There is no such thing in general as "too many people for the economy".
"The economy" is the sum of goods and services produced and consumed. Everyone who lives consumes, and could easily consume more. The economy is generally limited by the ability to produce, and is generally limited by the number of working-age people to do the producing. Unemployment can be result of production being bottlenecked by something else:
* raw materials - but Japan never had an abundance of those even when their economy looked like it would dominate the world in the 80s
* education - but the people the article talks about have university degrees
* capital - again not something Japan lacks
Companies would rather hire a new 22 year old graduate at full pay than give a 30 year old with an even better degree a chance at a 30% discount, not out of concerns over the 30 year old's skills being outdated but simply because hiring new graduates is what you do. They'll hire non-graduates only on temporary contracts when short of workers, but never in a million years consider promoting them and converting them to regular employees, no matter how good they are.
When the discussion is about economics (the topic I have studied at uni) most comments are just plain wrong and show a complete ignorance about the topic.
If one wants a counter argument to "too many people for the economy" one can start here : https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523702?seq=1
"Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami's labor market to rapidly absorb the Mariel immigrants was largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of immigrants in the two decades before the Mariel Boatlift."
There are many causes explaining unemployment some due to macroeconomic factors such as the monetary policy, others due to regulations of the labor market, others due to the lack of innovation, ..... They have been studied in depth. But "too many people for the economy" is not one of them.
This seems to be a problem inherent to many such forums on the internet. When the discussion is controlled by a certain subset of that population, usually via comments, submissions and voting, that subset tends to self-select and alienate alternative viewpoints. Participants are rewarded with a sense of validation for things that appeal to the group but aren't necessarily true or accurate(or humane, fair, respectful, etc).
I think this topic needs a whole lot more analysis and public debate as more and more opinions are solidified in these balkanized communities. I quit reddit over these issues and am hanging on to HN by a thread. At this point I'd rather pay to hear opinions and analysis of experts than be influenced by, and participate in, internet echo chambers.
The workaround is to try to get better at using methods to pool the wisdom of "experts", to evaluate their claims based on external attributes (eg. looking at the journal that published the paper, looking at other claims of the expert, looking at the methods used to arrive at the claims, examining the used statistical methods, etc.), see also how prediction markets force "experts" to support their confidence with their money - and of course these markets are not infallible either.
Or you can just point out that, well, if there are too many people, just (virtually) split the country down the middle: voila, fewer people in the country.
A more sophisticated argument brings up density. But it's usually the sparsely populated parts of a country that are poorer.
Imagine how little they know about the topics you haven’t studied.
The overall quality of comments here is the same as every other niche discussion forum. OK on the original topic. Pretty poor on everything else. The only advantage is that this place at least has some moderation.
I think curating a discussion board to have knowledgeable discussion about many things is a really hard task. On many professional boards, discussions about other subjects are put into an OT corner. HN doesn't split discussions into topics so I guess expectation of comments' quality carries over.
I would just make a mental note: Oh this is not about CS/privacy/programming and adjust accordingly.
I suppose it's one of the reasons one should acquaint themselves with people from a variety of backgrounds and don't run away when others are not as knowledgeable about CS/privacy/programming. Actually
For example, I emailed the staff with regard to the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on HN and the response was that it is policy not to remove COVID-19 misinformation (including raving conspiracy theories) but also to allow flagging by the 'community' to remove posts pointing out that something is misinformation.
Tacitly allowing the platform to be used to give a mouthpiece to spread misinformation and allowing users to bully people for injecting some degree of factual reality does not encourage good discussion.
Facilitating knowledgeable discussion across a broad range of topics starts with attracting people who are knowledgeable in many areas, and that cannot happen in an environment where the administration allows mob bullying--through the very thin veneer of the downvote/flag system--of people who actually know things.
I think you have it wrong as well. The size of the economy doesn't really matter. We don't say Norway isn't viable because its size is only a fifth of that of the UK. There is no point in doubling the size of the population to make the economy twice as big when each person is no better off. Especially when we are increasingly bumping up against ecological limits.
Ex. 50/mo + 240 gift money (for a 2 year lease) == 60/mo without gift money.
It’s basically just a one-time fee that is paid up front - something which is not at all uncommon in the world of commerce.
Demand and supply. Oversupply in labor results directly in diminishing incomes and the ability of employers to be extremely picky about who to hire (e.g. like you said nobody over 30).
I also explained that the problem is not just that employers are picky because of an oversupply, they are picky in ways that are actually not really in their own interest and which contribute to the oversupply problem.
If employers would act systematically against their own interest by hiring only young people it would be easy for investors to come in eliminate them in the market. But they won't because they can't. Employers prefer young people because they are cheap and they hire them because they can.
And no, it is not easy for investors to outcompete incumbents simply by being more efficient with their employment policies, especially not in a society like Japan. And my point is that employers are not hiring older people even though they could pay them less.
Sure there is. If nothing else, at some point you have more people than can be physically fed with the available land.
Each additional person uses up a certain amount of resources. If the marginal resource gain of adding another worker is smaller than that; then economically there are too many people. There is no principle saying that cannot happen.
The malthusian argument has been used since the old ages to argue for fewer people because of resource shortages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Modern_Malthusia...). It has not eventuated.
The more people there are, the more minds there are at looking for solutions to problems, the more able the human race will be. But of course, these people need investment to obtain benefit - they can't just be empty mouths to feed.
Drought has contributed to the Syrian civil war and Egypt threatened Ethiopia with war over their megadamming project on the Blue Nile. Places like Yemen have an order of magnitude more people than in 1950 while relying on the same water resources.
This is not an easy problem to solve, water is too heavy to transport in significant amounts to places like Sanaa (elevation 7000 ft, over a million people, mild desert climate).
There is a physical limit somewhere. Just because we didn't find it in the last hundred years doesn't mean we won't in the future. Real growth in % terms eventually stops because it hits a physical limit; that isn't a controversial idea. It is almost too obvious to state. Humanity can't maintain 1% Year-on-year growth in crop yield indefinitely. At some point; the improvements stop. The longer the improvements have been going on for the more likely it is they will stop.
But concerning the actual topic at hand, Japan's labor market problems have nothing whatsoever to do with a resource or land shortage.
I'm not sure how much of an advantage they gain from having very easy port access by virtue of being an island (probably quite a big one, I assume). But it is hard to accept they wouldn't be having a much easier time if they had easy access to something like the Saudi oil fields, the US oil fields, the Chinese coal fields, etc etc. They are a long way away from the good sources of natural resources.
And they struggle to be self sufficient in food in the first result I found [1]. That is pretty different from somewhere like the US. There is a real risk of war in East Asia, so I imagine they'd be quite uncomfortable with that.
They have completely different resource-use problems than the economies that are larger than they are. The idea that the US would have to exert itself to be self sufficient in food is rather weird, as is the idea that China would struggle to justify transporting resources to the country from Mongolia, etc. It is obvious to me what could be done with more people in the US or China. In Japan there is probably something, but it does require actual ability to find instead of just "dig more, grow more, build more, forge more" that their competitors for the best-economy crown can manage.
Japan needs transformative technological improvements to grow. The US needs warm bodies. China needed to stop the Great Leap Forward and put competent leaders in charge. The Japanese challenge is much greater.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mines_in_Japan
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture,_forestry,_and_fis...
Your counterargument is that they didn't have a problem in 1980, when they had less people and the same amount of land. I can't disagree with that, but it isn't relevant.
> Many, many other countries don't have a lot of natural resources and are not having these problems.
They have the 3rd largest economy in the world. It goes US, China and then Japan. 30% higher GDP than the next contender, Germany. If there are any non-linear economic effects at all between size and labour market, Japan is going to find them first.
And the chart in that article shows that they basically stopped having children in 1980 which would be consistent with a "running out of resources" hypothesis as a root cause. If they hit a wall in economic carrying capacity circa 1980 that chart would supporting evidence.
It reminds me of western Ireland. Hiking around for hours through the country and not seeing a living soul. Expensive (holiday I assume) houses with slate roofs on a couple of hectares and empty.
Cycling shows: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/cycle/ Train: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/japanrailway/
The best series is Document 72 Hours: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/72hours/
Some can be seen on demand, others, they’ll give a repeat date. These are fascinating, and be warned, they can swing from happy to gut wrenching. There’s one episode where they’re in a Home Center talking to kids about their projects and the next they’re talking to a guy about kitchen tiles. He talks about his wife always wanting a new kitchen, but he was always too busy... and now she’s dead. So he’s working on the kitchen in her memory.
It’s an introspection on a society that is fraying at the edges. The producers seem to be trying to communicate that. As Krugman says, if you want to know our future, look to Japan.
in the last decade japanees workforce grew despite overall population decline/getting old. mainly due to women participation increase. If there was not enough to do it wouldn't be possible.
almost all on-the-face-of-it arguments are oversimplification of largely complex issues. Sadly most(all of them?) government interventions are done by politicians on the basis of such arguments...
Japan's greatest problem is that they have a geriatric population, coupled with low fertility rates, and an extremely unhealthy work ethic/culture. But, as usual with demographic stuff, the nasty effects won't really appear visible for decades - and by then it may very well be too late.
It's also why real estate prices are so high in Japan. The older generation needs to squeeze out as much as they can from each member of the younger generation since there are so few of them in numbers.
E.g. random hit: small 3LDK house in Kashiwa built in 1981:
https://house.goo.ne.jp/buy/uh/detail/4/12217/37091100002300...
6000000 yen ~= $60K USD.
My assumption is that declining population is leading to surplus housing and declining real-estate prices in most of the country.
And even in the Tokyo area where demand is still strong, homes are still more affordable than in other large cities like New York and London.
You have causation exactly backwards.
If poor people had higher incomes they would spend them. (In the jargon: "marginal propensity to consume declines with income".) That spending would create jobs and sustain incomes for other people like them. I know in my own case, if I had more money I would hire a personal shopper to buy my clothes, a cleaner, a personal trainer,...
Wealth and income inequality lead to stagnant societies where nobody is happy and most people are miserable.
This was pretty bad with sub-minimum wage pay jobs (restaurant / bar industry, tipping culture) and people having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, but it's gotten worse with the race-to-the-bottom gig economy, 0-hour contracts, prison labor/slavery, no changes in minimum wage or worker rights, de-unionization / union discouragement, etc.
They just stand around doing nothing the whole day.
When Malthus lived, there were about 1 billion people. It's hard to estimate, but I'd guess at most 10% of those were living non-miserable lives, so about 100 million people at most.
Now the world middle class is 4 billion (40x) and the world upper class is probably around half a billion people (5x). I'm willing to bet that each and every one of those middle class individuals live better lives than the upper class of his time. We've been able to scale that 40x in 200 years. Despite wars, natural disasters, social strife, etc.
We're pretty resilient.
Where there is a debt, there might be a later bankruptcy.
Sure we might manage to live with 10 billion people on the planet, maybe even more. But why would we want to? I see no value in having more people on the planet. If anything it only reduces the value of each individual.
Does it? A group of people who just know how to raise and care for nerfs may not be worth anything to me. But add a bunch more people who know how to turn nerf wool into a high-quality textile and I start to value the nerf herders a lot more.
It's just a fact. We're 8 billion and we'll probably be 11 billion when we reach peak population.
> I see no value in having more people on the planet.
I have to point out that you say this as a person on this planet :-)
More people means more potential consumers, surely? So the only way there could be “too many people” is if the market is dominated by goods which have a high one-off cost and trivial per-unit costs, such as software or other digital goods?
India, though...
* 3rd largest economy.
* 11th largest population (top 10 until recently, they basically tie with Mexico).
* If you look at a table of countries by area, they are there. Even in the top half, thanks to places like Tuvalu.
I think there is a very strong on-the-face-of-it argument that they just have too many people and not enough for them to do, economically speaking. If they could drop their population and keep the economy about the same (and if they have so many dead-end jobs and so few opportunities, they could) then they would be both a wealthy country and absurdly wealthy on a personal level.