Re: Evergrande ( not Evergrand as I previously spelled it) Real Estate Developers
A report out today on the Evergrande situation includes an estimate that three quarters of people’s wealth in China is invested in real estate.
Thus, you can see how the potential collapse of Evergrande —which last month reportedly failed to make a $200 million interest payment—might have huge economic and social impacts on China and it’s people.
So how much, how many, is obscured behind Evergrand?
Are they the only ones who did themselves such a mischief? Are all the others fat and liquid?
The interest payment itself is peanuts if owned in tiny shares by individuals? Not even enough to be annoying. But an institutional investor counting on, say, fifty mill this term, five others splitting the balance…. Could be a knock-on collapse parade.
And, of course, the interest is a symptom. What’s behind that, if anybody trusts a balance sheet from these guys?
I have heard that massive loans going unpaid are continuously rolled over because if they are officially unpaid, the responsible loan officers–high ranking guys, these being big money loans–go to prison.
So someplace out there is a balloon ready to pop.
Then what?
“Disagree. Marriage is for every stakeholder. The parties, the children, the grandchildren, the elderly parents of the couple. It’s a whole ecosystem of symbiosis and division of labor.”
Agree. It’s the glue that holds society together. When there are strong social taboos against family dissolution, just about everyone does better. The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good, so if anyone quotes back the opening lines of Anna Karenina, expect a bucket of excrement tossed in general direction! 🙂
For one, I am absolutely certain that having at least one set of grandparents living under the same roof has to be better for Child Development — there’s a concept related to successful individuation in early development called the ‘Good Enough Mother’. Two Heads are Better than One ™. It’s smart to increase the odds with a Grandmother or two on tap. Plus is more in line with our evolutionary past.
And most of us will know that grandchildren give old people a new lease on life and a new purpose. It’s can be a beautiful thing to see them come alive again.
Richard Aubrey-Take a look at the ADVChina video I cited above, which very graphically shows just how criminally shoddy i.e. fake some of the real estate that Chinese investors are investing in is.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKbLB_T-IjY
Snow on Pine.
I’ve seen some of that. I think it was a couple of months ago that they did controlled demolition of four apartment skyscrapers at the same time.
My question is two-fold: What is really happening financially, and how shoddy are the publicly available numbers?
Investors are investing in shoddy properties, either not knowing how bad it is, or believing it doesn’t matter. Still be a profit somehow.
If all of it comes down all at once, then what? Do the CCP and PLA have sufficient control? The PLA owns lots, possibly most, of this crap. Who do they blame when the generals’ solid-gold retirements turn to dust? Where do they go to get their money, or a least some of it?
Hong Kong, then Taiwan,
om. Going to be a lot more work than they’d planned.