I’m sure artificially lowering female med student’s grades to increase drop-outs amoung women will help with the financial stability and job security needed to raise a child!
I love Japan, but I will say it has its issues that often get overlooked. Workplace culture is horrific in Japan and it contributes to their high suicide rates. There’s even a word in Japanese that specifically refers to a person dying from being overworked. I know friends who immigrated to Japan, only to regret it because they saw for themselves just how harsh the workplace culture was. Japanese people have no time for their family. Something must change or this problem is going to get worse but given it’s a highly conservative culture I’m not sure it’s going to see changes anytime soon.
In the context of Capitalism, sure, Japan is in trouble.
But then again, any system that demands infinite growth within a finite system has a biological parallel… in cancer. Yes, capitalism is economic cancer.
Japan has a bright future in front of it, if it can successfully pioneer an effective degrowth system that prioritizes the lives of people over Paraiste-Class profits.
As an American (or at least a non Japanese native) if my boss came up to me yelling and swearing in my face I would punch him out cold.
Actually if more Japanese did this I think things would improve at the office.
No one has time for family in Japan
When I watch yt videos about people leaving the workplace at 10pm, I wonder how suicide rate isn’t way higher
You can tell capitalism is super efficient and sustainable by how it totally collapses without fresh babies to sacrifice.
Thing is, we don’t really know what’s the reason for the current worldwide trend in much, much lower natality rate. We’ve observed in rich countries and poor countries, religious and atheist countries, capitalist and communist countries (both USSR and PRC, who have had very different economic systems), in countries with no safety nets but also in countries with large social programs, in western countries, but also in eastern countries.
The only thing I can think of these days is education level. Is it possible that education is inversely correlated with natality rates? Or maybe women in the workforce. I’m not arguing for either point, I’m just thinking about what the cause of a world-wide issue might be, because it’s happening everywhere and seemingly without any clear common cause.
Any system would collapse without newer generations.
I don’t think any social/political structure would survive without a birth rate
Which is why, in the U.S., the rich are turning back abortion rights and access to birth control, and gutting our public education. They could, instead, work to build a country where people felt safe, and supported–healthcare, jobs with decent wages, education, etc.–but the filthy rich are psychopaths who care only about themselves, and will do nothing that costs them money, power, and control. Instead, they’ll GLADLY watch the people (people they depend, incidentally, for what good is power and control, if there’s no one to wield it over?) suffer at great levels in attempts to achieve their goals.
It takes a lot of poor people to make one filthy rich person.
I mean, any system collapses if you don’t have the people to actively participate in it.
I’m not saying that as a defense of capitalism, more so as pointing out how dumb your comment is.
Lets see how China handles it down the road before we mark this one a problem of one specific system, rather than just humans seemingly sucking in sustainable long term planning on large scales in general.
Well, if you prioritize shareholder growth, before Support of children and make sure people have to work super hard to be able to sustain themselves and can’t afford to have a family… Then you should not be supervised that you don’t have any babies in the country
Progressives have made kids useless. In the distant past they could help carry firewood or gay bales around the homestead.
Industrial revolution fucked it up. Sure for a while you could send them down into the mines or get them sweeping chimneys but over time that got outlawed due to the increased danger these jobs involved.
Now, why bother having kids? You can’t do anything with them. Even worse, they play games like Minecraft. You are literally spending your money for them to virtually work in the mines where they don’t bring in any money at all!
The national pyramid scheme
Give them some days off.
I live and work in Japan, and it definitely is not a very condusive environment for younger Japanese people to have children. My wife and I are both foreigners, and we are in out late 30’s and just had our first. The country has some really great benefits and support services for having children, but we definitely would not be able to do this if we worked for Japanese companies, and with the Japanese work mentality.
While it IS getting better, work being the central pillar of life and the expectations from the older generations are still very much a thing. The long hours of paper pushing, the culture of promotion based on age and time served rather than innovation and hard work takes a toll on people. If you are not living in the office in your 20s to show your dedication, you are looked down upon, at least accoridng to my Japanese friends.
Immigration could help fix some of this. Japan is a desireable, largely affordable country, that is safe when it comes to raising children. Living here as a foreigner though has specific challenges, and your job prospects are pretty poor unless you are lucky, and access to housing and just general living can be challenging, even if you can speak Japanese.
I just got a new job in Kyoto, and I currently live in Tokyo. I would say around 40% of the houses we applied to look at would not even let us see the properties because we are foreigners. That’s 100% legal and totally ok to say here, and I take that in stride. In Australia (where I am from), they would either just tell you to piss off, or show you the property knowing you don’t have a chance, so at least they are upfront about it here I guess. Getting a credit card is a massive ordeal, which you kinda need here because debit cards are increasingly hard to find, and they don’t even work for all bills and systems, and getting a bank account … it all just snowballs.
Also anything outside of the major cities is kinda dead. I love it, but living and thriving there in places that have more space that would probably promote having big families, is nearly impossible, or at least impossibly boring. This is not unique to Japan, Australia is largely the same outside of the main cities.
Not sure what the fix is. But annecdotally I see these articles all the time, and yet there are kids and younger families always around, so not sure if it is as serious as they are saying, or more media hype?
Lived in Japan for many years, came back to the USA for many of the reasons you touch on. I knew a few foreigners who had non-English-teacher type jobs, but mostly, it was English teacher or English juku owner. The systemic issues, for young Japanese and for foreigners, in Japan really need to be dealt with if they have any hope of slowing their population decline. So, not going to happen.
Japan is never going to have enough immigration to significantly impact the population decline. Even back in the early 2000s, it would have taken millions of immigrants a year. Now, forget about it.
Living in inaka is not bad but not great either, for most people. So, tiny apartments in or near big cities or large houses in the middle of nowhere are pretty much the choices. Jobs in inaka? Fisherman, elderly care, sakaya, maybe some other generic retail for the eldest sons who couldn’t escape. And, of course, government jobs.
Re: media hype, yes there are still young people. But not enough. Societies need 2.1(-ish) children per couple to maintain population equilibrium. Japan, South Korea, Italy, and several other wealthy nations are way below that. Add in the Japanese propensity to live for a long time, and Logan’s Run becomes more and more thinkable each year. When the population pyramid becomes whatever shape parallel lines || are, the economics of a modern, wealthy society break down.
I gave a PD session for Japanese teachers back in like 2004 or so about why learning English would be helpful, because they might end up with a lot of immigrant children in their classes. (Or, I didn’t say, because you could use your English skills to look for jobs outside of Japan.) Of course, immigration barely happened, and many of those teachers are probably close to retirement age by now. So, my bad, I guess. Someone should do that PD today, because the situation is even worse now.
I am lucky enough to not have an English teaching job, and never have. But unless you are highly specialized, or somehow manage to start your own thing here, there seems to be limite scope as a foreigner to really have a strong career.
I am actually moving to Shiga Prefecture in a few days. It’s going to be a big change from living on the outskirts of Tokyo for the past six years. Excited to see how my perception of life in Japan changes from the move.
I’ve always had this silly dream of running a large, wealthy tech company, and attempting a startup in Japan, not reliant on business with other Japanese companies, that promotes a healthier work culture, and then stuffs the high productivity results in the faces of other companies. As a stretch goal, it could even locate out in the burbs, with an investment in better infrastructure access.
Japan has so many great things about it, but the major points around banking, sexism, and seniority really twist the image.
Its hyped by FT and more economy driven outlets because it makes them nervous. The replacement rate of births was always enough to support retirement pension plans. Now it’s not.
Japan is way ahead of the curve on this inevitable trend than other countries so it will be really interesting see how it adjusts and what markets are affected by this.
In terms of buying a house, is remote work really not a thing in Japan? Living in a remote village sounds lime a dream. Otherwise, are there no towns/villages where foreigners sort of band together and are allowed to buy property? Just curious about how Japan functions
Part of my YouTube diet is English-speaking expat YouTubers who live in Japan (UK, US, Canada, Australia), and just based on what they have shared there are some firms that specialize in property searches by foreigners. Not like “buy up a Japanese town and make it Australian”, just networking with more open-to-foreigner Japanese, and being an interface with foreigners to help them learn to integrate.
Like everywhere in the world, remote villages in Japan lack services. From restaurants to health care to home supplies, it’s more time consuming and expensive to get some things, and others are just not available. From the YouTubers I watch, the community connections enabled by the great mass transit and walkable urban areas in much of Japan (though not all - some parts ate the car-centric pill) are what keep them there, and the friction to maintaining friendships from a rural area has pushed several to move to Tokyo.
As far as “how is Japan adjusting” to population decline, elder care sucks. A lot of people die alone unnoticed (kodokushi). Markets adjust to lower supply of workers (Japan is at the cutting edge of automation), but quality of life for seniors can’t be automated.
I believe Japan has less inequality than the US. Not sure on that, but I think it’s true. I think in this case we see work culture playing a role. The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan. No one has time to even think about having kids when you are a company man there. It’s similar in the US.
It really is. In the US I mean. I work 6 days a week 9 am till whenever the fuck I’m done. Sometimes at 1pm and some nights I’m not home by 7pm.
Luckily I’ve negotiated less work orders on Saturday later in the morning so I have some kind of decline of work towards the end of the week. It took six years of constant work to get even that. Otherwise it’s 7 work orders a day and I drive around 150 miles a day. (I work in household appliance repair. So I travel from home to home.)
It’s a thankless job I get micromanaged in. The only advantage I have is that appliance repair techs are always in high demand because there’s so few of us and I’m good at my job so my boss can’t really fire me.
This is why we need to do something now. Japan has been unable to offer enough of the right incentives to turn their birthrate around so how do we do any better? Act now. They waited until they had a problem before trying to turn it around and it hasn’t worked. Social and economic inertia is very difficult to turn but maybe if we start now, we can have different results. Japan never had much immigration to fall back on but we can use that to buy more time. We have a chance as long as we keep encouraging and welcoming immigration…… shit
I’d be more interested in altering the material conditions that lead to low birth rates than relying on churning through the global population. We’re already doing immigration like you said and have been. It still sucks to live in these conditions.
Even as economist talk about the Lost Decade (really, two decades) in Japan, the unemployment rate has always been relatively subdued compared to the US:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LRUN25TTJPA156N
From about 1.7% in 1990, and then two spikes that just about reach 5.0% in 2002 and 2009. Not only that, but that’s the range for people 25-54 years old, which isn’t equivalent to the headline number typical in the US. There is an equivalent in published US data, and you can see it’s much higher and spikier than Japan:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000060
This doesn’t mean everything is OK for the working class in Japan. Housing prices are astronomical, requiring 100 year multi-generational loans. Working culture is also far more stressful. However, I think it’s fair to ask who the “Lost (two) Decades” is really affecting.
requiring 100 year multi-generational loans
This is the first I’ve heard of this and the fact that it’s real is insane to me.
Because it’s BS. It’s glaringly fake and calls into question the rest of the claims of the post.
Housing prices aren’t even insane, especially outside of Tokyo. And the property prices don’t even go up. AND you can get 35 year housing loans at under 1% interest. The main reason housing prices have gone up at all is that construction materials cost have gone up due to inflation, Ukraine war, covid supply and demand issues.
I guess it works pretty differently to our system where you borrow x money at y interest rate then? Because otherwise a slight interest rate change has a huge impact, or paying slightly more back would reduce the time to pay it by decades.
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan.
China too.
…and most other countries that aren’t in Europe.
The only country in the world with a worse work culture than the US is Japan
What about North Korea?
Not really relevant. I mean technically there are countries with child slavery so I guess if you want to entirely miss the point on purpose you could go with one of those.
I wasn’t really being serious, I knew you were talking about developed nations.
You mean The People’s Republic of Korea? They’re a communist utopia, aren’t they? /S
This problem is not isolated to Japan. Countries all across the world are facing the same issue and have been for a number of years.
Create a shitty, miserable, society with no rights or support, and people do not want to bring children into it… who’d guess?
The flannel has been wrung dry to the detriment of the working class; there is no where to go, no more water to squeeze from them. This is global society / capitalism falling apart.
Exactly its not some mysterious problem no matter how much the government and media try to frame it as one, people of the age to have kids have no time for kids and no money for kids so no wonder they have no desire for kids.
Even if they did want children, without the support systems, it may not be feasible for them to have kids. Having them might mean choosing to starve or go without a house.
Even if you’re in a country with a public health care system, a sick/young child means having to take time off work to care for them.
Countries all across the world
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Isn’t it interesting that the more “developed” countries have the lowest birth rates.
It’s what follows education. It’s the largely uneducated areas of the world that still raw dog like there’s no tomorrow.
Solid racism. Even if your correlation is “accurate” (according to imperial definitions/measurements of “education”), that’s not causation.
People also tend to have more kids when the life expectancy of their kids if very low. Colonized people have low life expectancy because their labor and resources are exploited by the privileged.
Pointing out an objective fact isn’t racism, it just is.
My understanding is that lower fertility follows higher female education for several reasons, including that women in school - and with access to birth control - prefer to wait until finishing school and starting a career before having children. Countries where women have fewer educational and fewer career opportunities, people often start having babies sooner, and more babies overall.
Another oft-mentioned factor is social safety nets such as social security (as much as that can count as a safety net). Areas with no or weak elder support outside of the family tend to have bigger families. Shockingly, this was also the case in the “developed” world back before they developed. Ask older adults in the USA how many brothers and sisters their grandparents had and it is probably a lot more than the next generation had, and the next, etc.
Do colonized people have lower life expectancy or do their children? Or both? Certainly, exploited people may also be living in (and unable to escape from) a society with poor elder care and insufficient safety nets such as social security or other retirement options. Which, of course, makes having lots of kids a totally rational decision. And also limits the ability of many women to participate in the economy outside of the home, which can also slow the development of the country / area’s economy.
So apparently under Sharia law, Muslim men can have anal sex with a girl under 8, and vaginal with a girl over 8.
And Muslims can openly lie about what is and isn’t true under Sharia law???
No, Muslims cannot openly lie about what is and isn’t true under sharia law. Islamic jurisprudence is a thing. It’s pretty important to Muslims to know what they can or can’t do.
There are different traditions (remember - there are Sunnis and Shias as the largest groups, some more obscure splinters, and splinters off of Sunni and Shia). Not everyone accepts the same Hadith, and there are, ya know, like more than thirteen centuries of interpretations and various schools. (Like, people get Islamic law degrees - that’s kinda why the medieval Muslim world was pretty well known for education, you needed the madrassas to be teaching people this stuff)
I have never heard the idea that anal sex was permissible in Islam. The Hadith cited in my link I think are direct enough that basically all traditions would accept them outright.
I don’t understand the 8 years old distinction bit (maybe something to do with the heinous child rape involved in bacha bazi - but that would not be considered permissible by Islamic scholars)
Capitalism is the best we’ve got. Even North Korea has acknowledged this. With other systems people starve en masse. My hope is that we get over the taboo of regulation. Capitalism fucks up real-estate and wealth distribution. And health-care should 100% be government funded.
Seems super likely that capitalism is going to be a major factor in our extinction. Maybe we could have a bit less of it and actually survive as a species
The major shareholders have voted down your proposal.
I actually agree with this. Capitalism presumes infinite resources.
It seems like you already understand some of the limitations of capitalism. Look into why regulation has gradually been rolled back in the US since the 70s. Why did politicians start to agree with corporate execs demands for lower regulation. Keywords to look up - regulatory capture.
On a separate point, there’s plenty of famines that have occurred in capitalist economies due to capitalist exploitation - that is make more money, at the cost of of creating a famine. Some estimates put the deaths due to famines under capitalism higher than those under socialism. I used to simply know only of the famines under socialism and not know of the famines under capitalism.
Finally the capitalism we live in since the Great Depression is significantly different than the capitalism before it. Socialists, actual Marxists in western counties, yes the US included, were actively involved in the policies that created the welfare states across the west along with the regulatory regime. Some of FDR’s economic advisors were Marxian economists.
That was the compromise to save capitalism from imminent worker revolution. The unregulated, no-safety-net version of the system had lead to the conditions for such revolution. The socialist policies that averted the revolution in have slowly been dismantled over time and the system is reverting to the pre-Great Depression state. Faster in some countries than others.
If you want to reform capitalism to the point where it can no longer revert to economic liberalism (free market fundamentalism), you’d have to almost completely eliminate wealth accumulation. You could only do that by changing the ownership of the means of production. E.g. all employees in all corporations become equal owners (or controllers) of the machines and therefore the decisions on sharing the wealth those machines produce, instead of those decisions being made by a tiny number of major shareholders. You’d also have to significantly expand the industries operated by the government. At that point you end up with socialism. And yes socialism doesn’t mean central planning and no markets. Capitalism doesn’t mean no central planning and just markets. We do plenty of central planning in capitalist economies across governments and large corporations.
I’m not asking you to change your mind today. Just pointing out a few things to look into in case you haven’t.
nothing about the idea of having children appeals to me in the slightest
Everyone has their opinions and circumstances, but anecdotally my time with children has been some of the happiest.
it’s a good thing some people like kids because otherwise im not sure what happens
I love my kids and my life with them. People who pridefully claim they don’t want children is similar to people being prideful of not eating pizza.
No one gives a shit about your preferences.
I love my kids and my life with them
No one gives a shit about your preferences.
That’s exactly what I’m saying
your preferences about my preferences can suck my balls
Some body get this guy a Netflix special. This joke is so good.
thanks
Me neither 😆 and now my son is 5 y old
We discovered him about 4 month after creation…
Not even the initial sexy time?
Making children :) Having children :(
i heard there’s more sexy time without kids
You heard right
Oh no, not our out of control population growth fueled by resources running out as I type this comment and causing unspeakable damage to the biosphere of the planet.
Whatever will we do if our numbers fall below 7 billion.
I don’t disagree, but the systems necessary to make this happen non-destructively just do not exist.
BTW, you may like the limits to growth study. https://archive.org/details/TheLimitsToGrowth
Although it is kind of a downer. In the 70s, they predicted the downfall of society. We’re on track with the prediction, more or less.
fear of decline
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Damn there must be so much evolution now
Clearly solid, factual, data there.
“It’s so expensive to have children in Japan that birthrate is further declining.”
I swear to God these people couldn’t connect the dots with a GPS.
Surely if they just instill good Christian moral values like forced birth, racism, and tribal isolationism all their problems will be solved.
I mean, Japan is one of the more isolationist countries on earth. And racism is a massive issue. Christianity isn’t a major factor, but traditional views on the roles of women and the set up of the household are a major challenge.
If you didn’t notice, those aren’t Christian values. They are christo-fascist values.
At least in the US those are basically the same thing
U.S dwelling Christian anarchist here.
I’m sorry for your terrible experiences with so-called “christians” that bought into the americapitalist death cult. Heck, politics aside, everyone’s had a run-in at some point. We’re embattled with those types, too.
But nah, there’s plenty of Christians here that actually read the source material and we’re trying our best out here.
We’re just harder to spot because we’re busy trying to love our neighbor(everyone) and facilitate peace and hope, imperfect as we may be. But we’re trying.
They don’t build mega/(maga?)churches for people like that. These folks don’t get featured on the news, or end up in positions of power, because if they get the chance, they talk about the “Love your enemies” and “The rich won’t enter Heaven” Jesus of the Gospel, not “supply-side God will make you rich Jesus.”
They’re not trying to force theocratic policy, or sling hatred, or act obnoxious in the streets, and they’re definitely not wearing stupid little red hats.
If you encounter one of us, you might not even realize it. If we’re doing a good job, we’re somebody who “looks like they could help.”, someone you can trust, and will show you an unusual amount of kindness for someone you barely know.
If it comes around to it, we’ll share the Bible as a gift, like how anyone nerds out about what they love, not use it as a bludgeoning instrument.
We’re incredibly angry about the State Religion calling itself “evangelical”, and we’re right there with you in opposing these monsters doing the works of Hell.
The churches of the early United States were straight up based. For real, the tophats and monacles of the day thought churches were a leftist threat, and basically systematically undermined them and warped them into capitalism’s ardent apologists we see today. (See: "Behind the Bastards: How the Rich Ate Christianity. It’s mind blowing.)
Anyway, much love, stay safe out there. ❤️
You associate how every you like but I wouldn’t just hand evangelicals the title they so desperately desire.
Ah yeah I assumed you meant the extreme interpretations of Christian values.
The problems over there are the same problems Americans are starting to rekon with. That’s why you see Vance and his ilk push for this fetishized version of the American dream where every MAGA male gets their own concubine. It’s fantasy and has the exact wrong chilling effect. As it’s trying to answer the same racist question, “more of us less of them.” While what they need is a healthy population which they refuse to recognize requires a diverse composition with plenty of resources.
I’m not sure why all the sarcasm. I mean, America’s problems have all been solved.
Is this supposed to be a jab at people criticising Christianity? Because the same problems can be found in non-Christian countries, does not mean Christianity didn’t have a role in what happened elsewhere
No, it’s describing how fascists all share similar beliefs, no matter what you call it or where they’re from.
I’m not sure how true this statement is. I go to Japan every year and the child care infrastructure there is incredible.
The healthcare is icredible - you can literally summon healthcare assistant if youe kid is sick at any point for free to your home
Then there’s incredible public transporatiob system, parks, everything is equipped with child support and even culture heavily respects kids so they can do most things independently.
I think they mean expensive time and desire wise and Japanese still work incredible hours many of which seem to actually negatively impact productivity. People don’t feel like such investment is worth it and tbh that could easily shift around with cultural changes but Japan is very allergic to those.
This is an interesting point. So apparently the problems of having that terrible working culture are solved for (ish) to promote procreation, but it’s not helping. Gee, I wonder if possibly creating a society of miserable people and making it easier for them to create more people they presume will be miserable doesn’t work because they just don’t want to do that.
But what about housing? If you live in a shoebox with no hope of getting a larger place, it’s unlikely that you’re gonna have kids.
Housing is pretty good in Japan outside of Tokyo, especially if you don’t mind a bit of a train ride
pretty much the same in korea, i think korea is slightly worst off, china is beginning to see its effects too, they already trying to change that by “encouraging more sex”, but they arnt solving the underlying issue, which is the one-child policy that devastated the female to male ratio and HCOL. and they also have harsh work ethic.
slightly worst off
worse* off
you know…I’ve been saying this in passing for the last decade and I’m starting to believe it.
the rich continue to rape the planet, spurning global warming on at an alarming rate. it’s almost like they don’t care about it–or rather they want it to happen.
When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
They don’t care about it getting worse. because global warming is their answer to every goal they have.
Climate change will:
- destabilize world governments
- drastically reduce world population
- displace millions, forcing them to migrate to safe zones
- allow them to capitalize on an opportunity to become “gods”
once half if not more of the planets population has died, the planet might start to regulate itself, though it will never be the same again.
I believe they are trying to take over the world and enslave humanity for their own benefit. climate change is just one of the many attacks they are throwing at the world right now.
We’re already slaves. They are just making it more obvious.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that they’re trying to assign a single point of blame to a complete systemic failure. The feeling is that if we can simply find out who is doing this and boil it down to one person or one group we can then simply attack that group and solve all our problems. That’s exactly the ox that fascism has yolked on its ride to power in every single generation.
Very well put.
I think it’s very natural to just want a threat to be known and made tangible.
Things are so insanely complicated, that fixing systemic issues feels insurmountable. It makes one’s head spin and feel rather helpless because it requires either power en masse or concentrated power in the right hands. Especially when there’s bad guys that defend and praise the broken system, but their elimination still wouldn’t fix it.
But man, if there was just some mustache-twirling mastermind in a lair somewhere sending out emails to all the other bad guys, and we took him out to save the world…Hooray! Much simpler! That would be a much more preferable scenario. A cinematic face-off against Skeletor / Palpatine / Rupert Murdoch / whatever, rather than trying to undo the corrupting influence of masses of oppressed people all thinking “But this broken system benefited me so it can’t be that bad bro.”
It’s not that there don’t care as much as they don’t believe it will affect them personally. They believe they their wealth will protect them.
I think plenty of them also think it’s far enough in the future that it won’t affect them (spoiler alert: it’s not)
They don’t care about it getting worse. because global warming is their answer to every goal they have.
It’s the classic “we don’t care if the valley floods, we live on the hill” mentality. They think that if/when the world devolves into chaos that they’ll be safe because they’re well off.
precisely, they want the valley to flood because the fields will be fertile and there will be less mouths to feed while they hold all the power.
Except climate change is a flood that won’t go away for 10,000 years. There is no ‘after’ for the rich to benefit from.
countries have mostly abandoned climate action change,
Elysium but in New Zealand
It was the government doing window guidance that caused their mess, how do you blame the people who made successful companies that gave Japan its first world living standard?
I blame the people for ignoring their responsibility towards humanity. just because you achieved success does not mean you get to stifle the progress of the world.
as the quote goes, “A rising tide lifts all ships.” when one person installs a levy and only allows their friends access, progress ends and the town(world) will die.
success is not greed, and these people are greed.
My first two kids were born in Japan, and they were actually pretty cheap. The local city gives you some money (a few thousand) when your child is born, and day care was good and super cheap, like $10 per day because it was subsidized.
It really wasn’t very expensive.
That an average situation? perhaps you were financially better off than the rest
I was better off, but this was an average government subsidized day care, a neighborhood Hoikuen (保育園). Everything else was just normal stuff. In fact, we didn’t qualify for the few thousand from the city office because we were ex-pats. Medical is free for Japanese. So where are the costs?
You can thank their housing market
Well it does get a lot more expensive when almost everybody wants to live in the same tiny square of the country Tokyo’s population will decline in 2035 according to some estimates
With Japan, they only have so much inhabitable land anyway. It’s a mountainous island where all viable land is already pretty much taken.
where all viable land is already pretty much taken.
Very much untrue, the actual issue with living away from one of the major cities is the same thing the US is dealing with: capitalism and a highway system (HSR there) encouraging suburban sprawl and the death of the small town. No need to visit 5 different shops in your small town if you’re going to pass a Donqi on your train ride into work. Then people eventually just move away from the smaller towns entirely to be closer to where the work and businesses are, and the cycle deepens
Although yeah, Japan is about 2/3 as big as California so it’s not as big as people think on top of that
If the Japanese want people to work 80 hour weeks (and go drinking with their boss every night) maybe they should make polyamorous marriage a thing. Kids are a lot easier to deal with if you have help.
From what i heard from people and read online, i really don’t understand how people even do that. Japanese work etiquette is bananas. But that aside, my job is somewhat high demand, but i draw the line at work hours. I work 42 hours a week and not a second longer. That opens up enough times for some hobbies, enough free time and everything. But if i had kids, most of that would be gone. So if you’re a work horse, you’re expected to give up everything, except work and raising kids.
Literally: they don’t go home, that’s how
Hearing about salary men sleeping on the streets or in train stations is one thing, but when I actually finally saw them in person it broke my fucking brain
Imagine the homelessness issues of a major Californian city but instead of homeless people it’s a bunch of clearly drunk dudes in suits who all vanish by morning
My wife cried hard because the realization hit that hard
That’s certainly a take on “family business”.
Yeah. Only rich people should have exclusive access to women.
You seem sarcastic, but biologically speaking, the children of rich parents are much more likely to be born rich themselves. Isn’t that a direction we want to evolve into for humanity, given that being born poor has so many negative outcomes?
me and my ex already both tested poor before we had our first baby, so we went ahead with the abortion because the dotor determined he was going to be born poor anway
biologically speaking, the children of rich parents are much more likely to be born rich themselves
Bro, what? Biologically speaking? What are you talking about?
The kids of rich people are rich because their parents are rich. They grow up to be rich because they have their parents wealth, which they either use to create more, or just stay rich.
The fact that they’re rich has nothing to do with their “biology”.What are you proposing anyway? That only rich people procreate and then somehow eventually everyone will be rich? If you can do simple math like addition and subtraction, you’ll realize that that scenario is not possible.
Plus wealth generally means power and connections, all of which makes it easier for someone to get wealthy.
Microsoft would almost certainly have never become what it is if Bill Microsoft wasn’t wealthy enough to have a family computer ahead of most people being able to have one at home, and his mother wasn’t friends with an IBM chair.
Naturally, IBM would be much more likely to hire someone who comes with the recommendation of a higher-up than Afferige Mann, who is applying based on an ad in the paper, and has only worked retail.
Plus wealth gives a safety net. It didn’t matter for Bill if the first few Microsofts failed, he can try again until he hits it big. Afferige has non-such luck. If he starts a company and it folds, he may not have the money to start another.
That’s a form of eugenics. More specifically, it would be classed as “positive social eugenics”.
Clarification
The use of the term “positive” does not mean it is a “good” thing. It just means that individuals with percieved “desirable” traits are encouraged to mate more than the “undesirables”. Conversely, an example of negative eugenics would be murdering/sterilizing the “undesirables”.
“Social eugenics” simply means that the “desirable” trait is not genetic, but rather a social construct, in this case wealth.
If we can all be rich, then sure.
Otherwise it’s just a tool to breed average people out of the gene pool. The end result are rulers and servants. Guess which one your kids will be.
Keep in mind, the only reason why some people don’t have enough is because others have too much.
I think we all largely get what you’re speaking to but I feel compelled to highlight that you can’t breed average people out. “Rulers” and “servants” are social classes, and not “in the gene pool.”
The message got a little muddled there.
that you can’t breed average people out.
Actually, you can. I’m referring to the middle class and their increasing difficulty in raising a family. A significant amount of them are choosing not to, which literally means they don’t get to carry on their lineage.
I’m not going to get into the whys, but very poor people do not have the issue with reproducing that the middle class has.
There is no “middle class”. There’s labor and capital. You’re either serving or getting served. I know very well where I’m at. :/
Duckduckgo “myth middle class” and take your poison of choice.
That’s not entirely true.
People in the middle class have disposable income that lower class people do not. Many of them have enough wealth to live comfortably for the rest of their lives without ever having to work again.
I didn’t know KenM had a lemmy account!
