For the fourteenth year running, Japan's population has slumped to a record low. The non-foreign population dropped by nearly 900,000 — an unprecedented fall.
What sense does it make if you raise your population and everyone is miserably poor or on the edge of becoming poor?
There’s an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it’s not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.
It’s a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it’s not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.
And I’m not actually disagreeing with you. I think there’s probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).
There’s an overall negative correlation between wealth and fertility, so it’s not like the rich are having a ton of kids, either. Or even the societies with decent metrics on wealth or income equality, still tend to be low birth rate countries.
It’s a difficult problem, with no one solution (because it’s not one cause). Some of it is cultural. Some of it is economic. There are a lot of feedback effects and peer effects, too. And each society has its own mix of cultural and economic issues.
And I’m not actually disagreeing with you. I think there’s probably something to be said for cheap cost of living allowing for people to be more comfortable having more children (or at a younger age, which also mathematically grows populations faster than having the same number of children at an older age).