A potential downside of making women equal to men is that they become more similar. They don't need each other. They don't complement each other anymore. Opposites attract, but if women are expected to succeed in the same way as men, then the prior balance is lost.
This messy compromise seems impossible for women in Japan.
More conservative societies see a steeper decline in birthrate as women participation in the workforce increases.
That's why France has one of the highest birthrate in Europe for instance.
Disclaimer: I grew up in Germany/Austria and find the topic of Europeqn demographics quite intriguing
As far as France and immigrants go, I'm not sure relevant studies are available (since France has very specific policies about not mentionning race/origin in its official data). But My intuition is that the role of the immigrant population is overrated. Mostly because the keyword here is "recent" and while France has a rather large population of second or third generation immigrants, the recent immigrant population is probably not much higher than anywhere in Europe.
Stop giving these freebies and fertility rates will drop in no time.
The question is , should we encourage it? in the long run ,it doesnt make sense. We often hear on the radio here how Germans dont make babies anymore and it will doom Germany. I dont think so, one country doesnt need perpetual population growth in order to survive, i believe Germans are smarter on these issues.
Can a country with perpetually declining and aging population survive? In what form?
France has very active policies in place to promote large families, which is why if you run into a French couple with children they'll often have three or more instead of just one or two.
I wonder sometimes if maybe we've swung too far in the direction of gender equality, where now we shame people into believing their self worth can only be found through their professional success, rather than letting them live a life they more care to live. How many times have I seen an article grace the HN homepage defending the idea of being a stay-at-home-whatever?
Its not just salaryman and stay at home wife turning into salaryman and salarywoman, its unemployed dude and salarywoman at the same time.
Well they are living on an island. You can't grow your population forever in a finite space without increased competition.
This is true in most places. The supposedly horribly expensive countries (U.K., Japan, Switzerland; to a lesser degree, the U.S.) are quite affordable outside of the major cities. And there are plenty of high-quality cities that aren't expensive-- analogues of Austin and Portland.
I've come to the conclusion that locating in a large city, for a business, and requiring people work in-office, is an unfunded mandate that borders on the inappropriate. It's worth having a corporate office there, of course; but expecting people to live in a high-COL area if they want to have a career at your company is not only classist, but probably a tactical mistake as well. Remote work poses a lot of difficulties, but it's the only thing that will save us from this catastrophic, worldwide real estate problem. (We should also work on high-speed, affordable trains... but one step at a time.)
Winner-take-all economics is somewhat inevitable, and the best that a government can do is to place a floor under it (i.e. it can't, and shouldn't, prevent the winners from shooting ahead; but it should prevent poverty for the less fortunate) but when WTA applies to places, you get wide swathes of joblessness and a few cities with robust economies but housing prices so severe as to constitute a return of debt bondage. Instead of indentured servants paying for their boat ride, now they pay a 500% housing premium for the ability to live there (i.e. access to the local job market). It's the return of hereditary oligarchy, with real estate being passed from one generation to the next and almost unaffordable on the legitimate market (due to regulatory corruption coming from entrenched, malignant interests-- owners trying to keep their property prices artificially high.)
No one asks, "Why did people drink so much in Communist Russia?" because it's taken as self-evident that Soviet-style communism was a gloomy, depressing system so "of course" people hit the vodka. Yet it surprises the hell out of people that urbanites under a runaway market system have stopped having children (and, in some sad cases, relationships and sex).
Japan is concentrated on the urban areas, apart from that it's very scarcely populated.
And Japan is bigger (area) than Germany.
"Tomita says a woman's chances of promotion in Japan stop dead as soon as she marries. "The bosses assume you will get pregnant." Once a woman does have a child, she adds, the long, inflexible hours become unmanageable. "You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income. It's not an option for women like me."
Great, so if a woman marries she loses independence and her own income, and then people don't know why women don't want to marry?
Same thing here:
"Romantic commitment seems to represent burden and drudgery, from the exorbitant costs of buying property in Japan to the uncertain expectations of a spouse and in-laws"