Japan missing its chance to embrace population decline

Berlin, 4 February, 2023

The episode of TLDR News' Daily Briefing from 23 January 2023 included coverage of Japan's most recent response to the ongoing drop in its birth-rate. From this episode:

Japan's Prime Minister, Fumio Kishida, says that it is a “Now or Never” moment to tackle his country's population decline, and has vowed to introduce measures to boost the falling birth rate, which hit a new record low last year.

Kishida said in a speech beginning this year's parliamentary session that, quote, “Our nation is on the cusp of whether it can maintain its societal functions.” He went on, “it's 'now or never' when it comes to policies regarding births and child rearing. It's an issue that simply cannot wait any longer — we must establish a children-first economic society, and turn around the birth rate.”

Last year the number of children born in Japan dropped below 800,000 for the first time which is a milestone that the government hadn't expected for another eight years. Despite previous government interventions, Japan's birth rate has fallen continuously for 14 years, and Japan now has the second highest median age in the world, at 49 years.

Kishida said he'll announce plans to double the budget for child-related policies by June, and that a new Children and Family government agency will be established in April.

While this kind of response is hardly surprising — indeed, one could say it is the only logical reaction of a system predicated on its ongoing existence and the notion of continual growth — it did make me think what an alternative, and arguably much more appropriate response might've looked like.

Rather than committing to pumping more money into increasing its population and becoming a 'child-first economic society', what if they had announced that it was no longer realistic, even responsible, for Japan to try and maintain such aspirations, and that they would, instead, draw upon their current economic and industrial 'buffers' to prepare for a time, in the not-too-distant future, when its 'age pyramid' will become so heavily inverted that it will no longer be possible to maintain the quality of life for its population as a whole, and for the increasingly large number of people in the autumn and winter of their lives?

To be sure, things would become harder, and the things that were considered luxuries (or simply didn't exist) one or two generations ago would become increasingly scarce, but the consequences of demographic inversion could be softened by an investment, now, into decentralised infrastructure and a surplus of medicines, higher-quality domestic appliances and 'assistive devices' such as 'stair lifts', walking frames, etc. (especially in densely-populated cities), together with stockpiles of the spare parts needed to maintain them for another 20 or 30 years?

(And looking further into the future, given their existing network of high-speed trains and rail networks, a combination of sufficient spares and 'derating' might allow them maintain a higher level of regional distribution for a longer period of time. (The question of where the energy needed to power the rolling stock would come from is, of course, non-trivial, but it could be addressed, in part, by scaling down the amount of trips that are made and the amount of cargo that is moved.))

But while the impetus for this post was Japan's response, these thoughts and criticisms are in no way restricted to Japan; this is just the most recent instance where we are confronted with the question of what kind of State (or other entity whose existence is now, at any rate, so inextricably linked with the notions of growth — both economic and population) would actively plan for, much less welcome its own dissolution?


References

  • asides/2023/0129_japan_missing_its_chance_to_embrace_population_decline.txt
  • Last modified: 2023-02-04 10:17
  • by Peter