Thursday, March 31, 2011
A (Different) Crisis In Japan
While, for obvious reasons, everyone's mind is on the aftermath of the disastrous earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan, today I'd like to bring another problem in Japan to your attention, one with potentially far worse effects in the long term. I speak of underpopulation. Though the world was in the midst of a looming overpopulation cris which peaked during the 1970s and 1980s, uin developed countries around the world, birthrates have declined and net population is beginning to (or will soon) drop rather than increase with time. In the United States, this has not happened yet, as the net population growth rate is still positive (according to the CIA World Factbook, about 0.963% per year.) This current growth is expected to extend into the future, with the US population expected to reach about 400 million by 2050. Japan, however, is in a very different sitauation. Its population is aging rapidly and its birthrate is extremely low, the second lowest in the entire world. It only ranks ahead of the small nation of Monaco. The immediate effects of this problem are transforming Japanese society. Schools all across the nation have been boarded up and sold, as there are no children to fill them. Companies are beginning to have labor shortages from the lack of workers. The repercussions are for more expansive than just this, and despite Japan's leadership in the field of robotics (which help aid the gap in labor by reducing the number of jobs needed, which, paradoxically, may be a good thing in this situation), the country is beginning to feel the effects of having a declining population. The problem has a few possible solutions. One solution, which I mentioned before, is an advancement in robotics. These advances will allow Japan's economy, which is by no means struggling, to become even more efficient and productive despite a declining labor force. Another solution that is more practical in the short term is to bring in workers from other areas to replace the lack of labor. However, Japan's incredibly stringent immigration policies and distrust of foreigners make this concept politically distasteful to implement. What do you guys think? If you were in a senior position in the Japanese government, what might you propose as a good solution to the problem? Does this situation surprise you, since a labor surplus has been the way of life for essentially all nations for much of recorded history? How likely do you think it is that Western Europe or the United States could face a similar problem in the future? --- *Clicking on the title will take you to the CIA World Factbook statistics on Japan's population.
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4 comments:
I, for one, didn't know about Japan's declining population, so this article was very interesting and new to me when I came across it. I think that in order to fix this problem, Japan needs to let foreigners into its labor force because it seems that only then will Japan's economy be able to carry on well. Even if they made robots, robots can always break down whereas people won't as easily since they're not machines. I don't think that the United States would have this problem as we always have immigrants coming in and generations of people remaining in the nation too.
Underpopulation has long been a problem in Japan. To possibly resolve and alleviate some of the side effects of this problem, Japan could offer incentives (i.e. tax benefits, cheaper medical care or services) to encourage citizens to have more children. Either that, or Japan could overcome their distrust of foreigners and allow more of them to become Japanese citizens. However, I don't really see this happening in the near future as the Japanese are rather selective with their citizenship process and almost associate a cultural/ethnic tie with citizenship.
robotics?.... how bout having some kids and starting a family earlier...
i remember watching a documentary on this in environmental sciences...
part of the problem really is the ambitions of most of its people....both men and women get caught up in there careers so much they forget to have kids in their 20's.
for men... well there's that not much of a biological clock ticking... but for women... yeah.. there is...
but the take away is... every couple needs to have about 2 kids for replacement level fertility to exist in a population.
"no matter what you accomplishment for yourself or for humanity... if you haven't shown the love and attention to your family that they deserve... what have you really accomplished?"
-raymond lim
I remember seeing a video about this in my APES class. How Japan's population was decreasing rapidly. I remember seeing schools close down just because there weren't enough students because of how few children there were. I remember a part of the movie where there was only one student in his whole class. I think that depopulation is a serious problem economically because it can lead to less workers which would mean less products for sale. I think that since Japan's population is decreasing so rapidly, they should have people with countries whose population is increasing rapidly should have those people move to Japan. This would mean that the Japanese government would need to be less strict about their immigration policies and be able to trust foreign countries.
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