Yah, the reasons for Japan’s low birth rate were not what I expected to see in that video. I assumed it would be the same reason that all well-developed countries see declining birth rates. It’s now a well understood effect of high quality of life and womens’ rights.
The moral panic of the 1970s (as many Mutants remember, I’m sure) was “the population bomb”. People looked at the exponential growth in global population, made silly linear extrapolations, and predicted doom. Now, birth rate has gone negative in many (most?) wealthy countries.
It is interesting that Japan is seeing many other effects contributing to this. I’m guessing their long-standing resistance to immigration has made this much worse as well.
Canada is leaning hard into immigration for this reason. We can’t rely on birth rate to fill the labour force we desperately need in all sectors and industries. Everything from house cleaners to university professors is in desperately short supply here. We have aggressive minimum targets for immigration now.
Looking at the current state of the culture, it’s really not surprising. The marriage rate in Japan is really low, too, for the same reason: the expectation is that women will give up their jobs (and lives) to spend 18 hours a day (seriously, the role is insanely labor-intensive) taking care of the children and husbands (who they’ll never see, as work-related activities will take up all their waking hours, and who will not only not contribute to domestic labor, but also have demands identical to those of the children). It’s incredibly oppressive. On top of which the softening Japanese economy means that’s often not supportable on one salary, so it’s not practical, either.
We’ve been seeing the same thing in other countries with oppressive patriarchies and (the attendant) poor support for mothers/families. The conservatives, whose policies and worldview are driving this lowered birthrate, are responding by saying, “Oh, we’ve made it intolerable to have a child? Well, we’ll make it impossible for you to chose to not have a child.” Many are pretty open about this being a motivation. Of course it ultimately just makes things worse - witness all the people who, in the face of abortion bans (and possible contraceptive bans), went with permanent surgical responses. People who might have chosen to have children at some point, but when that choice was taken from them, went with the rational option of, “if I can’t choose when, then I choose never.”
Conservatives apparently prefer the “all stick, no carrot” approach to policy. If their policies have made something undesirable, but they want to encourage it, they just make the alternatives even worse.
I was thinking of the lowered birth rates as two phenomena that others have discussed above - one where women went from having more children than they wanted to having an education (and thus no need for large farm families) and control over their fertility, and another where families were having fewer children than they wanted because conditions are so intolerable, but they’re largely the same thing. The current situation in Japan is largely due to women looking at their options and realizing that not getting married or having children is the better one. Part of this is because of lowered quality of life issues for everyone, but partially because women have options they didn’t (or didn’t recognize as having), before.
Yah it sounds like Japan is a special case in many ways. The general rule of thumb that I stated above applies to most countries, but of course there will be local variables that may be as strong or stronger as well.
I mention it mainly because in discussions about climate change, there inevitably seems to be some thinly veiled eco-fascist rhetoric around there being too many people and that’s the root of the problem. They never quite get around to saying who all we should murder to solve that, but the truth is population limits itself when you apply social justice (womens’ rights and a middle class) to poorer countries.
The other thing missing from eco-fascist rhetoric is the fact that humans are the solution. We need more and more people to manage our increasingly complicated world full of ever-increasing specialized labour requirements. How many people would the eco-fascists like to assign to hyperbaric welding or lichenology? We’d better figure that out if there’s going to be some perfect population number. I’m glad they’re volunteering to figure that out because I don’t think I could.
We’re seeing similar things in other conservative, patriarchal developed nations with poor support for mothers/families (i.e. the US), just to a lesser extent (in part because it’s masked by immigration and sub-cultural differences that don’t exist in Japan).
Yep - and both problems - overpopulation and too low a birthrate are both solved by a more just, equitable society.
I’m reminded of the back-of-envelope calculations Charles Stross did for the number of people you’d need in a Mars colony for it to be truly self-sufficient (i.e. able to create all the technology necessary to keep people alive there), to show that the number was orders of magnitude greater than the sorts of numbers the likes of Elno are thinking about, showing how absurd the idea was. And that was minimal numbers for a new society, not for maintaining an (aging) population in a global society.
We have some decent numbers for this from our own history. When white people first came to North America and stole native land, they subsisted largely on technology they brought with them. Food was a mix of things they brought and assistance from the natives, but it was generations before white people in North America could make everything that Europe could. During all that time, they relied on stuff shipped over from Europe regularly.
And that’s Super Easy Mode when it comes to colonizing. The colony has breathable air, protection from radiation, full gravity, and arable land. Plus supply ships only take a month or so to arrive. Mars is Extreme Hard Mode. Supplies are at best six months away, and only during a window once every couple of years when the planets are lined up right. Your colony has no air, no pressure, weak gravity, extreme radiation, and no way to grow food. Plus no handy natives keeping you alive until you figure it out.
The difficulty of colonizing Mars is off the charts. It’s (IMHO) totally inconceivable at current technology levels.
And even that wasn’t sufficient - they had assistance not just with food from the locals, as you mention, but shelter as well. A lot of early colonists survived by either joining native villages or by using the resources left behind when villages were wiped out by introduced diseases. It really is surprising how long it took before even basic resources were produced domestically - apparently there wasn’t any lead production until 1750, and even during the Revolutionary War, 90% of gunpowder was imported, and those were pretty key to daily survival. For building a self-sufficient society on Mars, I wonder if it’s even possible - does the planet, for example, have any deposits of silicon of sufficient purity for making chips, for example?
Stross’ ballpark for how many people you need to maintain current technology levels starts at about 100 million people, but probably less than a billion.
Heck, we know we don’t have the technology to have astronauts survive the journey there, much less live there. The kind of ecosystem-technologies we’d need aren’t even something Elno’s even thinking about, because he’s so focused on macho “hard science” rocket projects. (Which is how it is for the tech bros on Earth, too - the ecosystem/biology issues that are core to our survival get ignored in favor of big engineering bullshit.)
Our kids here in Japan have just had their first child (still can’t quite believe I am a grandfather!).
Even though we are living close by and can help with child care, it is still a burden on the parents and difficult to manage along with lower paid jobs, expensive rent and long commutes. They were also well into their thirties before having their first child.
They might have a second child but it’s not a given.
Long commutes, small apartments, inflexible working hours… the sheer logistics of raising kids are difficult even with grandparents around to help out (congratulations by the way!), and a lot of people have left their hometowns to live in the big city to boot.
@Purplecat is right on. On a population scale, factors such as educational attainment, standard of living, healthcare availability & affordability, and most of all, equality of women in society are strong predictors of birth rates. The higher all of the above, the lower the birth rate.
Still, that article keeps framing everything as a choice by the younger generation. They’re not choosing to rent, they can’t afford homes! They’re not choosing not to chase promotion, there are no chances to move up!
Alaska Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy closed this year’s State of the State address with an attempt to rebrand what it means to be “pro-life.” With the specter of the end of Roe hanging over politics—playing a significant role in the drubbing right-wingers received in the midterms—he announced that his “goal to make Alaska the most pro-life state in the entire country” was really about measures to attract families to Alaska and keep them here. With the talk that he’d turned a new leaf and would be more moderate heading into his second term, it sparked some hope that Alaska might just be able to make some progress.
This Monday, however, the governor delivered more than $200 million in vetoes that are almost entirely focused on cutting education funding, social safety net spending and the sort of investments in infrastructure that keep families in Alaska.
Unlike almost every other veto announcement I’ve covered, Dunleavy took the unusual move of just releasing the vetoes in a news release with a bland, perfunctory statement about preserving the state’s general fund dollars (for what, precisely, is left unanswered). There was no news conference for him to explain the cuts to Alaskans and field questions from reporters—which I would like to think would have included “How does this budget align with your pro-family position? Was that just a sham?”—and it looks like all one-on-one interview requests were declined.
