This strategy works as long as there are more places (by volume) experiencing growth than decline. Since the trend is slower growth overall, there will be a point where global growth stops, and clearly then the strategy will start to fail.
Frankly, from a planet point of view I'd hope that point comes sooner than later.
This will play out in obvious ways (lifting retirement age etc) but ultimately the quality of life will increase overall until some sort of stable population number emerges.
Also, look at cities that have had a decreasing population, such as Detroit. They don't look so good.
Perhaps Japan is going to be the place to be if you're in the "do more with machines" business.
They can only solve this with significant capital investment and major productivity improvements.
Economic growth is technologically driven and developed economies are at or already past peak resources consumption.
OTOH in countries with decreasing overall populations due to birth rate and not lack of economic opportunity (emmigration), it might be possible to sustain high employment rates, low crime, and good quality of life. (There might be more need to fund social services, however, if the population is also aging).
Granted, all of this is due to historically extraordinary events playing out. But still, less population doesn’t necessarily imply no or negative growth. There’s an interplay of factors affecting if growth is possible, and population is just one parameter of those.
Maybe in the face of some type of economical crisis they will change their tune but I wouldn't bank on it. In my opinion, they've been burned once, they were the top dogs for a while, economically poised to even surpass America, and now, a lot of people are without money. So I think it will take a bit of convincing to want to go back to those days.
Japan has an interesting sort of apathy (??), kind of like, they're happy to not be the center of attention and just go on minding their business. We had some business development people visit Japan recently and they were stunned at the lack of competitiveness and interest in growing their businesses.
I guess this is a culture which was happy isolate itself from the world for centuries and I guess if it could, there's nothing saying it wouldn't do it again...I have to say, I can't always blame them :)
There's a bunch of cultural reasons for the low birthrate but a bunch of encouraging benefits might help address that.
You're basically leaching off goods and services provided by those in high growth areas.
I think the idea is we might reach a point where globalization itself is hard to maintain and then things start to unwind, dramatically fast.
In 2010 the same job could be done with 10 men holding machine guns. In 2030, we have drones. Humans need not apply.
It’s like the “unlimited” vacation days that some scummy companies offer. They do so confident that people will be shamed by the behaviour of their peers into taking very little vacation.
Exactly. Extolling the virtues of low population growth because it enables a higher quality of life is misguided. Your life is higher quality because billions in China are toiling away in inhuman conditions, making goods for you, and unable to move to your location.
Before you yell at me consider that China lifted an unprecedented amount of people out of even more inhumane conditions as a result of this process.
There’s a Pros/Cons table where the first row almost seems like a paradox. A “pro” of a high population density is that you have access to resources. A “con” is that the resources are still limited.
And, if she doesn't do that, then some other little girl in Japan has to say that same thing but with a number higher than 2.1.
Why would they buck the trends of their own ancestors, their own family?
Surely, it looks similar to the ancient past where some lineage looks as if the same happened. But that was because only one offspring survived to adulthood, and then of his or her children only one survived. But they were having many more with tragic results. Those children, for as long as they lived, existed in a world where people were trying to have many.
This is the part where people reply to me as if I were crazy. But children who grow up seeing those adults around them having few children internalize that as normal, and don't seek to have more than that number.
S Korea is very similar to Japan, also facing the same problem of population decline, you can view S Korea(or even Taiwan) as a lately developed and peninsula version of Japan. Each of them with limited resources and a dense population, in which made J and K what they are today (You can look up how these two countries developed, I am not an expert historian). Even China, has a significant decrease in newborn population, despite its vast landmass and less developed population.
So basically, the achievement of development is brought by whatever suppresses the population at the same time, they are sort of at the local maximum of their country at current time point. The Nordic countries meanwhile are much loosely populated, higher average resources and so on, although not as capitalist as US. Again I am not a Nordic expert, but the distinction is significant enough that I can say applying their policies in Asian countries will not work.
Each country has its own "ecology", that are of course constantly interacting with each other so to speak, but still inertial wrt some policies that are do not cope with it well.
Not that immigration is a cure. It's more of a way to delay population decline.
* Overall it's a very affordable place and people are friendly by default.
* It is a free world Country if you care about freedom
* People take privacy seriously as parts of their daily matters, minimal data share. (unsure about the lucrative advertising business, please enligh)
* Comfortable level of tech, you can say it's low tech, but they got all the details right, and experience is great. (No aggresive behavior analysis, rare ily seen QR code for menu/ordering)
And some realities to offset the love: (Ordered low to high on impact, by personal feelings)
* Unfair compensations, a large majority of companies pays their employees in a Nenko System, basically your salary increments by the x years of service inside the company
* HIGH welfare tax, Nenkin will take away around 10% of your PRETAX income.
* Language, I love this Country and I would like to learn their culture and their language
* Etiquette, the Japanese way of daily routinal interactions are very much formulated, you can take vantage of that when you are fresh off boat and trying to do basic things like shopping and lodging. But say if your goal is to integrate into their society, it's going to be a long painful journey for the talented. I got a few friends spent better half of their lives in Japan who just gave up on becoming Japanese. One of which quitted so well that he occasionally violates social norms.
Bottom line: you will need a strong incentive to stay in Japan and start/move your family here, and your first experiences won't be good. So why would foreigners stay if it's next to impossible to become local. If you are doing well enough in the Country you are already within, then you definitely would miss it and go back.
While it might be true that everyone has a price, if we plucked someone off the street and they told us they never wanted children (at all, or more than they have now), how much money do you think it would take to persuade them to have a kid?
Do you think it would be $1000? How about $4500? Maybe it costs a whole $12,000 right? These are the sorts of incentives that are offered in Europe, in South Korea, etc. They don't seem to influence much extra in the way of births. And it's not difficult to see why... those people are told (whether true or not) that children are far more costly than those sums. So we're still talking about it being net negative.
In some publications, people in the western world are told that it's some large fraction of a million dollars to raise a child to adulthood. How many babies could Japan afford, if it had to pay parents $500k for each?
It's even worse than that though. Many Japanese women of child-bearing age aren't even in circumstances where it is plausible for them to consider having a child. No husband, or a husband whose career doesn't make being the sole provider possible. Little chance of those circumstances changing before motherhood is out of the question. Etc.
Learning Japanese and emigrating is particularly tough because of their culture and on top of that it seems most Japanese women would be uninterested in having a family with an American she couldn’t speak too
https://japantoday.com/category/crime/illegal-amounts-of-ove...
In fact, no single one highly and densely populated developed region can have a significant positive growth in population. There is much more than just scale of economy.
It might. But it won't be pretty. Either the land will be taken over by new arrivals that will assimilate and their increased fertility will lift fertility.
Another scenario is that things go pear shaped and fertility rises because of uncertainty.
At that point it won't really be Japan anymore, and where will you go?
I live in Japan and have Japanese friends. Lots of Japanese I know want to have kids, and wouldn't mind having 3 or more kids. They love kids! And it's still the dream of many women here to get married, have kids, and be a housewife since they know how terrible the careers are in this country.
But 1 or 2 is the limit due to work/time, finances, practicality (housing, vehicles/public transit). The families I know with more kids are the ones who can afford having a housewife or who have multi-generational homes (live-in grandparents).
What I'm trying to say is that I think one major reason people aren't having more kids isn't because they don't want them, but because society isn't built to enable them to.
I think the difference is that for the most part, small and medium businesses in Japan are just trying to fit the size of their role in their communities, growth for the sake of growth isn't the goal.
Just observations and idle thoughts from me though, both views on growth clearly have merit and I can't actually speak for Japanese business owners.
That sounds like an exceptionally fair compensation system to be honest.
As a citizen of a country where a lot of foreigners move in, it's not great. And we have nowhere the level of quality of life of Japan to fall from.
It’s also going to be another disincentive to migration. A specialist with 20 years in a field isn’t going to move there with their whole family and take a new job for graduate money.
First, real estate is almost always inherited, not purchased over the course of your life (it's far too expensive relative to anything but the top few % of incomes, and mortgages are somewhat hard to get). Also, overall economics are family-level not individual-level. Often only one or two people in the extended family has a job, and the money goes to the entire family.
Second, families growing at more than replacement result in the ancestral land being divided into smaller and smaller lots. The deed ('red book') tends to be inherited by the eldest son (but not as often as you'd think), but the actual space allocated (by a contract separate to the deed) tends to depend on direct-family size.
So there's this weird dynamic right now, where having kids early, and relying on extended family to support them lets you seize more of the family real estate. Inheriting more of that is worth more than any accumulated salary you could earn due to skyrocketing prices. So from what I gather from the rumor mill, there's some scheming to have more kids earlier than your siblings, and pressure older family members to allocate you more property -- instead of working or building a career. So the motivation to have children is very different here than in Japan!
In part because of these things, I think 3 or 4 people on my street have what you would typically call a full-time job. Most live 4 to a small room rent-free, and stay home all day. I estimate within 10 or 15 years many will be priced out of their homes, which will be demolished to make room for large complexes of tiny rental rooms that the infrastructure will really struggle to support. A few big units are already being built in the area ever year.
So if countries like Japan want to attract immigration from here, we've got a generation just being born that would probably be willing to consider long-term opportunities in Japan. It is already quite popular to go to Japan or Korea to work menial jobs under the guise of 'studying' for a couple of years. Some education is often provided, but it's mainly paid job placement at varying levels of shadiness. If that can be cleaned up, then hey, maybe the problems of both of our countries can cancel each other out a little!
Eventually they will indeed run out of people willing to do lower level jobs in the factories, then economic growth can move somewhere else. Bangladesh, Africa, Philippines perhaps?
Then we observe these countries whose population subset is actually able to move to a different, richer location (such as Maghreb countries) and we see apparent lack of serious economic growth, industry development and general instability.
Makes one question all of your assumptions.
You could become naturalized there, but you will never be Japanese, and you will never be treated as an equal.
Economists confuse an increase in the extraction rate as some kind of "creating something from nothing" but actually a better analogy is "traveling to previously unreachable places".
The reason for that is that the concept of 'Freigeld' forces people to think about production and consumption schedules. With regular money you can pretend that labor can be stored like any commodity, which is actually not possible.
"Capitalism and not participating in Ponzi schemes don't go hand in hand with each other" becomes nonsense. The last one to jump off that track before it collapses becomes capitalistic winner. But the ones who jumped before that moment are still better on than ones who ended up paying to them.
I don't know what the Japanese system is like, but the point is that there are multiple variables to take into account. Length of contribution, type (tax rate and pre or post, or flat) + amount of contribution, when you qualify to receive it, recipient stipulations (can you work or not, does the rate change, does the age change, etc).
Based on some back of envelop comparisons from my little research of the Japanese system (what wikipedia provides, since I can't read Japanese); it would seem that the US system is a little fairer (or, at least, generally equivalent) for W2 employees: a lower rate and contribution requirement [6.2% vs 10%], with a shorter term requirement [35 vs 40 years] but a slightly lower payout at a later age [4.5kusd@70 vs 5.5kusd@65] with a lower overall tax burden [nominal 17% vs flat 25%]. But both are a fair bit better than the Irish system. Please feel free to correct me if those are off, however.
Even those are just assumptions based on you making no private retirement contributions and you working a white collar job and then going full state pensioner at the full retirement age. If any variables change, it can drastically effect the payout/taxrate. So it's almost impossible to fully compare.
No, a country is just a landmass, and when "Japanese become the minority" that would be a problem solved (the problem being entitled people from outside the country wanting in).
I’ll add that the drop in birthrates is not something that has persisted for generations—as recently as 1950 Japan had a fertility rate over 3.
Some of that is of course classic Ricardian "comparative advantage" of trade. Much is, though, outsourcing high-impact / high-resource / high-effluent production to elsewhere.
What the Nordics in general do well, and Germany does ok, is preserve the ability of mothers to have careers, thus making motherhood a bit less of a drastic decision (it’s still a drastic decision. You’re committing to unconditionally love someone who will, say, bite you hard on the shoulder because you had the temerity to suggest it was time to go potty instead of play with trains, and to take the physical damage of pregnancy that has so far led to my first broken bone and back pain that never quite goes away)
But I’m still working in my pre-maternity department, in a scaled-back version of my old job, and more critically, keeping up with our industry about as well as my not-mother colleagues, so once the little nipper can escort himself home from school, I can more easily go back to full time.
And in case my husband loses his job that currently is our main source of income, we have the backstop of my job and the potential to go back to my full time IT income.
This would be far more difficult in a country where my large employer was not obliged to let me work part time for several years, and Elterngeld didn’t make taking a year off after the birth of a child fully expected and planned for by employers. My husband was also able (and expected) to take a month off after the birth, and then another when I went back to work. A lot of men in relatively conservative Bavaria were initially hesitant to take those two months, but it’s now normal. We’re not at the point that it’s normal for most fathers to also exercise their right to switching to a part time schedule for their children’s first few years - no idea if this happens more often in Berlin or Hamburg.
Germany has its own demographic problems, but not as severe as Japan’s.
Local population can be relegated to a minority and what makes Japan alluring today will still exist just fine. There's nothing about a particular people, with a particular culture, and a particular approach, having built a country of a particular outlook.
Besides, we can improve the norms we don't like. And of course, we totally deserve to live there, after all we've watched all these anime and ate so much sushi...
No one should value their own culture and history, every culture should be open to being destroyed.
Except Islam for some reason. They get to keep their culture, otherwise you are an islamophobe.
Promoting bullying and exclusion —- part and parcel to indigenous Japanese society — is a bad idea that should be relegated.
Now apply your logic the other way (parents having many children) and see how meaningless your conclusion is.
Do you as, for example an LGBTQ culture person not have the right to exclude a Nazi? By your definitions they don’t because exclusion = bad
- Japan becomes an almost empty and stateless or only having a nominal state, landmass with very little population and no functioning economy (no transport network, no electricity grid etc). Unlikely - it's climate is too good.
- It gets militarily taken over as soon it's too weak to defend itself. Likely but undesirable because you don't get to pick who takes you over and that will be by definition someone hostile.
- Immigration and replacement. This is the most beneficial of the realistic options. Because you get to pick the people who replaces you.
Can people in other societies have a say about what they want in the matter in their own society, or your also prefer the norms of you and your society imposed upon everybody?
("I like multiculturalism, as long as every country has the same cultural mindset as mine").
>From that I’m sure you can guess my own nationality.
Is it one where foreigners massacred and replaced the native population, took their land, relegated them to specific areas, and even took their children and closed them in camps? I guess those natives were xenophobic too.
Would you feel "bullied" if an Amazon native population wants to keep their ways, and doesn't welcome you or anybody else coming over and wanting to join them?
Are people you don't know demanding to stay at your house "bullied" and "excluded" when you don't just let them in?
What if they're "good people"? Should they just get a room then? What if you have a couple of extra rooms you don't use?
Of course people in other societies should have a say in what they want in the matter of their own society. I just prefer they come to the same conclusion mine has, since it’s the superior one in many respects. (Not all aspects, of course — there is no “perfect culture” or “perfect system”; all of them have downsides in some aspect)
>From that I’m sure you can guess my own nationality. Is it one where foreigners massacred and replaced the native population, took their land, relegated them to specific areas, and even took their children and closed them in camps? I guess those natives were xenophobic too.
The genocide of the peoples indigenous to North America is a black mark in the history of the United States, as is slavery. Neither has been adequately remedied, and I’m unsure it ever will be. The US has a lot of work to do on both of these fronts.
From my understanding, that is essentially what you are advocating, just with a different landmass. To me, it seems incredibly colonialist.
* People are friendly by default
This can be a common mistake made by tourists (or short time visitors). There is a difference between polite for money, cultural fake politeness, and actually more friendly and welcoming than average. Hotel staff can be very polite (as trained to be for money), but that doesn't mean random people on the street, clubs, housing agents, or business owners actually like every or any foreigners. And the extent of politeness or friendliness shown can depend on skin color, known country of origin, or language spoken.
* Very affordable place
This is quite laughable. It depends on your salary and where you are from, but clearly there are cheaper countries in the world than Japan. If you are rich or nearly so, many countries are "affordable".
* Non-free Country versus free world Country
Freedom is relative. For instance, in Japan, police can arrest, question/interrogate (some have claimed torture) you, and hold you for weeks without a lawyer (nor allow you to call one). Compared to other countries, this is quite draconian and backwards. Where for others, that there is any process where you aren't killed at whim or have no to little means to seek true justice, means greater "freedom".
* Comfortable level of tech
While this is quite true, Japan is not the only country that possesses significant technology. The level of street cleanliness, sewer system (like open sewers), garbage collection (dropped on street or in cans), design and width of city streets, safe train systems (protecting passengers from falling/jumping onto tracks), etc... These points all add up and how "comfortable", can be a matter of where you are from and what you were used to.
To some degree, this isn't a bad idea. For example, I abhor female genital mulitaliton (FGM) and I don't think it's particularly wrong to say that regardless of it being the "culture" of some people, it shouldn't be done.
If I weren't a moral nihilist, I certainly wouldn't be a moral relativist.
Why shouldn't I? You don't get to dictate how I "get" to feel. The very idea of racism and xenophobia is fundamentally offensive to me. As with the Amazon native population, I would not approve if they didn't let me in by virtue of some immutable attribute of mine such as my appearance.
So long as you make an effort to learn someone's culture, I don't think there's any justifictaion to exclude someone on the basis of the brute facts of their body or upbringing. Actions ought to matter far more.
I'm not aware of any moral theory that has been justified in academia or elsewhere which prescribes that such discrimination is permissible. This also is evidenced by the fact that many Japanese people claim to abhor racism while simultaneously practicing it against sections of their own population and other populations.
I lived in Japan for a year until June 2023 and I agree with OP. It obviously depends on your salary -- Japanese people's is pretty low compared to expats -- but Tokyo is still pretty cheap compared to even Geneva or Paris. Restaurants are cheap (compared to anywhere in Europe), groceries is not that expensive and cinemas are nothing compared to where I live. What offset this are accommodation and fruits (yeah, they're very expensive).
Outside of big cities? Don't even get me started, you get all this plus cheap rent and could even have local-grown fruits and vegetables. I actually plan to retire to Japan if I ever live this long.
> Freedom is relative [...]
I agree with your on that point. Police is at worst corrupt and at best useless in this country. I'm actually of the firm belief that if they were better trained, crime in Japan would "rise" (as in "statistically there would be more crime") because more of it would be discovered or reported.
This practice has produced an entire lost generation called “Hikkikomori,” Japanese people who were excluded from Japanese society so completely that they don’t even leave their homes. Some of them are entirely dependent on their aging parents for their subsistence, including shelter and food.
That says nothing of gay people, whose presence is tolerated at best.
When it comes to foreigners, they are welcomed as tourists and guest workers, but there will always be places and aspects of society that they will never be welcome in.
This is exclusion for no other reason than xenophobia. Even a person who learns the language, practices the customs, pays taxes and follows the laws will not be accepted in Japan.
What you’re hitting at in your response is “The paradox of tolerance.” To arrive at the paradox of tolerance, a society has to have a sufficient level of tolerance. Japan simply doesn’t.
When I say this is “bad,” I mean this is in two ways. First, it violates my principles of tolerance for good faith actors — a set of values shared broadly in the west, to varying degrees and with a lot of asterisks. Secondly, it’s bad for Japan. In a situation where your demographics are decades into terminal decline, the ability to integrate foreigners is the only option to continue to being a going concern. The breakdown of their society without foreign integration will be catastrophic.
Is this colonialism? It’s certainly a cultural change.
The mixing of people and ideas through trade and migration has resulted in the fastest decline in mortality and poverty in human history. Cultures open to new ideas have benefitted the most.
Debt used for unsustainable growth could be extremely destructive. It is needed, for example new machinery and so on, but investment has to return more than you pay on it.
I guess one has to see enough really hard working highly educated intelligent young people in a place that also houses slacking geezers who managed to learn nothing over decades. They are basically sitting there waiting for others to earn their living. If it is a national thing you wont have the endless flow of new hires who cant wait to get the f out of there.
Japan will never want more foreigners in the country. Even if the population shrinks substantially. And it's a right thing to do - a lot of cogs in japanese society rotate well only when all links use same predicaments. It will never work with foreginers en masse.
They rather lock the country again like Tokugawa did long time ago. As I am getting older, I support the decision to protect society from destructive traits that come with western societies more and more.
Reminds me of some (Dutch) people who made a chart of % taxation (including every kind) vs income by using real world data... It came out like white noise. Apparently if you make as many rules as possible to make it all as fair as possible you end up with the lamest possible system - even worse than a lottery.
Now, you could totally question the link between these two. And you’d be right to! There’s no absolute link between “restrictive personal expression” and “low crime and high safety.” Japan, for one, has pretty punitive laws, including the death penalty. That probably plays a role. It’s all super complex, which is what makes it interesting… and why sharing ideas is critical to improving conditions for individuals, especially marginalized ones.
And yet! Singapore is consistently ranked as one of the happiest countries in the world. This contradicts the common western association of personal liberty correlating with happiness.
Cultural relativism is more useful in understanding why some people from different cultures behave the way they do, and examining if wither rejection of that behavior is based on a logical, beneficial value, or whether it’s based on the natural impulse to reject something foreign. Mistaken beliefs prevent cultural progress. Beliefs should be open to challenge.
I know you are going to say that’s not the case in the modern world, but you need to at least understand there are very concrete reasons why xenophobia evolved, and why it’s a natural reaction. Some might not be relevant in the modern world, but I’d argue there’s a lot of complexity that we might not understand.
For example, there are some extremely intolerant immigrants to Europe right now, 100% of whom in London polled as wanting homosexuality criminalised.
Should everyone be 100% accepting of this because they are foreigners? Is xenophobia justified in this case in your opinion?
Let's see birthrate forecast graph by govt https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2zKUeHVoAA3ufi?format=jpg&name=...
Oh, but buckle up my friend, because Japan isn’t an outlier. It’s ahead of the curve for a majority of the world’s societies.
The OP might not be, but their children / grand children would be. This is nothing new.
But, even if that could help, the cultural changes Japan requires to make that possible, just aren't feasible in fewer than half a dozen generations. Which is sort of what they're running out of anyway.
Germany will get to where Japan is, and it will be within our own lifetimes.
See this alot among the Amish/Anabaptists here in the United States. There's no more farmland to be bought in the places they live, so each generation has the farm split between 4 and 6 sons, and they keep getting tinier. Until, at some point, it can no longer be divided. Moving and setting up a new colony elsewhere is difficult in the extreme, so it usually happens far past the point that it would make sense to split them (down to just a couple of hectares in many cases).
Sometimes when it's at its most extreme, they'll all take their pooled savings and go buy a square kilometer or two out west, but there aren't so many places like that left to buy, especially that are worth farming.
> So if countries like Japan want to attract immigration from here,
Here's another funny one about Japan. There is a not-well-known but peculiar class of potential immigrants. After (before?) a bunch of Japanese emigrated to Brazil. But, being Japanese, they didn't give up speaking Japanese. So they're more or less fully ethnically Japanese, speak the language as their first language, etc. And, as it turns out, many of them would be willing to move back to the land of their grandparents and great grandparents, if there were jobs.
Also, there are jobs!
So, the government initially sets up a program welcoming them back. But it turns out that they aren't welcome, either by elements in their own government, or society at large. They're simply too alien. Eventually, someone gets voted out, or retires out of government, the program is shut down, and those returnees are forced to go back to Brazil.
If Japanese society thinks those people are too alien, too foreign, to fit in... what chance do the Vietnamese have?
That the unicorns known as children in large families still see all the other families around them who have just one kid, and internalize that as the norm too, or maybe their own family does influence them slightly and they bump their ceiling up to 2 or 3, and within a few generations that's right back to the mean again?
After age 5, what percentage of waking hours do children spend away from their family anyway? What percentage of adults that they are familiar with (at least to the degree that they know how many children those adults have) are their own parents? Are the people (in the US, they'd be mostly women) that teach them also parents to some high number of children?
Even the Duggars must have grown up internalizing a number far lower than the 20+ their own parents had.
If I compare the US (assuming it's your country) and Japan, in anything from crime and safety, to cleanliness, community cohesion, politiness, cuisine, nature, and art, I found it deeply inferior, when contrasting results.
Economist: Hi Tom, I’m [ahem..cough]. I’m an economist.
Physicist: Hey, that’s great. I’ve been thinking a bit about growth and want to run an idea by you. I claim that economic growth cannot continue indefinitely.
Economist: [chokes on bread crumb] Did I hear you right? Did you say that growth can not continue forever?
Physicist: That’s right. I think physical limits assert themselves.
... the rest in the link ...
[1] https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/22/asia/japan-mixed-roots-hafu-d...
Should have figured out how to incorporate that into the post as it's an important additional angle in the story
Vending machines are everywhere, but usually only for drinks and there is plenty, and I mean plenty of retail shops.
So I don't know what you mean really. Automaking electronics, again not sure, there is a fujitsu factory nearby where I live, there's hundreds maybe thousands of people going in and out of there each day.
Do you have a romantic view of Japan that doesn't exist maybe?
What does this mean?
The US is indeed more dynamic, but as has often been pointed out, that's partly due to coming into existence with a continent's worth of very lightly defended resources only a few hundred years ago. If you win a huge lottery jackpot you will probably enjoy a very comfortable life afterwards, but it doesn't mean you became brilliant at economics.
Quite - the organic size, if you will. In biological bodies, organs that become overdeveloped or overused relative to the rest of the body lead to disease. MY loose analogy for economics is that your body can only store so much excess sugar before you acquire crippling diabetes.
I didn’t even read the pollution part. That’s a whole different topic that wasn’t being discussed.
But thanks for the downvote! Next time, please make sure your reply is up to par if you feel the need to downvote.
No, but logic and society and experiences gets to dictate (even if in a slightly fuzzy what) what makes sense to feel.
Otherwise, feelings are like a*holes. Everybody has one.
>So long as you make an effort to learn someone's culture, I don't think there's any justifictaion to exclude someone on the basis of the brute facts of their body or upbringing. Actions ought to matter far more.
They don't want people merely having "made an effort to learn their culture" to immigrate in their country in any great numbers. They prefer people having grown into their culture - that is, their own people.
It's through this organic process (as opposed to some bro watching anime and watching documentaries about sushi and samurai swords who feels they've "made an effort to learn the culture") that they preserve their culture, their social cohesion, their customs, their safety, and other such aspects.
It is, of course, a white invention, as we feel morally superior enough to do all the bossing around. Let's call it the "white man's burden" to show those people how it should be done.
Foreign/multinational organizations coming to dictate to the "natives" even how to deficate, for "their own good"? Sounds like it.
Colonialism is not just about "bad intentions". There were colonialists with "good intentions" too. They also thought they were doing "god's work", building railroads, teaching the brute natives how to live, and so on. The "white man's burden" they called it.
In the case of Japan, Americans threatened and even bombed them (in the 19th century) to teach them how they should live: to force them open their borders to western trade. The same entitlement apparently never stopped.
We could all decide to multiply every currency with 10x and nothing would change except the number and we would have 10x economic growth as measured in the currency.
That is an obviously simplified example, but it is not that contrived. Modern money is not tied to energy use. Money is created out of thin air every day and that is ok.
You've used this strawman previously in this thread; perhaps it would be better if you elucidated what elements of culture you're actually referring to.
>They don't want people merely having "made an effort to learn their culture" to immigrate in their country in any great numbers.
Who is "they"? I feel like you're ascribing very specific opinions to people who I suspect would be perfectly happy with law-abiding immigrants who don't hold parties at 3 a.m.
>They prefer people having grown into their culture - that is, their own people.
Is this even true? And to what degree? For example, there are cases of non-ethnically Japanese people who were born and raised in Japan, but still face challenges with discrimination, whereas immigrants of Japanese ancestry from America only seem to face issues with language. There's even a politician who immigrated to Japan and was elected by Japanese people: https://www.japan-zone.com/modern/tsurunen_marutei.shtml - in what way was someone who grew up in Japan preferred?
You may argue that these are minor examples and exceptions, but even one example is enough to show that these feelings are not based on logic or probability, but on mere gut feeling when one encounters someone different.
Cultural assimilation can happen to varying degrees and varying time frames with mixed results; the degree to which it is successful is also dependent on how accomodating or welcoming that particular culture is.
The argument against a sustainable population basically boils down to, "but, then we'd have to make adjustments to policy!" Which is not the slam-dunk some seem to think it is.