Japan and South Korea and many other countries are experiencing national demographic crisis due to falling birth rates. In 2023, Japan’s fertility rate was 1.367, which is far below the 2.1 children per woman needed for population stability. South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.7 in the second quarter of 2023.
Japan and Korea leaders have declared national emergencies around these issues. They have spent billions over the past 20-30 years and plan to spend tens of billions. However, Nextbigfuture believes the programs have already been flawed and inadequate. Japan’s problem is not just that they have already dropped from a peak of 128 million people to 122 million today and are headed to 100 million people in 2050.
If you are drowning, then going from twenty feet underwater to ten feet underwater is nice but you want to be breathing at the surface all the time. Being below replacement birth rate means that mothers are not replacing themselves with a daughter. The mother ages out around 30. It is still possible to have a baby after 30 but the percentages start dropping a lot especially if the women does not have a partner yet and they are not already trying. Twenty years of 1.1 or less fertility rate means that the country has half as many fertile women for the next generation.
Japan’s total fertility rate, the number of children a woman has in her lifetime, likely fell to about 1.2 in 2022, the lowest in 17 years. Getting to replacement of 2.07, we would need a 73% increase in birth rates. Instead of 800,000 babies per year there would need to be 1.38 million.
Japan needs to define the problem that they need to get at least an additional 580,000 babies born in 2023 and another 580,000 to 600,000 babies born in 2024. Every day, every week and every month they can check the hospitals and see that they had maybe 60,000 to 70,000 babies in a month but needed to have 50,000 to 60,000 more that month.
Japan is touting the “success” of a small city. Akashi’s population has grown for 10 years in a row to over 300,000. As of 2021, women here had an average of 1.65 kids compared to 1.3 children nationwide. Many Akashi residents credit the city’s success to Fusaho Izumi, the city’s mayor from 2011 until April.
Yes, 1.65 is better than 1.3. However it is still far less than 2.07. It is also one city and not the whole country. It is like a country in WW2 saying look we only lost 20% of out troops in one battle and not 50%.
Izumi notes that he doubled the city’s child care spending not by increasing taxes, but by cutting spending on public works. He insists Akashi’s success can be replicated nationwide, but he doesn’t think that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plan will do the trick. Kishida has pledged to double Japan’s spending on child care by the early 2030s. He’s promised bigger subsidies for families with kids, more spending on education and medical care for children with disabilities. He’s not said exactly where the money will come from to pay for all this. Kishida highlighted the urgency of the issue in a June 1 speech. In the current generation, only 25% of households have children. That means the other 75% don’t have children. Therefore, for lots of people, this is someone else’s problem.
This is supposed to be an URGENT national emergency. This is a national emergency than has been happening since the early 1970s. Japan’s women and families stopped replacing mothers with daughters in 1974. This is falling below replacement of women with daughters. Japan’s entire economy peaked in 1995. The economy is down about 20% in less than 30 years ago. In the same 30 years the US economy has tripled its GDP.
The Prime Minister is saying it is important but the measures are to try and replicate a “success” to get to 1.65 fertility in the 2030s.
It is like Soviets saying in WW2. Ok, we have lost 500 miles of land to the Nazis. We will take ten years to slow down their annual advance by half. This is not a plan to win, it is not a plan to stop it is a plan to lose and die slower at some number of years later…maybe if we are lucky.
The urgent plan is to rapidly increase incentives every month until there are replacement level babies in a month. In Japan, this is about 120,000 per month and in China it is 1.5 million per month instead of 800,000 per month. The incentives need to stay at that level to sustain the replacement level of babies every month. The incentives can be reduced or modified after the data indicates adjustments can be made to be more efficient while sustaining the mathematically correct level.
An urgent problem needs to have short time frame metrics. It cannot be decade or more long metrics. If you were fighting an avalanche or a flood, then actions would be measured in fractions of a second and not minutes or hours, let alone days or years.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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Really good podcast on the issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwIeDuHwXJY
We’re in dire trouble.
Seems to me we need one of:
-Some strong inducement for young women to have kids even if they don’t serve as mothers – perhaps get grandparents to raise them, perhaps make university free to those who have babies and expensive to those that don’t. Want intelligent women to have more kids.
-High tax advantage to having kids – eg drop income tax by 5-10% for every kid you have
-Cheap or even free suburban housing for people who have kids, perhaps no-interest mortgages etc. Families with young kids need larger urban houses with many bedrooms and yards, adults and elderly with no kids don’t. Could be done using land rather than income taxes (with tax breaks for families) as primary method of taxation
-Cheap/free state provided childcare to make it possible for people to work and remove cost penalty of having kids for families.
-Changes in car seat laws or development of cars that make it logistically possible to have more than 3 kids (actually a significant impediment to having children in added time it takes to go anywhere with kids).
-Focused research on extending age range of female fertility.
Beg to differ – you absolutely COULD push people to have children by surtaxing them until they have them (or prove they can’t, if we want to be kind).
Incels of both sexes would jump on ‘Match’ to post “Looking to permanently reduce my taxes. You too?? Let’s chat.”
Just because you’d like to have no or low taxes, doesn’t mean every problem would automatically be solved by having no or low taxes. People aren’t going to increase their preference to stay at home with 2 or 3 children for a dozen years just because you reduce taxes on everyone. Child care for working couples might be more affordable with generally lower taxes – but there are more enjoyable ways to spend tax savings.
The fundamental problem with crashing population rates is that the people who understand why it is a problem are not the people in power. The people in power hate humanity and view depopulation as a net positive.
then why is crashing population rates a problem? (i would assume ‘crashing’ means a new ‘equilibrium’ below 1B, not extinction).
Does anyone believe that the current world is Good and that adding indiscriminate extras is making it Better? Most countries are garbage and many people within even the good countries are also.
Almost everyone I talked to is happy with their children but would have had less or later or prepared better, if they could go through it again.
Most old people could have worked longer, better, and happier with better planning to achieve less dependence/ costs on others during long-term care. Most people could have functioned and saved fine if they knew they weren’t getting a pension.
There is nothing more that I would appreciate than a world with 50B on it, if i believed there was widepsread modern, self-reliant, techno-focussed, industrious people on it with great potential, all contributing to family units of 5+ each amongst gorgeous natural splendor, possibly sending many off world. It would be great if the continent of Africa had 20B on it, most highly advanced farmers with custom, productive agricultural products they exported at great profit, amongst huge natural preserves and quiet, widely distributed, peaceful, semi-rural populations.
But that is not the trajectory our world is on. Huge and increasing wealth/tech re-distribution, widepread violence and conflict using more nefarious weapons, and just an utter disinterest in modern technologies, productivity, and mutual success are the trends. We need a re-set in the form of a slow reduction, consolidation, and re-think. Obviously, near-free energy, vastly better agriculture, vastly better medicine, and pollution-free/closed-cicuit manufacturing will be the black-boxes that accelerate whatever culture of work-focussed individualism, and self-interested succes can fianlly persevere and become the dominant system. Humanity will never collapse short of an external apocalypse – the resilience is just way too high. It’s just that people are so distracted by the pettiness and backwardness of their local condition that they are unable to become independent and productive.
For the Japanese to have more children they have to change their work culture. Work should be 8hr/5days and no drinking after work for married men. They must go home to their families.
Simple solution, *strong* incentives. Like fully subsidize the majority of costs of new children (free school/healthcare, food/housing credits/etc), then for every percentage below 2.0, let in that many more immigrants.
If people want less immigration at that point, have more kids.
Why do you care about China fixing their birth dearth when you have other articles on the front page cheer-leading the new cold war with China? Cold war increases the odds of hot war and that means lots of dead Chinese.
All this is meaningless nonsense. Automation will increase in the coming decades. There will be no new work. Unlike the 19th and 20th centuries, there will be no services sector into which you can go after the factory. Any work at some point will be automated faster than people will study it. Everyone who lives now and does not have multimillion-dollar capital, and therefore machines in the future, is ballast (except for prostitutes). All of them will be on welfare; they will all drag the economy to the bottom in 15 years. The sooner they grow old and die, the better. Previously, the number of workers provided the scale of production of goods and services, now it will be almost just machines. Previously, workers could receive a salary; with their salary they bought the goods they produced. To buy these goods, they worked even harder for you and produced even more goods. Loop of positive constant stimulation for work.
Now this is not necessary. A complex of machines becomes a subject of the economy, and complexes of machines will also to become consumers of goods. The economy will be transformed into an exchange of goods between the owners of the means of production (and the state too), and the basic needs that will be satisfied in the market are the needs of the owners and their machines.
Even if you find financial incentives that are enough to bring the fertility rate up to a maintenance level, you then have to worry about second order effects.
The Nazis gave eugenics a bad name, but that doesn’t mean that genetics stopped being real. As a society, we can’t afford to ignore the inevitable results of paying stupid people with destructive value systems to produce the next generation. Culturally, any society is only a single generation away from ruin, and assortative mating combined with high reproduction rates by the least intelligent could run the average IQ down to disastrous levels in only a couple generations.
Unfortunately, the people who are most responsive to financial incentives are the people you least want reproducing, or raising the next generation. They’re generally poor people who raise their children with values that only lead to perpetuating poverty.
We need to find a way to encourage reproduction by people who SHOULD be reproducing, child raising by people who SHOULD be raising children. And to ameliorate the genetic and cultural costs of reproduction by the poor. That’s an even tougher problem than just bringing up the raw numbers.
I think ultimately the solution is going to require some combination of artificial wombs, android nannies with social AI, and maybe subscription gametes and/or germ line enhancements. Allowing people who have already demonstrated track records of success to reproduce later in life without hugely reducing their living standards, and people who are less qualified to produce high quality offspring.
There are obvious traps here, like the nannies being used to indoctrinate the next generation with possibly even more destructive values on account of the programming being captured by smart lunatics or government bureaucrats.
I think the bottom line is that we’re NOT fixing this problem this year. We’re facing at least a few decades of declining population and distorted demographics before we have the tools we really need. We’re looking more at designing and constructing a life boat, than we are at righting the ship.
It is simple (and the major got it semi-right):
reduce taxes (taxes are paid by productive people to maintain unproductive people) on the working people.
Stop imposing foolish taxes and regulation over people:
E.G.
London fee to enter imposed to working people with old cars).
The reality is the Western (Japan too) system of government support government extracting wealth from the middle class to support the wealthy supporter of the government (first) and the poor voting for the government (second).
When working people are taxed 80-90% of their income in a way or another and the rest is destroyed by inflation of the currency, there is no way to stave off the collapse.
The productive will leave, in a way or another, Stopping reproducing or emigrating somewhere else.
This will continue until the society will collapse over itself. Then there is nothing else to steal and people is force to leave working and not stealing from their neighbour or the future.
Well, long term (and I am not sure how long term, but it may be shorter that we would expect) children may be created in virtual reality environments and never even be embodied in the material world unless their occupation or their society demands it.
Such a process may even use virtual DNA, derived from that of the parents DNA (whether real or virtual), but, if it did, when printed out, and a new body printed from it, it would probably be something like in the movie Gattaca. Why not use the the best combination of virtual gametes you can come up with? And that, of course, is assuming no one cheats and tries to make GMO people–would that even be a bad thing in VR? I honestly don’t know.
And all of that assumes they even bother to play at virtual DNA and don’t just skip using any sort of DNA at all. Which further blurs the line between human and AI.
Too weird? Maybe not weird enough? I have no idea. But the folks in the future have to make their own decisions. They will anyway, even if we felt we had the right to tell them otherwise.
You know what made the Baby Boom?
Living wages
Exactly.
No incentives.
No subsides.
No services.
Just leave them the wealth they create.
Why are you talking about people like they are a stock of cattle to be bred?
Do you people belong the breeding stock, or are you outsiders, just observing?
Why is underpopulation even a problem?
How can there be underpopulation when the total number of people on earth is growing?
If you’re shot out of a cannon, how can you worry about falling while you’re still going up?
“How can there be underpopulation when the total number of people on earth is growing?”
Tell me you can’t think more than a few years ahead without telling me that you can’t think more than a few years ahead.
“Why is underpopulation even a problem?”
Every developed economy with a social safety net has an assumption that younger workers will pay taxes to fund the retirement of the elderly. Shrinking populations lead to financial ruin.
“Do you people belong the breeding stock, or are you outsiders, just observing?”
Raising two kids in California where the price of living is extremely high. Having children means making real financial trade offs. To answer your question I suppose that I am both the breeding stock and an observer and neither position would invalidate the argument.
Thank you for reminding me of why my grandparents left Sweden.
Bringing replacement up to 1.5 – 1.7 seems doable with tried incentives.
How about manipulating the ratio of females/males born so that there are 66% females?
This can be done with incentives and normal IVF methods.
1.6 replacement with 66% females should do the trick and not tax the eco systems too much long term.
I’m glad that people are finally talking about this idea.
Three more points to add:
1. You need a fertility clinic, but you don’t actually need IVF. Apparently there’s a way to separate male from female sperm. It’s cheaper, so that helps.
2. Statistically, the life outcomes of daughters of single mothers are much better than the life outcomes of sons of single mothers. This provides an incentive to some mothers to try for a girl.
3. Countries with large numbers of single young men tend to be more unstable and have more crime. Nudging the gender ratio towards women will probably lead to safer, more stable societies.
Well, that would certainly complete our transition into being a matriarchy.
Scarce resources are more costly resources. 2x more women than men (66% vs 33%) means men become much more valuable.
Lets learn from China’s mistake and not fiddle with gender ratios although I am reminded of certain lines from the ending of Dr. Strangelove.
It is not the rate, the problem.
It is the tax level and the fact working, productive people, are sucked dry.
The cattle is not reproducing enough because their owner is sucking their blood dry.
What kinds of people are still having more than 2.07 children, sometimes a lot more?
– The poor, who don’t plan ahead for anything so they don’t practice birth control and pregnancy just happens…
– The religious fundamentalists, of just about any religion except the Shakers. Women in those religions are expected to stay at home and raise the children, while men work and, critically, can earn enough and/or have a supportive community or if not, the state picks up a lot of the tab for raising children.
– Superwomen: There aren’t many, but from a reproductive POV, here are a few: Sarah Palin (5 kids), Nancy Pelosi (5), Amy Cohen Barret (7, but 2 were adopted but adoption from parents who can’t take care of their children encourages them to have children too, so that’s a net positive). There are others, though in general the number of children is inversely proportional to success of women, which is why, when they have a choice, they choose not to have so many children.
– People who watch less TV, play fewer video games, interact with people more. This ought to be obvious, but it’s rarely talked about in high consumer-oriented societies because those societies count on consumers to buy stuff all the time, which works at cross purposes to having children. Exception: Las Vegas where people get wild and drunk, then have snap weddings they regret, but after conception occurs.
– TBD. Places where artificial baby-making is highest, maybe including artificial wombs someday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2RIvJ1U7RE but currently surrogates, free IVF, egg-freezing, etc. Overall, such societies are usually below replacement level, but these options do help individual parents-to-be.
None of these things have a lot to do with government incentives. The countries with the most incentives, like those in Europe and Japan and South Korea, are having the lowest birth rates. Social norms in those countries encourage hedonistic spending, not saving for children, so they are contradictory.
But is it worth it? Societies would have to regress a lot, particularly for women. Think Nigeria (5.28 average), not Japan, Afghanistan (6.6 average), not Germany (I’m leaving off immigration here because that just robs poor but fecund countries for rich, low pop growth countries, including America). Where would you rather live?
A much better idea would be to get far more out of the people we already have. The brutal truth is at least 1/4 of people are useless eaters, taking more than they are giving to society (the recently retiring Mitt Romney said it 49% who were takers in the 2012 presidential election, but he was speaking to a roomful of fellow rent-seekers, so what else would he think?). But these are often the kind of people having lots of kids. Perhaps we are headed for an Idiocracy, as in the cult hit movie by the same name; it’s not so far off. Of course such people complain about social lack of support for all their children, but they keep having them, and the taxpayers who pay the most taxes don’t want to pay for them, no matter what their government might proclaim in public.
Not sure if it feasible either. Combining incentives with increasing taxation on people that don’t bring children is more economically feasible. What is needed to be realized is that population decline is an avoidable result of a long living mega society civilization. This has happened in Rome as well. Only a return to a society based on small, participatory, self sufficient, fairly distributed societies will resolve this as well as other ailments humanity faces.
Solution seems pretty simple – since incentives don’t work well enough, try DIS-incentives.
– Tax singles who haven’t yet had any kids, or who aren’t financially supporting at least 50% of their offspring’s needs (i.e. deadbeat parents).
– Tax married couples slightly less if they haven’t had children yet. (No exemption for infertility, but subsidize successful fertility treatments.)
– Tax married couples who have only one child, about half as much as singles.
Toss net revenues into a sovereign wealth retirement fund, to cover retirees who won’t be supported adequately by children or workers. So if the disincentives don’t work either, at least you’ll have a big fund to pay for retirees.
You can not push the right people to have children when you surtax them when they had none (before forming a family).
We cannot breed human like chickens.
In Hungary a woman who has four children pays nothing in income tax over the duration of her life. Two children means only 50% of normal tax. This is the way.
Singles without children are already taxed to death, at least where I live.
Singles without children are already taxed to death, at least where I’m from.
I’d actually advocate for letting the species die off before I tried to force people to have kids who don’t want them.
We are all the results of an unbroken chain of lifeforms extending back billions of years that all managed to reproduce at or above the replacement rate.
A few downward generations is nothing as long as it stops before it is nothing, and I have faith it well.
Problem is monetary incentives don’t really work. The problem is deeper than money. It’s about lifestyle, and education, and career, and the difficulty of finding a partner in the modern world.
The only proven way to increase the birth rate is religion. The Amish have 6-7 kids. The ultra orthodox (Haredim) in Israel have 7-8. There are no modern secular societies I can think of that have maintained a replacement birth rate.
More than religion, people need faith in the future to want to breed.
The influence of the greens climate hysteria has been much more pernicious than most people believe.
If people don’t believe the future is worth it and have a choice in the matter, they stop breeding new people.
We have had periods of terrible future outlooks before, but humans endured because they had very little choice in the results of sexual intercourse. And they also had a strong faith telling them their and their kids’ life was worth it, as a trial for going to heaven or whatever.
We have neither and we will see the price of having relative high comfort but still believing life isn’t worth bothering.
This is not a mere philosophical pose. I recall seeing somewhere, that there are/were newly uncontacted tribes in the Amazon (no previous Christian influence) with a strong animistic belief that life is hell, preferring by a long shot the spirit world they can reach with their traditional methods (Ayahuasca). Unsurprisingly, they had very high suicide rates and were on the verge of disappearing just by this belief.
Actually, monetary incentives HAVE been shown to work. The problem seems to be that governments are too cheap to make them big enough to get the job done.
Which is a pretty weird problem when you consider how much they’re willing to spend on stupid things. Why, you’d almost think they don’t believe it’s actually a big deal, so long as they can just encourage more immigration by third worlders.
Actually, monetary incentives HAVE been shown to work
(Citation needed)
It isn’t a weird conundrum when you realize that western governments are beholden to an antihumanistic ideology.
Literally 20% of the 50M Filipinas would move to Japan and Korea immediately if those countries wanted the breeders. Filipinos often joke that the cure for poor is “Japan Japan”.
Educated women tend not to have a lot of offspring when they feel that their economic quality of life isn’t high enough to have more offspring. If wealthy individuals like Elon Musk believe women should be having a lot more babies then he should create such conditions by creating free child care for his employees and by substantially increasing the wages he’s paying his employees.
A ghost town out of The Walking Dead would convey the message better.
We are not drowning in people, but with a dearth of them.
One fundamental cause of the problem in Japan is how the entire domestic economy is set up to extract money out of you every time you turn around. These costs are exponentially greater for those who have kids. The Japanese government may call it an “emergency”. But until they tackle this issue, they will never make any headway on the issue.
I am much less familiar with South Korea. But I think their domestic economy is similar to Japan’s. They also have another factor that will likely drive their birthrate to zero. That is the policy that many companies have of mandatory retirement at age 50, whether you have enough money to retire independently wealthy or not. Young Koreans will view this policy as motivation to save enough money not to work after age 50, which means cutting the overhead (marriage and family) first and foremost.
We have similar issues in the U.S. Both our health care and education fields are constructed to extract as much money as possible, with minimal results. In contrast, the cost of everything from flat screen TV’s to international travel have declined significantly relative to mean income over the past 40 years.
It is simply amazing how many people, on both the left and the right, do not understand economics as an issue motivating people to have or not have kids.
As Glenn Reynolds would say, “Incentives matter.”.
An unchecked assumption in such demographic analysis is why not use precisely these crises to engage in selective breeding and let lower performing and crime-prone families go extinct?
Wouldn’t this lead to a more productive economy in the long run?
Maybe “depopulation crisis” with a picture of a single woman alone in a desert?
When you use the term “population crisis” most people automatically assume you mean overpopulation. And your picture here is of somebody underwater, so people you are taking about drowning in people. Since the crisis you are taking about is depopulation rather than overpopulation you need to work on your messaging.
Good point. 6000 african migrants turned up on the Italian island of Lampedusa in one day this week. (Normal population 5000). Most people don’t see the problem of too few babies.