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0 pointsjmyeet15d ago0 comments

Japan's economic malaise is a big topic that's mostly driven now by a rapidly aging population. Why is it aging? Low fertility rates [1]. So why are fertility rates so low? It kind of started with the housing bubble in the 1980s that created a youth unemployment crisis (ie hikikomori), which has now come to the West where we now have a youth unemployment crisis (and thus NEETs). I found this [2]:

> Japan made the same discovery thirty years earlier. The hikikomori phenomenon (young men, predominantly, who withdraw from social life entirely, sometimes for decades) emerged in the 1990s, after Japan’s asset bubble burst and the lifetime employment compact dissolved. The cultural commentary at the time, both Japanese and Western, framed it as a peculiarly Japanese pathology, something about shame and conformity and the pressure-cooker school system. This was wrong. It was a structural response to the closure of the productive ladder, and it has now appeared in every developed economy that has reproduced the same structural conditions.

It's worth noting that the US fertility rate is alos below replacement levels (~1.54) but the only thing that props up our population is immigration. Japan eschews immigration as a de facto ethnostate. South Korea is further along in that crisis. China will need to find a solution too.

But there are cultural reasons here too. Japanese work culture, pay relative to work, etc.

[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/jpn/jap...

[2]: https://henryfudgeofficial.substack.com/p/degeneracy-is-a-sy...

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3 comments · 1 top-level

win311fwg15d ago· 2 in thread

While the official youth unemployment rate in Niger is something like 0.5%, that includes things that wouldn't count by western standards (e.g. sustenance farming). The youth unemployment rate there, by how we measure it, is more like 50%. To call the situation in Japan or the USA a crisis compared to that is laughable. Yet they have a fertility rate of ~6 births per woman. You've come up with a fun theory, but it clearly doesn't work.

Fertility is on the decline, particularly in the west, although increasingly spreading, quite simply because it is socially unacceptable to have children. Society says you need to focus on your career instead. It creates TV shows, like "16 and Pregnant", designed to dissuade viewers from having children. So on and so forth. Social pressure is a powerful drug.

In fact, the pocket communities where certain religions that push a 'make babies' agenda are commonly observed, where the social pressure goes in the other direction, we find many families pumping out kids like there is no tomorrow. Social pressure works both ways, but the "having kids is cool" is not the prevailing social wind.

pibaker15d ago

Dismissing youth employment as a concept because some countries still plow their fields by hand isn't a good argument. You can just look at peer countries and compare them. Surely you can’t think that youth unemployment does not reflect any major difference between Spain and Germany right.

win311fwg15d ago

You will find no dismissal of youth employment as a concept. There would be no reasonable way to dismiss the concept as one only has to quickly look outside to see that youth are employed. What was the intended purpose of introducing this nonsensical tangent?

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