[HN Gopher] Saito Renho on Japanese economic growth, 'Abenomics'...
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Saito Renho on Japanese economic growth, 'Abenomics',
redistribution, and more
Author : mooreds
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-03-09 15:24 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hks.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hks.harvard.edu)
| JustARandomGuy wrote:
| Very insightful and thought-provoking.
|
| I really appreciated this insight, that governments had (quote)
| _an understanding that if you just leave young people to be, they
| will go and get married. They will have children. They will be
| able to have a family and there will be no problem there. You
| just need to let them go ahead and do that, which is a very naive
| way of looking at it_
|
| The next 100 years is going to be very interesting for
| demographics. I've heard it said that China needs to grow rich
| before it grows old, and that saying could apply to many Asian
| countries right now. Fully expect to see much more support for
| having a family in countries across the world.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| South Korea provides an evidence that this understanding is not
| only naive but also actively damaging the society. SK's
| fertility rate hit the record low of 0.84 in 2020 (compare with
| Japan's 1.36 in the same year), primarily because increasingly
| more people chose not to marry. There are a multitude of
| reasons, including pervasive misogyny which acts as a negative
| feedback to prevent further marriages. But regardless of the
| reasons, there is no reason to believe the fertility rate will
| recover by its own without active policies (of which SK
| crucially lacks).
| Ferrotin wrote:
| South Korea just had an election which may change its
| direction in that regard.
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| You probably wouldn't have known but I watched the whole
| vote counting process all the night (6:50 am here). And
| Yoon, the president-elect, is not really known for his
| gender equality policies---he is a polar opposite to say
| the least.
| Ferrotin wrote:
| Yes, and because gender equality suppresses fertility
| [1], that would do the opposite.
|
| [1] citation needed, and given Asian fertility rates,
| highly questionable
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Oh yeah, a forced marriage will do a great job. (Thank
| you for the footnote by the way, I was a bit nervous at
| the first!)
| throwawaymanbot wrote:
| mooreds wrote:
| If you want to see the demographic disaster many countries are
| heading toward, can't recommend Peter Zeihan enough.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNvdBRjRno8 is a good intro
|
| Disunited Nations is his most recent published book:
| https://zeihan.com/disunited-nations/ (a new one is coming out
| in June)
| pphysch wrote:
| Frankly, Zeihan is a crackpot when it comes to geopolitics.
| If you rely on him for geopolitical insights, you will be
| massively misled on virtually every issue.
|
| In particular, it is ridiculous to talk about long-term
| demographics in a vacuum. We are no longer in the phase of
| human history where you need millions of young people to be
| working hard 70 hour weeks. Economic productivity is no
| longer a function strictly of animal (human) muscle mass. We
| are, just barely, in the age of automation.
|
| From _Disunited Nations_ :
|
| "Germany will decline as the most powerful country in Europe,
| with France taking its place. Every country should prepare
| for the collapse of China..."
|
| LOL
| sanp wrote:
| We may not need as many producers but we do need
| consumers...
| mooreds wrote:
| Interesting. Who would you recommend reading instead?
| pphysch wrote:
| Michael Hudson on global economics - https://michael-
| hudson.com/2022/02/america-defeats-germany-f...
|
| Benjamin Norton on Latin American geopolitics -
| https://multipolarista.com/
|
| Pepe Escobar has fantastic & entertaining insights on the
| Eurasia region if you can stomach the occasionally pro-
| Russian hagiography - his main site (+ other great
| analysts) is down to DDOS right now -
| http://thecradle.co/
|
| The nation difference between these guys and Zeihan, is
| these guys are actually on the ground (or spent their
| careers on the ground), whereas Zeihan is a desk jockey
| that makes pretty charts and ridiculous, baseless
| extrapolations from them.
| fleddr wrote:
| Fully agree. Zeihan takes a singular issue, and then
| projects it far into the future under the ridiculous
| presumption that absolutely nothing else will ever change.
|
| Already right now, half our economy is made-up, bullshit
| jobs to produce bullshit items, keeping each other busy on
| the back of monetary stimulation.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm not sure what's so LOL worthy about this. Germany does
| seem to be in decline and China does seem to be a house-of-
| cards in many aspects.
| pphysch wrote:
| "seem" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
|
| That statement from Zeihan is absolutely hilarious to
| anyone with a passing knowledge of 21st century history
| and ongoing trends...
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Seem can be a weasel word, I'll definitely grant you
| that. My receptiveness to the idea that China is on shaky
| ground comes from what I was reading about Evergrande
| coupled with how analysts are reporting that their
| official numbers are heavily manipulated. I don't think
| the PRC will collapse into some successor state, but it
| would probably end up in a Great Depression and lose a
| large amount of power and influence. Temporarily at
| least.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Zeihan's been predicting for a decade that Russia's
| collapsing demographics would force it to quickly act
| (before it can no longer do so) to expand its
| borders/security zone. It's tough to call the Ukraine
| invasion anything else.
| pphysch wrote:
| If you think Russia invaded Ukraine primarily because of
| "demographic issues" i.e. territorial expansion for
| resources, I have a bridge to sell you.
| vkou wrote:
| Looking at Chechnya, the Georgian-Ossettian-Russian war,
| and observing that the entirety of Eastern Europe lurched
| into camp West around that time period, you don't have to
| be Nostradamus to imagine that Russia's desire to keep as
| much of the Soviet empire with it as possible will
| manifest sooner or later.
|
| Which has nothing to do with its demographics, and
| everything to do with its politics.
|
| ... Also, Ukraine is facing the exact same demographic
| stresses as Russia. Also, demographics don't matter as
| much as, broadly speaking, industrial capacity in modern
| wars. They aren't about throwing an entire generation of
| men into million-casualty-offensives over no-man's-land.
| rayiner wrote:
| This is a good example of culture acting in often invisible
| ways--a force that you don't notice at work until it's gone.
| There's a lot we assume to be universal about human behavior
| that's actually the product of cultural forces transmitted
| through generations.
|
| My dad spent his career on maternal health and family planning
| issues. He's in the group of folks that's the reason that
| Bangladesh's fertility rate has fallen from almost 7 per women
| in 1975 to just over 2 today. There was a generational effort
| in Asia to basically change the culture to discourage having
| large families. The notion that national prosperity is
| associated with population control was deeply impressed upon
| Asians--to the point where my dad thought it a little weird
| when my wife and I decided to have three kids. I suspect that's
| part of the reason why fertility rates in east asian countries
| have dropped not only below replacement rates, but down to
| under 1 in several countries.
| rr808 wrote:
| Its kinda amazing to see Ukraine fighting Russia - both have
| rapidly shrinking populations even before the war.
| alephnan wrote:
| > I've heard it said that China needs to grow rich before it
| grows old, and that saying could apply to many Asian countries
| right now.
|
| Asian countries are quite diverse in the economics
| demographics.
|
| Japan's already rich, but aging. Japan is stuck in the 1980s in
| many regards including soft power.
|
| China's not aging yet, but it's on Japan's trajectory. Bad with
| soft power.
|
| South Korea is similar to China, but it's already rich.
| Japanese may disagree but South Korea is arguably the strongest
| in soft power in Asia.
|
| Vietnam has a young population, but it is still developing and
| might be subject to the middle income trap if automation for
| otherwise low cost labor ramps up.
|
| Taiwan has its silicon shield, but software engineers are paid
| pretty bad. There just aren't many high paying salaries there.
| It also has a big welfare system despite not having many
| job/career opportunities.
|
| Hong Kong there is an exodus of young people and white collar
| people.
|
| Japan probably has the most affordable housing in the list,
| relative to the average income. I'm currently living here. I've
| been looking at real estate in Taiwan, but it just makes zero
| sense. It makes Manhattan condos seem reasonable given how old
| and units in Taiwan are.
| dublinben wrote:
| >China's not aging yet
|
| Yes they definitely are, and faster than almost any other
| country. China's median age is already well into middle age,
| and their birth rate has peaked and is falling quickly.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_China
| nicoburns wrote:
| > Yes they definitely are, and faster than almost any other
| country.
|
| I know what you mean, but I find the notion that the
| Chinese are ageing faster than everyone else amusing.
| rr808 wrote:
| The interesting thing for me with Japan and babies is in the
| 80s when houses were the most expensive in the world, the
| birth rate was much higher than now when houses are the
| cheapest in the developed world.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Isn't the correlation obvious? Growing population means
| higher demand for housing, shrinking population means less
| demand and prices go down as units aren't needed. It goes
| to show that the cultural forces are more important than
| the cost when choosing whether to have kids.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There are also confounding factors of increasing number
| of financially independent women and more convenient,
| more foolproof birth control methods.
| golemiprague wrote:
| sothatstheway wrote:
| In a class for my Masters in Public Health, we saw evidence
| that really nothing affected the average number of kids women
| had in any country or the average age they had their first
| child except for one factor: the education level of the women.
| That is, as education went up for women, the average # of
| children went down and the average age they had their first
| child went up.
|
| If this is still true, the flip of that is that as countries
| climb up the relative ladder and women have greater access to
| education, expect to see population #s dwindle without having
| really any levers to affect it otherwise.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://ifstudies.org/blog/research-debunks-myth-that-
| econom...
|
| TLDR The opportunity cost of having children in affluent
| society is too damn high.
| noneeeed wrote:
| Really interesting to see an alternative view from the
| prevailing narrative that it's all about the direct costs
| (housing, childcare etc).
|
| It seems to be such a multi-factor problem that I don't see
| any governments managing to come up with "solutions" to it,
| especially as most that are put forward are single factor
| and rarely amount to much more than fiddling around the
| edges.
| trophycase wrote:
| I kind of have a hard time believing this. Especially since
| the causation could run the other way. Declining birth rates
| are probably due to a lot of factors, the biggest being use
| of birth control, discouraging women from having children,
| societal attacks on traditional gender roles, obesity, lower
| testosterone/sperm levels in men due to lack of
| exercise/chemical pollutants/cultural factors.
|
| I'd be very interested to see this research. I have a hard
| time believing that anything positive will be done about the
| birth rate if this is what they are teaching at a masters
| level.
|
| I also think the cost of having children is completely
| overblown, people just simply aren't willing to make the
| sacrifices.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > the education level of the women
|
| educators in the WEIRD schools teach this, for sure. They
| also teach a lot of other things that have not stood the test
| of time.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| I got the impression that the two main things holding back Japan
| economically were overwork and a social signaling of "loyalty"
| arms race. Both are divorced from actual productivity efficiency
| and effectively make a minor martyr culture where the emphasis is
| more on sacrifice than results. I cannot speak to actual
| conditions, only observed tropes which may be outdated. Even
| before COVID-19 forced changes.
|
| Regardless limits to extreme hours and more robust enforcement to
| better avoid off the book hours would probably be more effective
| there.
| pphysch wrote:
| tl;dr: Japan, as the Asian Tiger economy most distant from the
| rising China, is viscerally experiencing the inadequacies of
| neoliberal policies. They know they will become the "sick man of
| Asia", isolated and weak, if they keep the current trajectory --
| a massive reversal from just 50 years ago.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| The four tigers were Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and Korea.
| Japan was never one of the group.
| pphysch wrote:
| True, Japan was the "proto Tiger" but not one of the
| following Four that it inspired. My point stands
| greydius wrote:
| What are inadequacies of neoliberal policies?
| pphysch wrote:
| TFA explains them succinctly -- lack of investment in public
| goods leads to a high cost of living which has many long-term
| negative effects, including low childbirth rates.
|
| Neoliberal policies tend to optimize for GDP in a shallow
| sense and neglect other indicators.
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