<The Japanese have strongly discouraged immigration, thus squandering the one opportunity they have for driving growth in aggregate demand. The population trend is very bearish for the Japanese economy and stock market. What are the cultural reasons for the low fertility, I wonder?>
ACF, the cultural reason is that young people don't want to have many children, or any. They have contraceptives available. They use them.
I live in a house which used to have a large population. It's emptying out [due to empty nest syndrome]. The total expenditure from the house went down as they left. I don't want to repopulate it, especially not with refugees from squalid countries with barbaric cultures to increase the household GDP.
Meanwhile, like the Japanese, I have invested my savings in overseas production of goods and services [hiring Americans, Koreans and Chinese to do the dirty work - they'll sell to people around the world, who will pay tribute to me and the Japanese for having been hard workers, savers and investors].
The income per capita of Japan, I think, is still right at the top of the world's list. Mine is up there too. We don't need to earn any more, so spend our days loafing around. Which doesn't do wonders for the GDP or sharemarket price, but heck, why should we go on working all our lives? We aren't mindless ants who just go on working.
As my house and Japan get fewer people, I'll have more peace, quiet and elbow room and Japanese will have more room to drive on the motorways to the skifields and fewer crowds on the skifields.
For decades we had moaning about the end of the world due to Club of Rome and Malthusian worries. The greenies and doomsters were wrong. There is going to be a lot of room and we like clean, pleasant living conditions. Japan is showing the way.
Why on earth should Japan allow immigration? The race riots in Britain and the USA, not to mention general crime, the prison populations and murder rates won't encourage Japan to copy that plan.
Certainly they have some banking glitches and had a silly bubble in the stockmarket and absurd land values, but those are separate issues. Gradually they'll sort that out. Actually, some of the problems might be sorted out suddenly; for example, the state taking over collapsing banks.
Not many people? Well, too bad. There are vast numbers of humans who used to be alive and they aren't now, and the world ticks along just fine. More people isn't necessarily better [though as a general rule, I like it]. The quality of those people will increasingly become the issue.
I know it's currently unfashionable to be in favour of eugenics, but people are hypocrites; they don't just marry the first mutant to walk up to them who asks "How about it?" They inspect the prospect's DNA and immediately do some eugenic planning and genetic engineering, usually by declining the offer, but sometimes accepting.
When they can select DNA from a menu, they'll be doing even more eugenics and throwing in some genetic engineering to boot. People like Lexus, not Lada. Same with their offspring. They prefer Mensa to Downs.
Mqurice |
