These types of strategic economic articles have always fascinated me. But I have to ask, what can the Japanese do about that high retiree:worker ratio? As the article mentions, they aren't the only country with that issue. Presumably there is some solution other than "sit there and suffer" or to push the retirees off onto an ice floe.
Japan is overcrowded and has famously long and lengthening lifespans. The result is that families have little space to raise children and retirees accumulate so the retiree to worker ratio grows to great heights.
It's pretty straightforward to deal with the trend, though.
You could mitigate the cost of a high ratio by investing in automation so that a smaller workforce can provide more goods and services to the population, and Japan is, in fact, the world leader in robotics and automation.
You could make child bearing and rearing cheaper so that the necessary generational decline in population is smoother. Japan is failing badly at promoting births, though. The economy is dominated by cartels that have been liberalizing their employment practices by reserving the high paying lifetime employment jobs to older incumbent employees and taking on younger workers as low-paid temps without benefits. Real estate taxes calcify the market and banking policy makes it even harder for young people to own homes. Social and government policy makes life very hard on working mothers. The result is young Japanese people that want babies find them difficult to afford. Japan has among the lowest birth rates in the world.
It's easy enough to stop providing government support to the industrial and banking cartels and liberalize real estate and school policies but the voters so far prefer national decline and bankruptcy to liberalization.
You could raise retirement ages or cut benefits so more people continue working longer. That's not popular either, for good reason.
You could promote immigration of younger workers, but then you stop being a Japanese nation and inflict an underclass on all your posterity. A wise nation would not do that.
As an Asian in the United States, yes. In most places in the US being Asian is certainly being part of the underclass, though (fortunately?) we have it a lot better than most other minorities.
All of the ethnicities you mentioned were, for decades, if not an entire century, the underclass. Racism against the Irish, Italians, and Jews was extremely commonplace until relatively recent history.
An when they stopped being demonized as minorities society find more, newer immigrants to vilify instead. Hispanics for one, and in our industry, Indians.
I'm all for immigration and diversity, but let's call a spade a spade. Immigrants are an underclass, and it takes generations for the stigma to fade - if ever! Jews are still frequently discriminated against.
Not to mention, politically, Japan is very high on the xenophobia scale. I'd be interested to see the effects of large-scale immigration on their society, though I suspect it won't be pretty. At all.
So your argument is what, exactly? That the Jews, Asians, etc. shouldn't have been allowed to come because they wound up spending some time in the "underclass"? That's the original poster's argument, as near as I can tell. Is it also yours?
Personally, I'm very happy that all those groups came.
P.S. 49% of Asian-Americans 25 and older have at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 28% of the general population, and the median household income for Asian-Americans is $66,000, compared to $49,800 for the general population.
Pardon the aggressiveness, but are you Asian? I live with my skin color and my last name every single day - are you seriously going to whip out a bunch of numbers and telling me that my experience, on the ground, as well as the experiences of my family and every other Asian around me, is null and void?
Note that I specifically disclaimed in my post that I support immigration. But you're idealizing immigration to an absurd extreme. Immigrants are treated as second-class in near every facet of life in the USA. That we don't have lynchings and head taxes anymore doesn't mean this class separation doesn't exist.
But let's get at your numbers:
> "49% of Asian-Americans 25 and older have at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 28% of the general population"
True, until you realize that despite consisting of 5% of the population[0], and being extremely over-educated compared to the general population, Asians represent only 2% of corporate leadership positions[1][2].
Let's not forget also that despite years of Whites being dramatically over-represented in top universities and colleges, no quota'ing was ever put in place until Asians started to threaten White dominance in schools[3]. This isn't a sob story about Asians in particular - if you replace Asian with Black, or Hispanic, the result would be the same.
Minorities in America were never meant to take center stage and assume influence - we were supposed to stick to the sidelines and provide color to society and little more.
Your claim for median income is meaningless in this context. Asians fare very well in the job market, so long as they stick to individual contributor positions. Want to move into management? Not impossible, but you now have to work harder than your White colleagues to overcome the stereotype that Asians are timid and indecisive. There is a gigantic glass ceiling in place for all Asian-Americans which few have successfully broken.
So let's talk about what we mean by "underclass". An underclass is not solely defined by income or education - an underclass is defined by how its members are treated in common society. We have a demographic here that, despite proving their merit, are besieged at all levels of education for being "too smart" (imagine for one moment that claim being leveled against Whites). They are, in popular culture and the media, portrayed as sidekicks and cultural curiosities rather than humans of depth. They are, in higher levels of society (both in income and in influence) dramatically under-represented.
And all of the above isn't unique to Asians. South Asians, African-Americans, Hispanics and Latinos, all face similar issues.
Is the situation getting better? Hell yeah. The Italians and Irish who were the butt of this sort of discrimination decades ago are largely free from it now - but it took decades upon decades of fighting discrimination, and gritting their teeth to get there, and it will take the same for the current whipping-boy minorities to do the same. So let's not pretend that we live in some kind of utopian society where immigrants are welcomed with open arms and treated equally.
Japan doesn't have the same melting pot background as the U.S. It would take significant culture change for the Japanese to adopt an immigrant-inclusive culture.
Within living memory, Japan has been transformed from (paraphrasing a line from Neal Stephenson here) just about the fiercest culture on Earth to a nation of nerds obsessed with cute anime characters.
Interesting. Fortunately you didn't hit what demographers call "lowest low", a rate of 1.3, and as you say, you're climbing back from your nadir of 1.50, now bouncing at or a bit above 1.90 per Wikipedia. I have heard of various things the government has done to encourage child bearing; congratulations on deferring and very possibly avoiding societal death.
The problem is as the article states its already baked into the cake. Fine, encourage a salaryman and his wife to squirt out a kid in 2013 (well, unless you parallel process nine women into producing a full term baby in one month, In early June 2013 if you convince them to do it, its somewhat more likely they'll squirt out a kid in early 2014...), that's not going to change the employment situation in 2030.
Or another way to put it, 2030 is right around the corner.
There are four options - live with a smaller economy, make more babies, bring in immigrants, or increase productivity to the point where a smaller number of workers will be able to do the work that currently requires a larger workforce.
The latter is not an unreasonable option. If worker productivity grew by an unimpressive 1% per year from 2010 to 2030 (the time frame given in this article), the 67.7 million Japanese workers of 2030 will do the work of 82.6 million 2010 workers, which is more than the 81.7 million workers in 2010's workforce.
The sky is not falling, and there is no need to mandate that Japanese women become brood mares, and no need to import huge numbers of immigrants from poor countries.
"live with a smaller economy ... The latter is not an unreasonable option"
Former is not a bad idea either. How's the energy security of a rocky island with no petrol more or less right next to China? Oh they're shutting down nuclear plants too, you say? I hope they got lots of windmills and solar panels...
This is an interesting way to analyze their 2030 scenario, lets say they only have the population to run at 80% capacity, sounds bad, but what if they only have the energy available to run at 75% capacity anyway? Sounds like squirting out more kids would be the worst thing they could possibly do in that scenario.
Another "limiting reagent" analysis is that at least a decade ago Japan imported a bit over half its food. In other words they must import most of their food, or starve. Again, growing industrial giant to the west, hows that going to work out WRT food? Oh and at the same time as energy prices are going up / availability going down? Lets say they only have food to keep a mere 90% of the current population alive on a bland starvation diet, or certainly not as good as they currently eat now, anyway. Good luck talking them into squirting out a couple more kids to watch starve under those circumstances. "Well the bad news is, we're cutting the rice ration, but the good news is, we want more babies" hmm good luck.
"import huge numbers of immigrants" = as long as you can feed and energize them, sure. Which Japan is not going to be able to do, so its all kinda irrelevant.
As a Japanese, you could certainly get your money out of Japanese banks and into a different currency. If it was me, I would have moved my assets out a long time ago. But I have no idea what Japan as a nation should do.
The ever popular pro business (multi-national mega corp flavor) type solution: turn your country into a hell hole, and we'll make it a better hell hole, we promise!
Like another poster astutely put: create an underclass, and diminish their country's cultural heritage.
> "and diminish their country's cultural heritage"
Woah woah woah. Careful there, this line of argument has been used in the past.
Ditto with a previous mention of immigration making the country "less Japanese", which has shades of certain groups making a certain country "less German".
They have the right to. Is it a good idea for the long-term though? If the issue is that the birthrate is too low and the deficit you need to make up is, say, 300,000 people per year, then the numbers say you need to let in 300,000 people per year, which may be far above what a xenophobic society can assimilate (I feel like we're talking about Master of Orion 2 here btw :P)
Not the only one, another is to give economic incentives for having children. Sweden has a general payout to families per child, it was created for the same reasons.
Kids cost a lot of money, the government can give a lot without them being a profitable proposition for the parents. Aid to families would only be a help to those who want kids but can't take the economic risk.
Yes, but that only works in the VERY long term. Suppose you doubled the birth rate now - the effect on the working force would only be felt after at least 20 years.
