The Washington Post reports on how little will there is to deal with the causes of Japan’s projected demographic collapse.
The article notes that the country may lose 70% of its workforce by 2050, at the same time it is faced with supporting a massive population of seniors.
The oncoming problems could be alleviated with immigration and a higher birth rate, but these are impeded by social malfunction:
- Japan’s strong sense of ethnic unity makes immigration a non-starter: “the issue is too politically toxic for extensive public discussion.”
- The low birth rate has a lot to do with how women are treated in the workforce and at home, but Japan seems to lack the will to do much to change this. The article reports renewed calls for “enlightened government intervention” on the issue, but those have gone and gone before.
Japan does not seem to face a disastrous implosion, like some socially malfunctioning societies of the past — see the Greenland Norse in Diamond’s Collapse — but it may choose diminishing strength, relevance, and perhaps prosperity over change.
See Futureatlas for more on this issue.
Image: usable with link and credit to Futureatlas.com
Der Spiegel reports that German women will be trying to delay birth for the next week, as a new law will make it much more lucrative to be a parent after December 31st.
The government will greatly increase subsidy payments to new parents — up to €1,800 ($2,380) a month for 14 months.
This is an attempt to stave off population decline, which according to the Federal Statistical Office could lower the population from 82 million people to 69 million by 2050. As in places such as Japan and Russia, Germans fear the consequences for the pension system, the labor force, and the nation’s innovation capabilities.
Columnist Fred Hiatt examines Japan’s demographic challenge — “sustained and inexorable population decline” — in the Washington Post.
As a result of this decline, the country’s population is projected to drop from 128 million now to 100 million in 2050. Crucially, the average age will be high and the elderly population large, with some 36 million people 65 and over.
A central issue is that women would like to have more children, but delay or avoid marriage and childbearing because Japanese society in general, and husbands in particular, leave women overburdened and without options.
In essence, Japan has given women too little equality, but enough freedom that they can back away from the system that they feel abuses them.
Hiatt writes:
In fact, robots and other ways to improve productivity are one of four possible routes to economic growth despite an aging population. The others would be making better use of women; immigration, which has increased slightly but remains unpopular in this ethnically cohesive country; and keeping the elderly working longer.
One result will be a continued flow of innovative ideas in robotics from the country.
Hiatt alludes to a fundamental question that Japan will pose: what is the meaning and purpose of economic growth? “What is happiness? Can we be happy without economic growth?” asks a Japanese demographer.
A lot of evidence suggests that growth may not be essential to well-being; income ceases to contribute substantially to happiness when development brings levels to about $10-15,000 thousand dollars a year in per capita income. Japan may test whether a society can remain satisfied without an upward trajectory.
More on the article at Future Uncertain.
The BBC has created an interactive map of world urbanization from 1955 to 2015, including all megacities of 5 million or more.
The 2005 map reveals that we are approaching the tipping point at which, for the first time ever, more people will live in cities than in rural areas.
By 2015, 52% of the world’s population (3.8 billion people) is projected to be living in cities.
Effects will be profound and numerous. For instance:
- Cultural flows will speed up as more people are exposed to cosmopolitan urban culture.
- Information will speed up, as cities tend to be far more wired.
- In future conflicts, controlling contries will mean controlling megacities, a difficult challenge that tends to nullify the high-tech advantages enjoyed by the US and a few other countries.
[Via Social Technologies]
Russia’s president Putin has announced plans to pay families monthly stipends if they have children, to counter one of the country’s most dire problems, population decline, now running at 700,000 people a year.
As the Washington Post explains,
If it continues, officials say today’s population of around 143 million will be down to 100 million by the middle of the century, translating into a weaker workforce and smaller army.