The big picture: Japan's birthrate has hit a record low for the eighth consecutive year in 2023, with just 758,631 births recorded. Marriages also saw a historic low, with 489,281 unions, highlighting a deepening demographic crisis. Why it matters: Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi has declared the situation a critical demographic challenge.
I know some economist will tear me apart for this but I don’t see where the big deal is. To me this is just a consequence of a bunch of factors like the economy and overall women education. I get that you end up with a weird lob sided age graph, but solving that feels like an engineering problem.
We have breakthroughs in automation every year. Every year a single citizen’s impact on overall GDP grows through productivity or efficiency. This is not even considering the impact AI/LLM/AGI will have on the next 10 years. I believe the focus should be on the positives of these trends. The environmental impact of a shrinking society for example. Let’s focus on those things instead of trying to convince people that adding more life to the capitalist income inequality machine is the solution. Adding more kids to the problem seems to only serve the top 1%ers instead of forcing us to have real serious discussions about universal income and what we should do with all the automation and efficiencies we keep creating.
The thing is: You need young people to support old people. This is irrespective of economic model; an upside down pyramid just isn’t a sustainable demographical situation. This could change as automation gets better, but for now both UBI and increasing birth rates are necessary. You can see this now in Japan needing foreign workers because there are more jobs that need to be done than people.
There are also some jobs that just can’t be automated, particularly around care for people (healthcare and education) and work that’s too unique to be automated (trades, in general, particularly around maintaining/upgrading existing homes and infrastructure).
The fact that our economic system requires never-ending growth to remain solvent is so crazy to me. And somehow many of the serious economists don’t see an issue with this.