Japan Births Fall to Lowest in 125 Years
February 27th, 2025Via: Financial Times:
The number of babies born in Japan last year fell to the lowest level since records began 125 years ago as the country’s demographic crisis deepens and government efforts to reverse the decline continue to fail.
Japan recorded 720,988 births in 2024, according to preliminary government figures published on Thursday.
The number has declined for nine straight years and appears to be largely unaffected by financial and other government incentives for married couples to produce more children.
The 2024 figure is a 5 per cent drop from the previous year and the lowest since records began during Japan’s Meiji era in 1899.
Combined with a record 1.6mn deaths last year, the figures mean Japan’s population shrank by almost 900,000 people, net of immigration figures.
In 2023, Japan’s then-prime minister Fumio Kishida warned that the country stood on the verge of “whether we can continue to function as a society” because of its shrinking and ageing population.
When rats in a box get overcrowded, they kill each other. Perhaps the very sophisticated Japanese are somehow choosing to respond by lowering their rate of reproduction, rather than some toxin somewhere forcing sterility on them.
The Prime Minister is wrong. A lower population might cut the govt’s tax income, but it will enable more people to share more of the nation’s natural environment and built environment.
Burning the candle at both ends.
https://x.com/Patent_SUN/status/1892483285768396876
Erasing unproductive costs (youth + retired) can be a way to assuage profit thirst in the short run, but while a shorter life expectancy favors distribution strife, low fertility leads to crisis.
A quick note. The traded results of a same effort have the same exchange-value (as long as productivity is agent-independent) no matter when the effort took place. This is why with Marx productive equipment is labelled constant capital, and cannot add value – only transmit it.
Maintaining profitability when living labor is receding requires increasing the share of the product that remunerates capital. Even with ever larger productivity gains, this can only go so far.
In other words, it’s exactly as if capital overaccumulation was taking place. And in the same manner, besides strictly economic profitability issues you will find additional strike risks, because demanded productivity gains must be both fast and unequally distributed.