>They’ll find it easy to keep their homogenous culture and shared traditional values.
That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any.
The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".
Doesn't sound fun though.First being conquered by Romans, then Anglo Saxons, then pillaged by Vikings and the conquered again by Normans.
I'm pretty sure where ever you come from that you have a dominant groups which imposes it's culture to every other subgroup. Every country where that is not the case, you infighting and war.
In what way? I included England just because those particular periods are well-known.
If you look at ALL of Europe's history, all up to recent times, there's been constant movements and migrations. People with different backgrounds, moving around, a lot of movement came as trade increased (and, as it has lately been found, there was much more trade even 3k years ago than anyone had previously anticipated). If you look at a snapshot of time it looks pretty static, but let your time-tick be generations and you see constant changes.
It really hasn't been constant movement and migrations. Once the Germanic and Slavic tribes settled, which wasn't fun for the natives before them and certainly not for the Romans as well, the migration more or less stopped statistically speaking (exceptions were the wars).
You are leaving out quite a bit of warfare, exploitation, rape, hatred, cultural erasure, colonization, slavers, serfdom, monarchy, religious conversion, religion erasure, and genocide in that pretty picture you paint as "All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere".
It is not as simple as that. In my country giving birth is free. And you get economic support for every child. For most people it's still an economic burden to some extent, but for the majority it's not something which blocks them from having children. It's more that most families I know are content with having two children. It feels fine to them. But that's the families that do have children. 25% of men in my country never have children. It's not enough. A lot of families need to produce 3 children, and better if there are some with four.. and most people simply don't want that. And that's for the most part not a question of economy.
It is as simply as that. Economic support you mentioned is never enough to cover basic needs. Better than nothing, but still require to sacrifice a lot to have an extra kid.
More kids means you need a bigger house, bigger car, extra furniture, a part time job for mother to manage kids.
I specifically mentioned families where the economy is not a burden, and they still don't want many children. Very few will want more than two. Please note that in my country at least, as long as the economy is good enough that there aren't any real problems living, then it doesn't matter if it costs more with more children. That is not the reason.
And there are the increasing infertility rates as well to hamper the efforts.
Personally, I would love to have a few kids but after many years of trying and all manner of treatments we have gotten nowhere at all. But that is just how if falls I guess.
The worldometer statistics site doesn't fully agree with that, the Guardian reports that the rate went from 0.75 to 0.80, while worldometer states that the 2026 rate will probably end up at 0.76. At best this has kind of stopped dropping, but it is any case catastrophically low (and way worse than Japan)
Look back a few hundred years and you'll find that the country you grew up in, in Europe, was constantly in that situation. People moved a lot back then too. And the countries are today.. the countries. It'll be fine.
The last migration of equivalent magnitude was the Anglo-Saxons 1500 years ago... Most people did not move around much at all. An average person would be born and die in the same village, or the same region. A handful of people travelled a lot, generally merchants, sailors, and such, but they were a pretty tiny percentage of the population compared to the people engaged in subsistence agriculture.
The average person may well have lived all their lives in one village, but the minority who didn't has always been substantial, often very substantial.
Since the Anglo-Saxons, we've had numerous intense bursts of migration driven by the first and second Viking periods, the Normans, the Hundred Years War, Black Death, Border Wars, Plantations, Thirty Years War / Wars of the Three Kingdoms / the Huguenots, Plantations, Colonialism, Inclosure, Clearances, Industrial Revolution, Famine, New Colonialism, World Wars, and the Commonwealth.
Yes, the Brexit migration wave was particularly sharp, but the movements in the 1850s-60s were proportionately greater (albeit spread over a dozen years rather than just five).
It only looks like that because you're looking over a relatively short timeframe. Start looking over more than a generation and things will look different. I just have to check my father's ancestry research to see that - his notes includes a lot of extra information not directly related to my forefathers, and yes people moved. That a lot of people move in, historically, an instant, is something that doesn't happen always, but it has happened again and again over time. The net result is in any case that anyone country is, when you look back, always a product of its immigration. And it's still a country which you would attribute national culture to. The culture isn't frozen if you look over a large enough timeframe, and I for one am happy for that - my boring childhood town isn't that way anymore: boring.
I didn't say that 1500 years ago is a short timeframe. I'm saying that if you look at short timeframes like a decade or a generation or two it may look like there's not much migration going on. But stretch that a bit, and you'll see the changes. It's like a slow-moving river. Always moving, if you yourself move your viewpoint back a little.
Around 1900 the median age of the Japanese population was somewhere in the twenties, in other words, they had a healthy and able work force relative to the population size. Today the median age is above 50, and there aren't many who can work the fields. In fact around here I see very old people doing that, and a lot of them can hardly walk normally, they're permanently bent.
What percentage of the Japanese workforce is working in the fields? Most industrial economies are in the 1-2% range for agriculture. And someone in their 50s can easily ride a tractor. Manual labor in the fields is not a productive use of labor in a first-world economy - the fact that it's still happening demonstrates slack in the system that can be absorbed.
Rice fields, around here at least. That's always been very labor intensive. They do use tractors to do some of it, but around the periphery of every field it's still done manually. Rice fields are very different from wheat production.
In my country strawberries are picked manually. There's yet no mechanical solution which can do what humans can, with respect to quality and more. And that's already a problem, without seasonal immigration there will be no strawberries on the market, simple as that. There are many other kind of work which still requires a young healthy work force.
That's the whole point of price signals though: luxury foods like strawberries will get more expensive if young, physically fit workers are in higher demand. People will shift their consumption accordingly. Maybe the strawberry pickers will end up working in nursing homes, and that's fine.
Rice in Japan apparently also benefits from extensive farm subsidies and protectionism. So it's ironic to point to those jobs as a risk for an aging workforce, when they are fundamentally just government make-work jobs. Sure food security is a concern, but it can be achieved in a much more efficient way.
If you have a way to secure rice production, please let us know. Or did you mean to abandon rice because it's too labor intensive? There's a reason for subsidies, just as there are reasons for agricultural support in my home country - without it there would be no agriculture. And, without going into details, that would be a disaster.
The subsidies are to protect Japanese rice production from countries where the same labour is done for way less. All praise free trade, where poverty is the most exported commodity.
Japanese rice is not commonly produced in other countries. And even where they do, the rice is not the same. I eat rice made inside Japan and made outside of Japan, and the latter is a poor substitute.
Fertility rate of 0.80.. and I thought Japan, Italy, and my own country had problems. Note however that https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-korea-p... says 0.76, and last year was 0.75, so there's barely any change there. Catastrophically low birth rate, and maybe it's not so hard to figure out why.
Japan's population is dropping like a stone. Since I first arrived here some years ago the population has gone down by several millions.
Countries which have more immigration (like my native one, also with a low birth rate) manage to keep up the population size, and, equally important, manage to keep the median age somewhat lower (the median age in Japan is now above 50).
If immigration is not a solution, then I assume you mean that reversing the birth rate problem is the way to go. Can't disagree there, but how do you propose to do that? No country with a birth rate below 2 seems to have been able to come up with a way to "fix" that.
The unfortunate flip side of this is that when you bring in a lot of immigrants, it can keep a lot of markets pumped up far beyond what the markets would usually dictate.
Here in Australia, we tipped below replacement rate in 1976 and it has never recovered, we just increase immigration to cover the gap. Culturally this has been brilliant but economically it has made some oddities in that housing is through the roof as there is far more customers for it than their would have been otherwise. But it does provide a lot of younger workers that manage to keep the pension system going and the demand on that system is only going to grow for decades to come.
The alternative is that you restrict immigration and we end up in the Japan position. A crumbling pension system and a lack of people to keep ever maintenance up of a lot of infrastructure and sheer labor availability.
I have wondered that as this situation grows globally, what happens when a lot of nations that have typically had a lot of emigration end up shutting the tap off as yhey feel they need their people more in their country? They can starve others of immigrants and potentially become a large political tool in decades to come. Interesting times ahead.
It is the difference between a solution and a predicament. A solution fixes the issue, a predicament has only response merely that try to take the least bad path down. This looks like a predicament.
I do fear for the younger folks, the kids and a generation or two afterwards nowadays as they are going to end up lumped with this mess. But after that things should settle down into a new stable phase. This isn't the end of civilizations it is just a re-calibration, it just take generations to occur.
AFAIK the pension system is quite well invested and can continue for many decades even with current trends. Where do you get that it is crumbling? There is a silly law forcing recalculation of pension payments vs inflation to happen too infrequently causing issues right now but that is probably a different issue.
The main problem is that solutions would be very expensive and, unfortunately, politicians don't get (re-)elected to solve problems that manifest over the span of decades.
From my tangential experience (brother and wife live in Tokyo), there are a ton of programs that are extremely desirable from the US birthrate/childcare perspective already.
Base level of 8 weeks Maternity leave , with 6 weeks ahead of birth as well. And government pays a lump sum to help cover hospital costs per birth.
The community support and available activities.
Seesh the only things that seem negative are the Japanese type of xenophobic culture (my family is white, so their kids are mixed), and the small living space which leaves little room for privacy in like any point of their day.
From all I've read or heard about birth rate rise the measures that sociologists see as the most effective are: provide cheap housing and pay much more to families (i.e. mostly to women) with children to compensate for their loss of potential career. The latter has a twist that the payment should start (or significantly increase) with the birth of the second child (and continue to rise with the third etc). Paying for the first child does next to nothing to the birth rate. Some countries already do that, but the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Or we can go full medieval - completely deprive women of education possibilities and financial independence, like Taliban does.
> the amount of money poured into this should increase by order(s) of magnitude to achieve the replacement level.
Exactly. And I found it being obvious after having thought about it, even while not having kids and I most likely will never have any.
Just from observing and talking to people with 0-2 kids (nobody I know has more...).
I know a couple with good income, living in Munich, which is one of the most costly cities in Germany, one Child. Avoidable pain points (finding daycare, you better start right after the baby was born, because they have multi-year waiting lists) and they feel the financial hit pretty hard.
> Is it easy to find high quality daycare for children?
Shinzo Abe mostly solved the daycare issues by both making it free and massively increasing availability. There are still some waiting lists but they went from a peak of nearly 30,000 in 2017 to under 3000 now.
Yep I would rank Japanese QoL higher than US or Canada. Skin color aside, they can even be xenophobic to second gen Japanese born overseas like Brazil.
Living space is quite good and affordable by Asian standards, you either live in mansion which is basically fancy apartments, or ikkodate which is single family home, albeit smaller than those in north america.
I don't think that's correct. Saying that "solutions would be very expensive" implies that there are actual solutions in existence. I've seen a lot of suggestions, and many have been implemented, some do slow down the dropping birthrate problem (countries with good maternity leave systems and regulated working hours are doing way better than those without), but nowhere have I seen any true fix presented, with or without a label "will work, but will be too expensive".
I argue nobody dared to try. Would be a significant undertaking for the whole society. It's manifesting way to slow so nobody sees the acute urgency, so politicians tend to think about other topic most of the time.
Also pretty hard with a society full of people that don't want to have children that they must pay a lot of money to people that have children. All that while also paying a lot of money to people that are too old to work.
What I'm asking is "..dared to try what?". What, excactly, would you offer? As I mentioned in another comment, those families in my own country which a) do not have any economical worries, and b) have great family leave support from work, i.e. no career problems whatsoever, and c) even more that I don't list here, they DO NOT WANT more than two children anyway. Because it feels fine with two. And then there's a problem, because that's not enough - there are a lot of singles out there, and most of them don't produce any children. You need more than two children per family, on average, to keep up the birthrate vs the death rate.
So, what is the solution that nobody has dared to try?
Yes, that's annoying. I have no interest in connecting my phone number to accounts here and there.
Some firms go the other way.. I use the "Line" app for communication, and initially (many years ago) it was connected to your phone, which caused difficulties if you moved countries (among other things).
They have, however, now removed the connection to a phone number. Good.
That idea is a fallacy. It has never been true. All of Europe was always a melting pot for people from everywhere. Over the centuries people kept moving, immigrating and emigrating. England.. Britons, Celts, Anglo-Saxxon, Norse, Normans (which were themselves originally immigrants). And my own country? Surnames from everywhere. 40% of my language's vocabulary came from immigrants. Is that a problem? I most certainly can't see any.
The idea about 'homogenous culture and shared traditional values' is as true as looking at a flower for five minutes and then claiming that "nah, it doesn't grow, it's frozen".
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