djsunyc wrote:typical american slut? wtf?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/07/japan-mystery-low-birth-rate/534291/
The Mystery of Why Japanese People Are Having So Few Babies
Many point to unromantic 20-somethings and women’s entry into the workforce, but an overlooked factor is the trouble young men have in finding steady, well-paid jobs.
Alana Semuels
Jul 20, 2017
Chris McGrath / Getty
TOKYO—Japan’s population is shrinking. For the first time since the government started keeping track more than a century ago, there were fewer than 1 million births last year, as the country’s population fell by more than 300,000 people. The blame has long been put on Japan’s young people, who are accused of not having enough sex, and on women, who, the narrative goes, put their careers before thoughts of getting married and having a family.
But there’s another, simpler explanation for the country’s low birth rate, one that has implications for the U.S.: Japan’s birth rate may be falling because there are fewer good opportunities for young people, and especially men, in the country’s economy. In a country where men are still widely expected to be breadwinners and support families, a lack of good jobs may be creating a class of men who don’t marry and have children because they—and their potential partners—know they can’t afford to.
“The gender stuff is pretty consistent with trends around the world—men are having a harder time,” said Anne Allison, a professor of cultural anthropology at Duke University who edited the recent collection of scholarly essays Japan: The Precarious Future. “The birth rate is down, even the coupling rate is down. And people will say the number-one reason is economic insecurity.”
This may seem surprising in Japan, a country where the economy is currently humming along, and the unemployment rate is below 3 percent. But the shrinking economic opportunities stem from a larger trend that is global in nature: the rise of unsteady employment. Since the postwar years, Japan had a tradition of “regular employment,” as labor experts commonly call it, in which men started their careers at jobs that gave them good benefits, dependable raises, and the understanding that if they worked hard, they could keep their jobs until retirement. Now, according to Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University’s Japan campus and the author of several books about Japan, around 40 percent of the Japanese workforce is “irregular,” meaning they don’t work for companies where they have stable jobs for their whole careers, and instead piece together temporary and part-time jobs with low salaries and no benefits. (Such temporary workers are counted as employed in government statistics.) Only about 20 percent of irregular workers are able to switch over to regular jobs at some point in their careers. According to Kingston, between 1995 and 2008, Japan’s number of regular workers decreased by 3.8 million while the number of irregular workers increased by 7.6 million.
Irregular workers in Japan are sometimes referred to as “freeters,” which is a combination of the word freelance and the German word arbeiter, which means “worker.” According to Kingston, the rise of irregular workers in Japan began in the 1990s, when the government revised labor laws to enable the wider use of temporary and contract workers hired by intermediary firms. Then, as globalization put more pressure on companies to cut costs, they increasingly relied on a temporary workforce, a trend that intensified during the Great Recession. “This is a major new development in Japan’s employment paradigm, as new graduates find it increasingly difficult to get a foothold on the career ladder as regular employees,” Kingston and Machiko Osawa, a professor at Japan Women's University, write in “Risk and Consequences: The Changing Japanese Employment Paradigm,” an essay in Japan: The Precarious Future.
In a culture that places such an emphasis on men being breadwinners, this has serious implications for marriage and childbearing. Men who don’t have regular jobs are not considered desirable marriage partners; even if a couple wants to get married, and both have irregular jobs, their parents will likely oppose it, according to Ryosuke Nishida, a professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology who has written about unemployment among young workers. About 30 percent of irregular workers in their early 30s are married, compared to 56 percent of full-time corporate employees, according to Kingston. “Japan has this idea that the man is supposed to get a regular job,” said Nishida. “If you graduate and you don't find a job as a regular employee, people look at you as a failure.” There’s even a tongue-in-cheek Japanese board game, Nishida told me, called “The Hellish Game of Life,” in which people who don’t land a regular job struggle for the rest of the game.
Women seeking full-time work frequently find themselves in irregular jobs too, which also has implications for raising a family, since the hours are unpredictable and the pay is low. But it is more of an obstacle for marriage if a man doesn’t have a good job—roughly 70 percent of women quit working after they have their first child, and depend on their husband’s salary for some time.
Women in Japan’s big cities say they’re getting tired of the lack of available men. While in Tokyo, I visited an event put on by Zwei, a matchmaking company. Dozens of women clustered in a small studio to take a cooking class featuring food from Miyazaki Prefecture, in southern Japan. The event was part of an initiative that Zwei was putting on to make them interested in life—and men—outside of Tokyo. Zwei’s business model is based on matching women in Japan’s big cities with men in other areas of the country, where men are more likely to have good jobs and be considered viable partners. “Men in this city are not very masculine and they don't want to get married,” Kouta Takada, a Zwei staff member, told me. A recent survey of Japanese people aged 18 to 34 found that nearly 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women aren’t in a relationship.
I also visited the office of POSSE, a group formed by college graduates who wanted to create a labor union for young people. Haruki Konno, the group’s president, told me that some of the young men in irregular jobs become what are called “net-cafe refugees”—people who live in the tiny cubicles available for rent overnight at Japanese internet cafes. (Shiho Fukada, a photographer, has documented the lives of these “refugees.”) Others with irregular jobs live with their parents or go on welfare.
POSSE calculates that irregular employees earn on average about $1,800 a month, but spend much of that money on rent, paying back their college loans, and paying into Japan’s social-security program. That doesn’t leave them much to live on. About a quarter of Japan’s college graduates—a proportion that roughly corresponds with the share of students who go to big-name universities—are set for life in good jobs, he told me. Everyone else, he said, is struggling. “Men in their 20s, they don’t have an idea of having families or a house,” Makoto Iwahashi, another POSSE member, told me. “Most of them feel that it’s just not a reality.”
The surge in irregular jobs doesn’t just create problems for the people working those jobs. It’s also led companies to feel that they can treat their regular workers poorly, because those workers feel so lucky to have a job, Konno told me. Knowing that people in their 20s and 30s are desperate to get regular jobs, companies hire lots of young people and force them to work long hours for little to no overtime pay, assuming that most won’t be able to survive the harsh conditions, Konno said. Japan has long had a culture of overwork—there’s even a Japanese word, karoshi, for death by overwork—but Konno says that it has worsened since the Great Recession, as companies have realized that good jobs are hard to find in Japan, and so push their employees harder.
Konno published a book in 2012, Evil Corporations: The Monsters Eating Up Japan, that used the phrase “Burakku Kigyo”—which loosely translates to “dark companies” or “evil corporations”—to describe firms that take advantage of workers in this way. That phrase has since become a buzzword in Japan. A group of journalists and labor advocates now issue a Burraku Kigyo of the Year award for the company that treats its workers the worst. (In 2015, Seven-Eleven Japan won the honors.) “It’s harder to find these jobs as a regular employee, and those places that are hiring, they have an advantage to exploit the workers as much as they can,” Konno said.
The result is that even Japan’s “good” jobs can be brutal. People who hold them may earn enough money to support families, but they often don’t have much time to date, or to do anything but work, sleep, and eat. Many are so stressed they can barely function. At POSSE, I met a young man named Jou Matsubara, who graduated from Rikkyo Daigaku, a prestigious private college in Japan. Matsubara, who comes from a working-class family, thought he’d achieved the Japanese dream when he graduated from college and got a job at Daiwa House Group, a Japanese home builder.
The company advertised itself as a great place to work, but Matsubara, who was a wrestler in college, told me it soon became evident that it was anything but. Though company employees left work at 7 p.m. on paper, Matsubara said he was required to work until late at night almost every day. Employees were required to sign off at 7 p.m., even if they were still working, and were given iPads so that they could do so even if they were out of the office at meetings. If they didn’t sign off, they’d get a call on their cellphones brusquely asking them to sign off immediately but keep working, he said. “The amount of time you're actually working and the amount of time that is recorded you're working have absolutely no relation to each other,” he said. Matsubara got almost no time off, and was required to take classes to receive real-estate certifications on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, which were days he was told he’d have free. This lifestyle made dating impossible. The closest he got to women, he said, was when his boss would drag him to cabaret clubs, and then make him pick up the tab.
After a year, the long hours and stress started to affect his health. Matsubara had trouble sleeping, and started hearing voices. He fell into a depression, he said, because the experience he had expected from a regular job and his own experience were so different. Matsubara told me he was taken to the hospital multiple times in an ambulance because he couldn't breathe. Eventually, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He said the company forced him to resign, and then made him pay back the money he’d saved from living in a company dormitory. (Daiwa House did not return a request for comment.) Matsubara is now living on welfare. “My life that was going smoothly and systematically was destroyed by Daiwa House,” he said. He estimated that out of the 800 people who started with him at Daiwa House, 600 have quit.
Of course, Japan is not unique in having workers who say they feel abused and overworked by their employers. Nor is it the only country that has seen an increase in temporary workers in today’s economy. But a few things differentiate Japan from the United States and other developed economies. The first is that regular employment is still deeply valued in Japanese culture, so much so that people who can’t find regular employment, no matter their qualifications, are often criticized in a way that people in other countries might not be. “There's a tendency, when someone doesn't have a job, to blame them,” Nishida, the professor, said.
The second is that Japan’s is a culture in which hard work and long hours are widely accepted and in which it is considered rude to leave before your boss. People who complain about working long hours may not find much sympathy from friends and family members, let alone the government. Finally, Japan is a country in which labor unions are weak, and often focus on collaborating with companies and preserving the good jobs that do exist, rather than fighting on behalf of all workers, according to Konno. “Unions here are for the companies—they’re not effective,” he said.
But Japan’s problems do have implications for the United States, where temporary jobs are common, and where union power is getting weaker with every year. As I’ve written before, men are struggling in many regions of the country because of the decline of manufacturing and the opioid epidemic. And studies have shown that as men’s economic prospects decline, so do their chances of marrying. The U.S.’s fertility rate is already at historic lows—and worsening economic conditions for men could further depress it.
The administration of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has turned some attention to the rise of bad jobs in Japan, but critics say the administration isn’t doing enough. A government labor-reform panel has proposed capping the number of overtime hours that companies could legally require people to work at 100 per month. And this year, for the first time, the Japanese government has also published a list of more than 300 companies that have violated labor laws, hoping that publicly shaming companies will make them change their ways. But overall, the Abe administration is pro-business and anti-regulation, and according to Kingston, of Temple, few of its reforms led to any real change.
The Abe administration, and Japan as a whole, has long vowed to address the problems of the country’s falling birth rate. Many of those pledges focus on helping women better balance work and family, which is certainly part of the problem. But not all of it: Though Japan’s men have long had more economic and social power than the country’s women, they too need help finding stability in a changing economy.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japans-falling-birth-rate-posing-serious-problems-for-economy-a7770596.html
Japan's falling birth rate posing serious problems for economy
Number of births in Japan dropped below 1 million last year
Jonathan Soble
Saturday 3 June 2017 10:02
Click to follow
The Independent
The number of pregnant women infected with Hepatitis B has almost tripled in the past year ( Getty/iStock )
Since Japan began counting its newborns more than a century ago, more than a million infants have been added to its population each year.
No longer, in the latest discomforting milestone for a country facing a steep population decline. Last year, the number of births in Japan dropped below one million for the first time, the ministry of health, labour and welfare said Friday.
The shrinking of the country’s population – deaths have outpaced births for several years – is already affecting the economy in areas including the job and housing markets, consumer spending and long-term investment plans at businesses.
Read more
Japan's fertility crisis creating economic and social woes
Japan's sex problem could cause the population to fall by 40 million
Why getting drunk is a huge part of doing business in Japan
For now, the Japanese economy is growing despite a dwindling number of workers and consumers. Growing global demand for Japanese products is one reason. But the real decline has barely begun.
After Japan’s population hit a peak of 128 million at the start of the current decade, it shrank by close to 1 million in the five years through 2015, according to census data. Demographers expect it to plunge by a third by 2060, to as few as 80 million people — a net loss of 1 million a year, on average.
Fewer young people means fewer workers to support a growing cohort of retirees, adding strains to pension and health care systems.
(Getty Images)
In a speech to business leaders this week, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called for a “national movement” to address Japan’s demographic challenges. The government has taken steps to keep older workers in their jobs longer, and to encourage companies to invest in automation. “The labour shortage is getting serious,” he said. “To overcome it, we need to improve productivity.”
Official efforts to encourage people to have more children have had only modest results, and there is little public support for large-scale immigration – something that has helped to stabilise populations in other wealthy countries with low birthrates.
Japan's female hunters
Birthrates have, in fact, risen slightly compared with a decade ago. But with women marrying later – in part, specialists say, to avoid pressure to give up their careers – prospects for a more decisive turnaround look remote.
Japan’s birthrate has long been lower than what demographers call the “replacement rate". And as the population decline accelerates, economic growth will be harder to pull off. How much the population size will fall is difficult to predict, but the basic trajectory is clear, demographers say.
https://www.businessinsider.com/japans-population-is-shrinking-demographic-time-bomb-2018-6
Japan's demographic time bomb is getting more dire, and it's a bad omen for the country
Jeremy Berke
Jun. 5, 2018, 9:52 PM
JapanJapan's population is shrinking. REUTERS/Kimimasa Mayama
Japan's population is getting older.
While aging populations are presenting economic difficulties in much of the developed world, the problem in Japan is dire: The country's birth rate last year dropped to its lowest level since statistics were kept in 1899.
There are now more adult diapers sold than baby diapers in Japanese supermarkets.
Japan's population is shrinking fast.
The number of babies born in the country last year dropped to 946,060, and it's the second year when new births remained below 1 million, Japan's government said. It's the lowest level since the country began counting in 1899.
At the same time, the number of deaths in the country — owing to the increasingly aging population— hit a postwar high of 1.3 million. That means Japan's population fell by a whopping 394,373 people in 2017.
In a demographic time bomb, fertility rates fall at the same time that longevity increases.
An aging population like Japan's poses numerous problems. The government will have to spend more on healthcare, and that, coupled with a shrinking workforce and tax base, is a recipe for economic stagnation. It also means, among other things, that there will not be enough young people to care for the elderly.
"An aging population will mean higher costs for the government, a shortage of pension and social-security-type funds, a shortage of people to care for the very aged, slow economic growth, and a shortage of young workers," Mary Brinton, a Harvard sociologist, told Business Insider last year.
Japan's aging population poses a serious problem to the country's workforce. Issei Kato/Reuters
Japan's demographic time bomb has been a long time coming.
The country's population grew rapidly throughout the 20th century, from 44 million in 1900 to 128 million in 2000, Quartz reports. But since then, fertility rates have fallen precipitously.
In the 1970s, Japanese women on average had 2.1 kids. Today that number is only 1.4 — far below the replacement rate, or the rate at which Japan would maintain its population.
The US is suffering from similar problems, but not quite to the same extent as Japan. The fertility rate in the US is estimated to be 1.76, an all-time low but still slightly higher than Japan's.
Japan set a goal to increase the birth rate to 1.8 by 2025 and to maintain a population of about 100 million people by 2060. That will be easier said than done.
Of 127 million people, there are 67,824 people over the age of 100, the highest rate of centenarians of any country. Senior citizens over the age of 65 make up more than a quarter of the population.
In perhaps the biggest sign of the problem, adult diapers now outsell baby diapers in Japanese supermarkets.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-birth-rate-hit-all-time-low-demographic-time-bomb-2018-5
The US birth rate has hit an all-time low, fueling fears of a 'demographic time bomb' — but women over 40 are a big exception
Hilary Brueck
May 18, 2018, 11:00 AM
newborn infant Shark_749/Shutterstock
The US birth rate fell 2% from 2016 to 2017, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Only women from ages 40-49 are having more kids.
Economists worry that the dwindling numbers of newborns could have a major effect on the future US labor force.
America may have a baby-making problem.
The US birth rate dropped to an all-time low in 2017, according to preliminary numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Women in the US gave birth to around 3,853,472 babies last year — a 2% drop from 2016. At just over 60 births per every 1,000 women (between the ages of 15 and 44), this is the lowest birth rate the country has ever recorded.
The estimated fertility rate in the US is now roughly 1.76, meaning that women will have, on average, less than two kids each. That's the lowest fertility rate the country has logged since 1978.
A looming demographic time bomb
The birth rate for women between the ages of 30 and 34 had been tilting upward since 2012, but it dropped 2% last year. The birth rate also went down 1% for women between the ages of 35-39 after five years of uptick.
Chrissy Teigen and John Legend just had their second child, a boy. Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images for City Harvest
Many experts blame two primary factors for this trend: the 2008 economic recession and the increasingly crippling costs of going to college.
"People are coming out with a lot of debt," Jennie Brand, a professor of sociology and statistics at UCLA, told The Wall Street Journal.
Economists are sounding the alarm about the effect the falling number of American babies will have on the future labor force. They sometimes refer to this effect as a demographic time bomb. When the economy shrinks, people often opt to have fewer kids. When there are not enough young people growing up, entering the labor force to replace workers, and paying into social security, that can become a big problem. The phenomenon can build over time, leaving old people in need of care without youngsters to help.
Kathy Bostjancic, an economist at consulting firm Oxford Economics, told the Associated Press that falling birth rates have already had a crippling effect on the US economy over the past 10 years because there are fewer Americans working or looking for work. The impact is equivalent to a 0.7% drag on the US' long-run growth rate, she said.
Other countries, including Japan and Denmark, are experiencing similar demographic time bombs.
The Danes had a fertility rate,around 1.73 last year. The country launched a campaign called "Do it for mom" to encourage Danish couples to have more kids in order to keep the country's grandmothers happy and its economy humming.
But while having a kid might help the economy grow in the long term, it can hurt an American woman's chances of getting fair pay. The US Census bureau noted in a working paper last year that women who have kids between the ages of 25 and 35 have a harder time shoring up the gender pay gap than women who make babies before 25 or after 35. Those stats suggest that having a kid mid-career puts women at a greater economic disadvantage.
Interestingly, not all US women are having fewer children. The birth rate among women in the 40-44 age group rose 2% in 2017, and the birth rate for women between 45-49 rose 3%.
In other words, women are having kids older.
This development is nothing new
Visit St. Pete/Clearwater/flickr
Since the 1970s, the American birth rate has been consistently below what number-crunchers call "replacement level," the rate at which new births keep the population steady by matching the number of people who are dying off.
That means that as older generations age out of the workforce, there will be an increasingly skewed ratio of retirees to working Americans.
Of course, making babies isn't the only way to stimulate the economy. Economists from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business argue that increasing the number of foreign-born workers in the US leads to "higher overall economic productivity" without a negative effect on American workers' wages. Both undocumented and documented workers are "net positive" contributors to the federal budget, whether they're low-skilled or high-skilled, according to University of Chicago economists.
Unlike the number of new babies in the US, the share of foreign-born workers is growing. New data released from the Labor Department Thursday showed that the number of foreign-born workers in the US in 2017 rose to 17.1%.
https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-becoming-demographic-time-bombs-2017-8
7 countries at risk of becoming 'demographic time bombs'
Chris Weller
Aug. 14, 2017, 11:45 AM
sad alone lonely woman work stress upset BarakBlueSky/Shutterstock
If you want to understand what happens when people stop having kids while life expectancy keeps rising, look no further than Japan.
The country's population is falling faster than ever before, and it's prompted economists to call the nation a "demographic time bomb"— defined as a place where fertility rates are falling at the same time that longevity is increasing.
Some experts have even created their own doomsday clock for when Japan will go extinct.
But Japan just happens to be the most extreme case of what's happening in a number of countries around the world. People are working longer hours, fertility rates are falling, and future economies are being put at risk.
Here are just some of the countries that could become demographic time bombs over the next 20 years.
Hong Kong
REUTERS/Bobby Kip
In Hong Kong, the government is faced with a striking gender imbalance; women outnumber men at nearly every age bracket above 25.
The imbalance is mainly due to men seeking women up north, in mainland China, as the women there are sometimes viewed as less choosy than in Hong Kong, according to experts in gender studies. Each year, the city also brings in thousands of foreign domestic helpers (who are almost always female) from countries like Indonesia and the Philippines.
The two trends have coalesced into a tense climate for younger generations.
Singapore
Thomson Reuters
Singapore has the lowest fertility rate in the world, at just 0.81 children per woman.
On August 9, 2012, the Singaporean government held National Night, an event sponsored by the breath-mint company Mentos, to encourage couples to "let their patriotism explode."
Like Japan, the country is also experiencing widespread aging. Without younger generations to replace them in the workforce, the economy could begin to shrink.
China
Flickr
A fifth of the world's population lives in China. But with a fertility rate of 1.60 and a culture that is becoming more reclusive, men and women are increasingly choosing not to date, let alone get married and have kids.
There are entire industries devoted to livestream stars, with millions of viewers — men, primarily — who pay to watch people sing, dance, or just eat soup. Multiplied out, they have created a generation that often prefers alone time.
South Korea
Flickr/Fahad0850
Many of the challenges facing Japan are making their way to South Korea — namely, long work hours with less consideration for family planning. But that hasn't stopped the government from trying other schemes.
With a fertility rate of just 1.25 children per woman, the government has offered cash incentives to people who have more than one child.
United States
REUTERS/Mark Makela
In 2016, the US had a record-low birth rate, according to provisional 2016 data from the Centers for Disease Control. That brought the general fertility rate among women 15 to 44 to 62.0 births per 1,000 women.
Shifting views on gender roles over the years have caused more women to enter the labor force. In addition, millennials are increasingly choosing to forego parenting in an effort to move up in their careers, pay off their massive student debt, and gain financial independence from their parents.
Spain
Thomson Reuters
Fertility rates in Spain are creeping downward while unemployment is rising: About half of all young people don't have a job. It's the second-highest rate in Europe, behind Greece.
To combat the worrying trends, the Spanish government hired a special commissioner, Edelmira Barreira, in January 2017 to investigate and find ways to reverse the trend.
Italy
Flickr/ViktorDobai
With a fertility rate of 1.43 — well below the European average of 1.58 — Italy has taken a controversial approach to encourage citizens to have more kids.
The country has been running a series of ads reminding Italians that time might be running out and that kids don't just come from nowhere, Bloomberg reported.
"Beauty knows no age, fertility does," one ad said. "Get going! Don't wait for the stork," said another.
8/21/2018 7:09 PM
