World News

Japan is notorious for unnecessarily complicated supply chains to bolster employment. And for unnecessarily ripping up perfectly fine pavement and concreting hillsides that don’t need it. Again, to bolster employment.

There are many, many, BS jobs in Japan.

And they still struggle with youth unemployment.

Fewer people would be a godsend.

Things like medical billing where the vast majority of the profession exists because we've created a labyrinth to be navigated that doesn't need to exist.

The market. This is why I'm really not too concerned about falling birthrates. There's a lot of bullshit jobs out there. Consider the typical office. It's damning that despite all the increases in efficiencies of computer technology we've had over the last several decades, work hours haven't changed at all. If anything, they've increased. And the number of people working in offices hasn't declined. The efficiencies of digital technologies didn't decrease work hours, the work simply expanded to fill the available space. Items that in generations past would have been resolved with a one page memo written on a typewriter have been replaced with 50 page reports full of charts and graphs. We have huge numbers of people preparing documents that no one ever reads. There is an absolutely absurd amount of fat and inefficiency in the modern workplace.

Or consider corporate vanity projects like RTO. Workers are on average more productive at home. But executives tend to be sociopathic narcissists who simply need people to constantly praise and validate them in person. They just don't get the same narcissistic supply from remote work, so they demand thousands of people waste colossal amounts of resources to come into an inefficient office just to appeal to their depraved egos. Oh, and for many executives, the ability to coerce sex from their employees is a primary job benefit, and that goes away with remote work.

Oh, and don't forget credential inflation. We demand people have bachelors and masters degrees for positions that 50 years ago would have been handled by someone with just a high school diploma. I'm all for education for those who want it, but the fact that you need a bachelors for anything other than food service and retail is a massive drain on our society's productivity.

As birth rates decline and the population ages, the market value for the labor of the workers that remain will soar. They will be able to demand higher wages. Think the equivalent of a $100k salary for someone with a high school diploma. This will force companies to either adapt or die. Those that insist on inefficient workflows, require excessive credentials, or demand employees come into the office for the sake of executive egos will simply go bankrupt. They will be replaced by companies that are run more rationally.

Anyone who has ever worked in an office can tell you just how stupidly inefficient corporate America is. And Japan's business culture is even worse.

I don't think we're going to have any problem getting by with a declining population. We can maintain our standard of living quite well just by squeezing the fat and inefficiencies out of our existing systems. There won't be some grand government bureau deciding what jobs are "made up." Companies that insist on hiring people for bullshit jobs will simply be driven into insolvency. And the world will be better for it. Working a pointless bullshit job is not good for anyone's mental health. People need a sense of purpose in their lives.

And while apoplectic doomsayers might say, "where does this end, won't the population eventually collapse to zero?" This isn't a realistic scenario. Cultures are not a monolith. Different groups have different birth rates. Over time, those groups and cultural practices that encourage higher birthrates will be selected for through natural selection.

For example, in many countries, the general misogyny of the population is a major reason young women don't want to get married and have children. They don't want to lose their careers and end up the stay at home wife to a salary man who arrives home drunk every night at midnight. They want a more equitable sharing of parental responsibilities. Some men are better at providing this equitable arrangement to their partners than others. Those that are will be more successful at finding wives. And those couples will pass their egalitarian values onto their children. Misogyny will be evolutionarily maladaptive and will be removed from the cultural gene pool. Those that insist on their wives doing all the child rearing will not find partners and will not be able to pass on their outdated beliefs to the next generation. In time, the birth rates will recover.

Or, alternatively, countries will move more back towards multi-generational households instead of the atomistic couple+kids that has become the norm today. Multi-generational housing was the historical norm, and it may be again in the future. It could be selected for through similar cultural evolution. Regardless, below replacement birth rates will not be maintained indefinitely. Eventually things will stabilize. If nothing else, eventually your population gets so disperse that you can't mass produce effective birth control anymore, and well things take care of themselves at that point.

TL:DR: how I learned to stop worrying and love the declining birth rate.

When did I say you did?

People are always born with the same age namely 0, but they do not all die at the same age. In fact getting older increases chances of death. Hence 2 babies per mother ends up in a pyramid too.

Even if you presume people all die at the same age, things will be stable. If say people all get childten at 30 and only work between 30-60 and then all die at 90. If we then assume 1 child per couple and everybody has a child at 30, we would get a stable dependency ratio of 2.5 dependents per worker. Obviously those numbers are not realistic. Btw that also is not a pyramid, but a trapezoid.