Steve Sailer writes: “As we all know, Japan is an economic black hole with a stagnant, aging, unvibrant population. Except as various graphs by Jason Bayz suggest, Japan has been doing a pretty good job keeping the Japanese at work.”
Comments:
* And an unemployment rate of 3.1%. What a basket case of a country!
* I have speculated that if Japan can resist the (admittedly tantalizing) temptation to diversify themselves with potentially hostile hordes of fecund foreigners, that their demographic situation may well fix itself.
The story is that Japan lacks working-age young people who are needed to keep their economy going, right? Supply & demand suggests that if something is scarce and necessary, then the value of that thing should rise, right? So the young workers in Japan should be competed for by Japanese businesses by increases in wages. At the same time, aging Japanese should be leaving their family homes and going into (even) smaller apartments. So the supply of family housing should rise, and prices consequently fall, right?
In theory, these higher worker wages plus more affordable houses should stimulate family formation, and possibly generate a new baby boom there. I wonder if there are any studies of that restoration of equilibrium effect happening to societies in the past.
* What exactly is the downside to the Japanese path? Cultural cohesion is maintained, human resources are used in a more economically efficient way, welfare constituencies are reduced. All that seems to be lost is the ability to enjoy lazing around on welfare/disability.
Come the Age of Robots, Japan is going to have less dead wood to support and so each person that is supported by government can enjoy a larger piece of the total welfare pie.
* Firstly, unfortunately there is a subconscious or even conscious desire amongst many commentators to ‘do Japan down’ motivated out of feelings of pure envy and spite and nothing else. Basically, these people *hate* the fact that Japan remains a successful ethno state, whilst their own nations are ruined multiracial cess-pits.
So they do their damndest to ruin Japan too. A sad reflection on human nature, but a true one.
Secondly, it’s the pure herd instinct amongst not too terribly well informed journalists. ‘Japan is greeting old!’ is the trendy meme. So they too, to be trendy, must parrot it at every opportunity.
* Despite Japan having a low fertility rate, lower and upper class Japanese women reproduce at similar levels so there are few poorly educated single mothers in Japan.
In contrast, western countries have higher fertility rates but a big proportion of babies are being born to low IQ mothers. Hence, the fertility rate of high IQ women in the US is probably similar to what it is in Japan.
* The reason that Japan gets bad press is that most economics journalism is written with investors in mind. This is no conspiracy; investors are who reads the business page.
From the standpoint of investors, Japan has delivered very low returns. Interest rates have been near zero for twenty years. Japanese real estate prices have continued to fall. The stock market has been about as bad. So, journalism written from that point of view is negative.
The reason for these poor returns is basically that the size of the workforce is shrinking. The average Japanese worker/person has not done too bad over the last 15 or so years; not worse than the average American worker*. Capitalists like immigration for a reason.
*Obviously, there are fiscal problems, though I personally think these are overstated. Japan never really needed to borrow internationally, so resolving their fiscal problem will involve an internal political settlement.
* I heard a local segment during NPR’s “All Things Considered” dealing with the efforts of a man seeking to get Hispanics in the Miami area to become American citizens. Apparently, there is a large number of people living legally in the Miami area who are content with their legal status and have not pursued the naturalization process. His aim was to make many of them U.S. citizens, with the obvious consequence that they could then vote legally in U.S. elections. One of his selling points to his “prospective customers,” which struck me, was that becoming a U.S. citizen would result in the person qualifying to get money back from the U.S. government that he was otherwise “leaving on the table” by virtue of not being a citizen. Since he was talking in the range of several hundreds of thousands of people, the number he threw out about the total amount of money getting refunded (so to speak) was in the billions. (The number that comes to mind was $12 billion.) Although it was not mentioned and the interviewer did not press him for details, I am sure he was alluding to the Earned Income Tax Credit, which pays back to qualified applicants more money than they actually paid in income taxes. As far as I am concerned, that is simply welfare by another name. It’s one thing to exempt lower income people from having to pay any income tax, but, imo, it’s a total perversion to give those people refunds for income taxes they didn’t pay. The notion that the Republicans and Bill Clinton “ended welfare” in the 90′s is a big joke, once you recognize that it merely changed names. It merely opened up shop under a different sign.
BTW I am sure that the EITC is behind the recent uptick in agitation to make Puerto Rico a state. As a territory of the U.S., Puerto Ricans are deemed to be U.S. citizens but aren’t subject to the U.S. income tax. The downside for Puerto Ricans is that exemption from the U.S. income tax means that Puerto Ricans don’t qualify for the EITC. Unless the EITC is changed, admitting P.R. to the union would simply represent one more drain of federal dollars. P.R. might benefit, but the rest of the country would be paying for that benefit.
* Is there any way anyone could possibly see America’s and Europe’s immigration systems as a solution for any economic problem?
They import people whose countries are basket cases, and allow them to bring in dependent family members. Simple arithmetic is all you need to see how many of them are net recipients of government money and services, quite apart from their changing the ethnic composition of the population.
There is little or no control of what a “temporary” immigrant does once he’s inside your borders. Even if he doesn’t slip off the radar, he may become a parent, which is all but a cast-iron guarantee of permanent residence (the European Court of Human Rights recognises the “right to family life”, i.e. any child you have is an anchor baby).
When economists extol immigration as a solution to anything, they’re using the kind of calculations that would land them in prison if they were doing the accounts of a private company.
* Population is falling in Japan, as is the number of people employed, despite the rise in labor force occupation. Yet per capita GDP has been growing. No one says they are not heading for a painful adjustment, but they have very good chances of weathering it successfully and keeping their nation in the process. Germany is simply kicking the demographic can down the road by promising the country to fecund foreigners of dubious worth.
Besides, GDP is not everything. Lots of unsavory things go into it. Sure, the Germans will have an uptick because of refugees consuming toilet paper and the like, but the costs of policing are reflected in GDP, the cost of prosecution, of crime labs, of rape kits, of more weapons and pepper sprays, of more private security, of buying better locks for their doors etc etc.
* Once you “convince” an organized and civilized people to disengage from total war, then your problems are done. They won’t even cross the street in an unmarked place. But low intensity violence as a way of life is a steady killer that fades into the background noise. All the Nankings and Stalingrads cannot compare with the unknowable toll of the machete and the raid in backwoods Africa. The first are exceptional and have taken a spiritual toll, the second are a way of life and their perpetrators sleep very well at night, and their descendants won’t think twice about it, if they even know.
* My personal experience with family members and other elderly in my developing society is that retirement is a killer of wits and faculties, especially for men, since women naturally find positions as nurturers for the (extended) family and opportunities to engage them socially. Unless you are rich enough to travel the world and maintain hobbies, the moment you disengage from the responsibilities and demands of a job, even an easy one, then your mind starts going. There is less reason to get out of the house, to keep in touch with people, to read etc. Impairments also take their toll and you give up trying to do things. It starts slowly and then accelerates. The only way you avoid it is by staying mentally active at all costs. A former International Relations professor of mine who was also a Diplomat keeps a blog at 102 and is still churning out books by himself (though he writes in pen and has someone transcribe it). With a few exceptions, we have not learned to age well. Barring debilitating illness, I plan on working till I drop, assuming my work is meaningful and enjoyable. Someone has to pay the share of taxes for the burgeoning Roma population.
* I lived in Yokohama, Japan for about two and a half years. I’ve never enjoyed a better quality of life.
Zero crime, wonderful mass-transit, fantastic food – the only negative that I would hear from my fellow ex-pats was that Japan can be “racist”. Read “racist” as having pride in your country and heritage.
* Thanks to technology people can be productive longer so Japan can weather any demographic problem by just making the elderly provide for more of their own care, this is a big difference from the past. In the old days a manual laborer really was broken down, you just couldn’t take them to the rendering plant like a plowhorse. He had to have family or a way to support him.
The Japanese owe the money to themselves and their people have a great attitude toward shared sacrifice. I doubt the Japanese would trade places with us.
* There is a scarcity value to things on this planet. More open space is valuable.
We could use fewer schools; businesses; rental properties; civic properties; and consumer goods. Fewer people is less of a burden on our resource base. We need to question this mantra of “more”, especially when dealing with population, which is an arbitrary figure when you industrialize feeding the womb.
* Still the island nation continues on, without bothering to listen to all the conventional wisdom from the West. They don’t do free trade (for the most part); they protect their home markets (for the most part); they don’t seem to insource via a H-1B Visa type of program; they aren’t outsourcing their jobs to say, 1 million Koreans or Indians. And they’re not about to any time soon agree to take in 10k-100k refugees from who knows where halfway across the world.
Japan actually has a good firm grasp on common sense and what works for their own nation.
Example: say 50,000 Mexicans, devastated by an earthquake suddenly showed up at the Japanese embassy in Mexico City to apply for asylum while simultaneously 100k Nigerians and 50,000 Hmongs all decided that they too just “needed” to emigrate to Japan because of, you know, its really really important that they go there, just cause they want to. They’re refugees, or they’re victims of war, famine, Ebola, etc. take your pick.
They’re not getting in. They have to take that song and dance act someplace else ’cause Japan’s not buying what they’re trying to sell. Maybe that’s the result of a nation with a mean IQ of around 105 whereas a nation with a lower mean IQ tend to fall for it.
Refugees? Nope, not getting in.
Immigrants? Nope, not coming thru.
Need to insource/take away native born Japanese jobs and replace them with Indians or Filipinos? Are you kidding. Really? Seriously?
Amazing.
Like the time I was at a convention and there were two dozen Japanese in attendance. They were given tea and refused to drink it. Finally got hold of the answer. “It’s Korean tea.”
The problem was eventually fixed and they were given a different beverage more to their liking.
Have to say in all fairness that Sencha makes a good cuppa.
Well done, Japan. Keep up the good work on preserving your culture, your people, and ultimately, your future.
* Another industrialized, perennially crowded island nation took the opposite track. The British economy looks worse than Japan.
I bet the Japanese are sorry they missed out on the vibrancy of modern Britain.
* Europeans are fierce nationalists at heart.
Not all of them. The problem is that most “nations” in Europe are fairly new. It is true that most Europeans take fierce price in their regional identity – as Catalans, Bavarians, Tuscans, Carinthians, Welsh, etc. But many national identities – “German”, “Italian”, “Spanish”, even “British” – are actually pretty weak. Clearly “Yugoslav” nationalism didn’t have a long shelf life even though the idea of a “Yugoslavia” wasn’t much more absurd than an “Italy” that includes Sardinians, Sicilians, Romans and Piedmontese in one “nation”. The strongest nationalists are in some of the smallest most coherent countries – Hungary, Slovakia, Denmark – but good luck to them defending themselves against the hordes of immigrants that Germany, France and the UK have welcomed.
* You are defining nationalism too broadly. I mean an attachment to blood and soil, not the contrived allegiance to a 19th century flag and a 19th century border.
