Society/Culture Japan population crisis

[kranky al]

You are being a bit defeatist. The structural barriers that you allude to are there. But we are also seeing the emergence of personal choices not to have children becoming quite a dominant force. It's become much more accepted to place career progression in front of family commitments.

This will have the consequences of a reduced tax base and fewer people of working age to manage what will be an increasing demand on health and social security services for an all too overrepresented senior population.



There is only so much a turn around in economic conditions can do without there also being a turn around in societal attitudes towards actually having and raising children.

Why do you think people are placing career over kids?

Could it possibly be that’s their only chance to achieve any sort of financial stability? That kids would end any chance of that?

 

[Episode IV]

This issue is something I follow pretty closely. I will make some comments from my perspective.

There are two main sets of drivers for the lower than normal fertility rate.

1 - Those issue common with other developed countries.
The first set of drivers are very similar to the issues we see playing out in Western Europe, where birth rates are collapsing. These are things like the progress of women in the workplace, governments continuing the cradle to grave subsidy of those born 1946-60, rising rates of tertiary education, availability of contraception, higher cultural expectations of the time spent with kids and so on. You can throw a few more on this stack. Interestingly one thing you can't throw on is expense. Japan is a very cheap place to have a kid. A month worth of childcare fees in Tokyo wouldn't get you two days of care in Sydney. Another thing you can't throw on is education. The government is highly committed to both quality AND consistency of quality in the government sector (these are different concepts). This means that if you have kids in Japan you don't have to pay for private education to get quality and you don't have to waste anywhere nearly as much time in checking the comparative quality of government schools. That peters out a little in high school, but is not a factor at all in the lower grades. I could go on about education here but I wont.

Outside Japan commentary is really drawn to this first set of drivers. Its what we understand and there are a lot of "things people say" about fertility rates. It is common discussion fodder for industry groups, educators, gender activists, family activists. We often read articles talking about family discount, baby bonuses and cheaper childcare... even though very powerful models of those things have already been implemented.

2 - What is unique to Japan
The second set of drivers requires a bit more background to understand, and therefore does not get a running in foreign media. These are the drivers that Japan experiences on top of the first set. It starts in the aftermath of WW2. The country was broke. The occupying government and the budding modern parliamentary Japanese government had to rebuild Japanese society.

Taking a step back, in every country households and individuals have a different relationship and get different things from different parts of society. EG in the UK social housing comes from the local government. In the US health insurance comes from the employer / whereas we have medicare. The risk of unemployment might be dealt with by insurance or a government agency. etc etc. So what did this look like in 1946 Japan? The government had no money so a sector had to be pinned with everything.

That sector was the employer. (For reasons I will not go into) Everyone knew that employment would be very strong in postwar Japan. Employers were begging highschool graduates to join them. So government just threw all responsibilities at the employer. Unemployment? No, just legislate to force employers to keep staff to retirement age. First house.... company dormitory. Second house? Company apartment. Further education? Company scheme. Health insurance? employer scheme. it goes on and on.

Japanese workers almost became citizens of their companies. Ever wondered where Japanese company loyalty came from? Employment supported their life like no other place in the world. Getting one of these jobs was like winning the lottery. Like literally, the net present vale to a high school leaver was pretty much like a lottery win. It still is for some. Life is safe, secure and prosperous as long as you had a proper full time job. These jobs are called seishain. They were a dime a dozen back in those days.

So if you had seishain in the 60s, 70s, 80s... you were in a first world country. All the things that supported modern life came from these jobs. Those without seishain were not really living a first world life. They had fallen through the cracks and were living a much meaner life than people who fall through the cracks in Australia or western Europe. But there were so few of them.

But then.... (ominous piano music). In the 80s we had rapid technological advancement. We also had corporate finance, with raiding, mergers, acquistions in the western world. It meant that Japanese companies were presented with competitive challenges they were poorly able to respond to. They couldn't rapidly change their skill base by losing 1000 workers here and hiring a different 1000 there. And then the crash came. Japanese business was in crisis.

Japanese business lobbied government for change. And they were granted it in the early 90. the change was a type of labour market flexibility. Laws were relaxed and companies were allowed to hire more and more people on limited contracts. These are called keiyakushain. No tenure. No benefits. Rolling one year or three month contracts. Not even an invitation to company parties in most cases. And it wasn't a one off. While conditions did not deteriorate for seishain workers, the proportion of new workers hired under keiyakushain arrangments increases every year.

The gap in society between seichain and keiyakushain is massive. If you start as keiyakushain, you are roughly only a 20% chance of changing to seishain. You are not living in the first world. You can't commit to anything. you can't buy a house. You are not getting married (don't forget the more transactional nature of marriage in Japan). You are not having kids. And it is an ever increasing proportion of the Japanese workforce. All childbearing age ranges are now saturated with high levels of keiyakushain workers. Childless.

One of the great ironies is when some western journalist tries to explain low birthrates by pointing to long hours in the workplace and poor work life balance. The reality is that those are the exact blokes who are still having kids. Its the young people without the long hours that are not having kids.

Like the Australian housing market, government is faced with a choice bewteen fixing a major problem OR doing what makes life easier for baby boomers. You know where this is going.

(will reread and clean up)

Very nice post indeed. Thanks for the meal.

Plenty to consider (and research) in there. As you've suggested, though, while the same symptoms (in this case, the topic of falling birthrates and effects of such on economic growth) may be present in first-world nations globally, the root causes of those symptoms may be completely different.

The paragraph I've bolded is one of the most important example with respect to making comparisons with Australia. Two questions which spring to mind are: is that reality applicable here (in terms of the long term, grounded workforce having the kids), and the use of the term "work life balance" itself - as in, what is that, exactly?

 

[Cmarsh]

Why do you think people are placing career over kids?View attachment 2147980

Could it possibly be that’s their only chance to achieve any sort of financial stability? That kids would end any chance of that?

Yeah look I work in one of the areas that chart lists with a mortgage I am paying off and with three kids and I know plenty of other colleagues in my industry with a house and kids and doing ok.

My advice to you is not take things you see on redditt as gospel.

 

[Episode IV]

Yeah look I work in one of the areas that chart lists with a mortgage I am paying off and with three kids and I know plenty of other colleagues in my industry with a house and kids and doing ok.

My advice to you is not take things you see on redditt as gospel.

One of the issues with asking people to look at the Big Picture is that, by way of reply, you'll get exactly that.

 

[kranky al]

Yeah look I work in one of the areas that chart lists with a mortgage I am paying off and with three kids and I know plenty of other colleagues in my industry with a house and kids and doing ok.

My advice to you is not take things you see on redditt as gospel.

When did you buy that house

Was that your first property

Where do you live?