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I don't see the problem. What's the problem here? How is this bleak, except for the linegoup?

More babies is just more people later. I don't know that we need fewer, but we certainly don't need more.

The "economy" can go fuck itself.

What matters is the resources available per person, and naturally you would expect that to go up when there's fewer children.

Japan before WWII

• high infant and child mortality
• shorter life expectancy
• many people didn’t live to old age
• there was population growth, but it was slower and much younger

So:

→ lots of children

→ many young adults

→ few elderly

**Japan after WWII
**
→ baby boom

→ improved healthcare

• better nutrition
• rising prosperity
• vaccinations
• medical technology Japan becomes world champion in life expectancy (over 80 years on average).

→ Japan gives women more freedom to study and work.
 But… the system around family, work, and care barely changes.

• women can pursue careers
• but the country still expects women to:
  • run the household
  • raise children
  • often care for in-laws
• and employers still expect:
  • extremely long working hours
  • almost no flexible schedules
  • full-time loyalty to the company
    → Conclusion: children are discouraged

Fertility collapses + a huge adult generation (from the baby boom)
From the 1970s onward, the birth rate drops dramatically due to:

• career-focused culture
• high cost of living
• marrying later
• limited childcare
• women working + conservative family structure
  → Japan falls to about 1.2 children per woman → structural population decline.

Lessons / Conclusion: Japan shows what happens when you don’t make structural changes for a long time.
 Too few workers + too many elderly = shortages of labor, money, and care.

Solutions

1. More children (slow solution)
Birth rates usually don’t fall because people don’t want kids, but because:

• housing is too expensive
• work and family are hard to combine
• childcare isn’t well organized
• there’s too little socioeconomic security

Countries like France and the Scandinavian nations do better:

• affordable childcare
• parental leave
• flexible work
• stable housing certainty

Result: higher birth rates than Japan, Italy, Spain, and formerly Germany.
If you want a “younger” society → invest structurally in good family life.

2. Raising the retirement age (helps a bit)
3. Robots and automation (already implemented by Japan)
4. Immigration / controlled immigration (the fastest solution)

Without immigration → extreme population decline and extreme aging.
In Europe: immigration + integration makes aging far less severe.


Japan can insist “we don’t want immigration,” “we are homogeneous,”
“we’ll manage through discipline,” but eventually this collides with simple math. If we want to preserve our way of life, we have to take demographic reality seriously, with better childcare, higher productivity, and controlled immigration.

I'd love to be told otherwise if this is untrue, but from what I understand the largest causes of birth rate decline in Japan are social, not economic, requirements. People want relationships, but they don't want the hassle of Japanese dating. For example, as I understand it, as a man asking a woman on a date in Japan would typically entail bringing both your friends and their friends out on the social outing and paying for everyone's meal. Because of this people don't want to date because it could mean having to pay for 4-8 people's meal.

Japan also has a lot of other cultural weird-isms like refusing to buy perfectly functional houses if they are more than 20-30 years old because their traditions expect houses to be torn down and rebuilt in that time frame.

Also I've heard that caring for the elderly is expected to be an all or nothing affair. You either bring your elders into your house and take care of them extensively or you do nothing.

Like I said, if someone has more information I'd love some insights, but the impressions I've gotten historically are that their problems are more than economic.

Another stupid article assuming that a population reduction is a bad thing.

No, no, of course, just keep increasing the human population until it crashes. Then it'll be an actual problem.

The numbers look bad because increasing population increases the GDP, and GDP has become the archetypal example of what happens when you turn a metric into a goal.

You can't complain about a birthrate crisis when the world is full of immigrants and there is a domestic cost of living crisis unless you are a eugenicist on some level.

Throwing rocks from the glass house that is the US I know