About immigration: go look up "lump of labour fallacy".
This is part of it too. As is the migration towards cities (because that's where all the jobs are). Huge crowds and a lack of space has the same effect on humans as it does on rats.
Mix those things up with the younger generation's feelings of hopelessness and/or insecurity about their careers and it's no wonder they've stopped having children.
This can be reversed with a government funded jobs program / public works program, EXACTLY like the one Milton Friedman took full advantage of.
It won't be reversed with immigration.
>About immigration: go look up "lump of labour fallacy".
I never said that there was a fixed amount of work in Japan.
If you think that bringing in 3rd world workers as competition isn't going to drag down wages, though, you're dreaming.
Let me disagree here. Most women don't have a career in the first place in Japan. They have office jobs, yes, but a career leading them to higher positions? Certainly not, for most of them.
Deflation and wage stagnation wasn't caused by the Japanese not having babies.
The wage stagnation and deflation was THE CAUSE of the Japanese not having babies.
If you ask most young Japanese today working McJobs (a large and growing number) if they are hopeful about the future they will say no.
THIS is the real problem with Japan today and at its heart it is the problem with the west too. It's why they aren't having babies.
If the Japanese government wants the younger Japanese to start having babies again they need to actually provide decent jobs. They can do that by printing/borrowing yen and spending it on employing people, EXACTLY as the US did following the great depression.
>The only real solution (real in the economists sense of the word) is mass immigration
This will make things worse. It will simply ensure that the already crappy McJobs the Japanese young are increasingly doing are paid even less thanks to Fillipino competition.
Want the Japanese suicide rate to skyrocket from its already high level? Start bringing in dirt cheap labor competition from the 3rd world.