Its so rediculous because there is tons of potential immigrants which they can bring in at any time. Im not sure about the other places but they can get babies real quick in the us if wealth disparity was no so logrithmic.
this post was submitted on 08 Nov 2026
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Just the usual Russian and Chinese digital warfare.
The Japan one I've only heard coming from people bitching about Lawson's new one item bentos that make cheap American food look like fine French cuisine. "OMG the empire is collapsing because a konbini bento is making us look like we are all broke."
No.
They are just going to entire a population and economic decline that plays out over decades.
But clickbait headlines want to make this seem like magically in 2050 the population will halve, because drama.
I mean, we're in deep shit in Japan in a number of ways.
More xenophobic people and anti-foreigner policies, higher costs of status renewal (they claimed to bring in line with Germany and other countries despite the fact that our salaries are way lower), etc. are driving foreigners away. Foreigners are taking jobs no one else is (it's generally an immigration requirement for a work visa is that you can't take a job a Japanese could do, roughly). Bus drivers, elder carers, hospital workers, etc. Rather than look at the actual issues and do something about it (voter participation, particularly among the young, is abysmal), they just keep voting LDP that keeps enriching the rich and powerful and not doing much to actually help.
There are all kinds of systemic issues around working conditions, gender roles, and other things that hold families back. Almost everyone moves to Tokyo or another big city for university and never comes back because the only jobs outside are farming, fishing, forestry, and factories, more or less. People like me who do move to be a part of a small community have their companies say "oopsie, we didn't mean work from anywhere; you have to be in the Tokyo office now" which is basically impossible (my union is fighting the company who retained a lawfirm, so who knows where this goes). There's no stability outside of the city. This is driving up prices on a number of things. Childcare is also over-burdened in those areas so one parent often has to quit, at least for a while, if they want to start a family. This only gets worse (whereas where I live, they pay people to move here and we have free/subsidized daycare for kids with open slots).
There's still more that I could write about. Inflation is rampant and wages don't keep up. Salaries were long flat, but so were prices until corona followed by Russia's invasion. I don't have much hope. It's gotten me (over a decade here, permanent resident, etc.) thinking it's time to go, which is not a statement I thought I would say; I had planned to retire and spend the rest of my life here. Now, I'm trying to get a job somewhere like Norway where I can do a silly thing like at least vote in local elections after 3 years, unlike Japan which is never in most places and the xenophobes are trying to remove it in the few places it does exist (despite us paying the same taxes, pension, and everything else).
ttl;dr - current gov keeps making rich richer, quality of life is generally falling, and something's going to give eventually be it the political system, the economy, etc. since line can't always go up and inequality breeds contempt.
Yes, it's called demography. The point of calculating predictions is so we can react to them now. For example, in the 1960s, we predicted population growth would outpace our ability to produce enough food, and massive amounts of people would starve to death. In response, societies invested millions of dollars into agricultural development to be able to grow food more efficiently. By responding to the issue, we avoided having it. The claim wasn't "wrong", it did what it was supposed to do.
I like to use Y2K as an example of this phenomona. It's a common misconception that people were panicked over something that was never going to happen. In reality, programmers put loads of time and effort into fixing the problem.
Sadly, when a crisis is averted, people think it was never going to happen. Now, if the Untied States manages not to continue its descent into fascism, people will say that those who predicted it were just fearmongering. In reality, people seeing the fascism rising led to people working against it.
There are real problems in Japan and South Korea, but the headlines are clickbait. Everything is exaggerated for engagement. There's truth there but you have to dismiss about 2/3rds of the sensationalism to get a good feel for how serious the problem actually is. The same goes for Europe and North America.
Any time you see a headlines about population collapse, remember that the hidden complaint is that wages will rise when there are less people in the job market.
So many business models are predicated on hiring low skilled, failed individuals to do menial labor for close to nothing in a job they can’t afford to quit.
When there are more people who are highly educated, slop jobs disappear which is a good thing.
Amazon has their job pool and quotas calculated to fire people over quota and rehire them in a revolving door.
The population of Earth has doubled in my lifetime. Population growth is only slowing if you exclude brown people and focus on countries that 1)are wealthy and 2) don't allow immigration. These 'demographic bombs' are the result of jingoism, immigration controls, and racism; they are entirely artificial.
Slow population growth is a crisis for capitalism not humanity. This is because capitalism requires infinite growth and the biggest engine that sustains that delusion is population growth. Just look who is freaking out about it.
What you’re partially describing is the demographic transition model, which splits population growth into five stages. The first few involve birth rates remaining high as a country’s development decreases death rates leading to the birth rate decreasing to match the low death rate. The last stage appears to be a little more uncertain than the last time I read up on it, at that time the standard expectation was that birth rates fall below the death rate in highly developed countries leading to a population decrease.
The problem I have with your thinking on the matter is your focus on “brown people” and the use of immigration to keep population growth. Immigration is just a stopgap solution for population decline because it relies on the existence of other, less developed countries for people to immigrate from. But those less developed countries (I assume the brown people you’re talking about) are also stepping through the stages of the demographic transition model as they become more developed, meaning eventually when the whole world is developed the overall population will peak and then decline. At that point, immigration-reliant countries like the US will have the same problems as anti-immigrant countries are starting to run into now. So the problem itself of population decline is not artificial, different developed countries at the leading edge of the charts are just dealing with the natural trend in different (and sometimes racist) ways.
It is a crisis for capitalism, but as long as humanity relies on systems based on an increase of the fundamental economic unit (the consumer), it is a crisis for humanity as well and we should worry about how to alter those systems. Places like South Korea and Japan are the first to have to deal with that shift, but the rest of the world should be paying attention to what does and doesn’t work for them because we’re next.
Population growth is only slowing if you exclude brown people
On the contrary, accounting for time lag, there is reason to believe we have already fallen below replacement rate on a global scale.
Slow population growth is a crisis for capitalism not humanity
Capitalism collapsing without any transition plan in place would be disastrous for humanity. Capitalism bad, but so far it's worked out better than everything else we've tried (Scandinavia et al is still capitalism, just with a layer of socialism on top).
Just look who is freaking out about it.
Practically every demographic scientist on the planet.
Big clickbait. The "concern" is that without an increasing population then we can't pay for the benefits of the older population, therefore anything that slows growth means doom, collapse, whatever. We really do have to get our fiscal house in order, but overall cough cough there is enough wealth to take care of our society.
Gotta check then sources, and view things with a critical lens.
Sudden large population changes can cause problems. Everyone seems to inherently understand the issue with rapid growth, but I often see people saying rapid decline is totally fine and sometimes even a good thing, actually.
Every job suddenly being understaffed would be a challenge. Every piece of infrastructure suddenly being oversized creates inefficiencies. National pensions take money from workers and give it to the elderly, which only works if workers far outnumber the elderly. Some countries are headed to a 1:1 ratio and China is estimated to soon have 5 dependents for every 1 worker. Pension plans will go bankrupt.
All of this will happen all at once, everywhere, in a few decades. I don't think it's going to create apocalyptic scenarios, but people were freaking out over gas prices being twice as expensive, imagine what they're going to do when their pension payments stop.
the global economy is built on massive amounts of debt which literally borrow from future growth in productivity to build today. If there isn’t more people to build stuff next year than this year, the whole thing falls apart.
Economic collapse sounds good to an anti-capitalist but it doesn’t feed them or their family, it leads to mass starvation and disease.
Yeah the number of people on Lemmy cheering on demographic collapse is insane. Things need to happen at a slow controlled pace, and it doesn't look to be happening that way.
It's not a huge deal. It's self balancing to a degree and it will be hard on pensions in a short term but will see drastically lower housing costs.
Godzilla has been sighted on the move towards Tokyo Bay.
Here's the science and data for south Korea https://sites.google.com/view/sources-korea-is-over/ And the video its connected to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk&t=89
It's always click bait, but sometimes* it's based on real problems that could lead to those things. Let's take three examples because I like to piss off sycophants everywhere:
Gordon Chang is a racist far-right white supremacist that uses this supposed Chinese ancestry to doomsay about China, and has done for literally decades. He has always been wrong. Every single prediction he has ever made. Every single one has been proven wrong. He has not ever had a single thing he has ever published come true.
Despite this, he is one of the US Media's foremost experts on China, having been featured by every single major media outlet for the last nearly 30 years. Nearly every single story you have ever read on 'China's imminent economic collapse,' or 'The Chinese Stock market just collapsed,' or 'China's economy is a paper dragon,' or 'China just ended their real estate market,' or 'China has five years left to kowtow to western demands before it collapses,' is based on his work, as well as a select group of others that claim to be experts on China, have published work on China for decades, and have never once gotten a single prediction correct at any point in their careers.
Why is this narrative being pushed so hard and why does half of lemmy (and easily 70+% of western audiences) still fall for it day after day, year after year, despite the link I used being TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD?
Well one, racism, but two, if western media allows the concept that another way of life could work, and is working better than the current status quo, those that benefit from the current status quo might lose something. So hundreds of billions are spent every single year making sure that headlines from people like this keep coming. Constantly. And no one is allowed to question why or point out that their predictions have always failed to come true and are based on nothing more than the 'feeling' that communist rule leads to failure and suffering.
This is real. This is real data. Japan's population has declined every single census for two decades now. The average age of Japanese citizens is only going up, and it is going up exponentially quickly, suggesting it is not just a lack of new births, but also a lack of resources to keep younger people alive longer. Thought honestly, I repeat myself.
Now why does it get so much news coverage, especially in the west?
2a. Japan is what a lot of racists want the west to be. As a far-right ethnostate dedicated to profit and social order above all other possible concerns, it is a blueprint for how a lot of western fascists want the west to be. Similar to Israel. So if it is failing, then that means that ideology might be a failure -- liberals who do not want fascism like pointing this out, and point out the 'solution' is immigration and more open borders which solves the totally random and not at all concerning declining birth rate. Which ignores the roots of the problem.
2b. Racism. Japan is failing not because of its socioeconomic system or politics; but because the japanese cannot handle the superior white idealized socioeconomic system; and clearly white men need to come in and save the Japanese from themselves, both through 'marriage' and through taking over the government. Don't worry, it's not miscegenation if it's white people doing it.
The UK is collapsing. Literally. Its economy cannot survive the next ten years on its current trajectory, as reasonably predicted by people who were against Brexit.
But it's not because of immigrants. It's just capitalism again. And it's being blamed on immigrants because of racism.