It’s a tired talking point at this point, but: in white countries, the government/media was telling everyone to have fewer kids because of global cooling or the ozone hole or whatever (this was pre-global warming), and then when people did that they came out and said “well, you people aren’t having enough kids, so we’re going to have to flood you with poor brown people.”
In Japan, they don’t have Jews and they frankly don’t really even have feminism. They have women working, but they’re polite and men are still in charge of everything.
Actually, Japan appears to have sunk into a kind of national depression as a result of the development of technological society, in particular urbanization (pornography and the infantilization of men have also had a big effect on the sexuality of men).
Reuters:
Japanese Prime minister Fumio Kishida pledged on Monday to take urgent steps to tackle the country’s declining birth rate, saying it was “now or never” for one of the world’s oldest societies.
Japan has in recent years been trying to encourage its people to have more children with promises of cash bonuses and better benefits, but it remains one of the most expensive places in the world to raise a child, according to surveys.
Births plunged to a new record low last year, according to official estimates, dropping below 800,000 for the first time – a watershed moment that came eight years earlier than the government had expected.
That most likely precipitated a further population decline in a country where the median age is 49, the highest in the world behind only the tiny city-state of Monaco.
“Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions,” Kishida said in a policy speech at the opening of this year’s parliamentary session.
“It is now or never when it comes to policies regarding births and child-rearing – it is an issue that simply cannot wait any longer,” he added.
This doesn’t work. You can’t change a society on a fundamental level with tired warnings of a vague future consequence.
Honest social scientists could presumably go in and figure out the mechanisms creating this nightmare and the state could then probably make changes to fix it, but it would take generations, and the problem is they don’t have generations.
Realistically, however, in terms of basic logistics, should be possible for Japan to simply downsize. It’s not like there are zero children. In fact, the generation of children they have now, small as it is, is still bigger than any generation 100 years ago.
The problem is always presented as “someone has to pay for the old people,” but that is an exaggerated problem. It can be figured out. The real problem is that a modern economy is not designed to ever shrink, and trying to shrink it would cause a catastrophic failure.
With regards to the mechanics of how abundance combined with crowding affects the psyche, it’s worth taking another look at John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia Experiment. When mice were given unlimited food in a limited space, they became neurotic and developed bizarre sexual practices, eventually becoming lazy and depressed and refusing to breed.
Click for Full Text!