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claman wrote:Are elderly people selfish sticking to their resources while younger families struggle to manege ?

Those elders took care of their own parents and grandparents and deserve the same level of respect from their children and grandchildren. In cases where they have none the society as a whole should be rewarding them for not contributing to overpopulation by giving them decent care.

Davy and apne are often talking about the great "die off" in generel. I'm just talking about it on a personal level.

claman wrote:Davy and apne are often talking about the great "die off" in generel. I'm just talking about it on a personal level.

This brings up an interesting point. On the personal level, we are saying a person should have a right to chose when to die. Well, can we not extrapolate that to masses of people. The culminating sum of the crisis we are entering means many many people will probably die prematurely or at a time not of their choosing. Of course precisely controlling the timing of one's death is unrealistic. But what is so tragic is we have set up conditions that will bring out the early death of many people thus taking away their right to life. I hope I am not around to witness it. That is my wish to die before.

Onlooker, My basic point of view is that humans are an animal species, and that we - no matter how bright we are - are under the rules of nature.
We are over populating and must face the same destiny as any other over-populating species ever on this earth

Okay the first point P, your take is Genocide, well is that not what is happening gradually with the stresses and assaults on our life support systems. I believe the confusion is when to die or NOT to die. With regards to your second point, true one can at any time choose to pull the trigger or such but that would happen when one feels that is the appropriate action to take and who can say when one will feel that way. Finally, to your third point. I do not find anything about mass die-off entertaining. In fact I do not even like to watch zombie hordes in movies or TV, yep call me a dull person. haha.

In a place as heavily populated as Japan a slow reduction of population is probably not a bad thing. I recently saw a film about the main station in Tokyo. Do not want to go there in rush hour.

Japan is already overpopulated, so their population shrinking is actually a good thing. As long as there are enough young people to support the aging population, a shrinking population is a good thing. Increasing population yields absolutely no benefits other than the illusion of perpetual economic growth.

Of course, anyone arguing that there must be perpetual population growth in order to take care of the aging population doesn't understand that such a statement is akin to the largest pyramid scheme in human history. Ever-more young people are somehow required to keep increasing the population in order to take care of an aging population. So you must constantly increase the bottom rug on the age-population pyramid to take care of those on top?

Does not and will never work.

Besides, no country actually wants the refugees from Syria in their country because there is no country in the world that is underpopulated. The entire world is in a severe state of ecological overshoot from an excessive amount of human beings. It just happens that the majority of people deny this.

Japan does NOT want immigrants from the Middle East. Encouraging population growth, in a world that doesn't need more people, is beyond foolish at this point.

Every country in the world should follow Japan's role model, and voluntarily reduce their populations by keeping birth-rates lower than death-rates. Especially in countries that are already way too overpopulated like China, Bangladesh and India.

Of course, realistically that is never going to happen. And realistically, the global human population will continue to grow until Mother Nature uses famine, disease and war to reduce it.

By the time we reach 9 billion people by 2050, the world's resources will become even more scarce and depleted than they are now. And the population crash or die-off will be even more severe than if it were to happen at our current population number. Of course, it is a big IF we can ever reach 9 billion people. It is very possible the involuntary population decline will happen before we reach 9 billion due to famine, diseases and other nasty things.

Virtually all of the potential arable land in the world is already being used to grow food. We are likely to reach peak food within the next decade or two--assuming we haven't reached it already. And afterwards, peak global population because without excess food, it is not possible to grow population. Just like the Club of Rome predictions in the book, Limits to Growth, predicted.

Most of the predictions in the Limits to Growth book are probably going to become true over the next couple of decades since business-as-usual is still continuing and will continue until it is no longer possible to.

Peak food is not the problem, it is the willingness to transport it. If you took the 1000 calories per day that the average westerner eats above the necessary amount there would be plenty of food, and the westerners would be healthier. The cost to transport it and the losses the distributors might make would require generosity. Do you think Trump would help?

..... and so it goes:

Japan suffers biggest natural population decline ever in 2018

(CNN)Japan suffered its biggest natural population decline ever this year, government statistics show.
The fast-graying nation also posted a record-low birthrate, as the estimated number of babies born in 2018 dipped to 921,000 -- the lowest since records began in 1899 -- according to a report published Friday by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare.
The number of newborns is estimated to have shrunk by 25,000 from 2017, and the figure remains under the 1 million mark for the third year running.
Deaths in 2018 also hit a postwar record high of 1.369 million, with a natural population decline of 448,000 -- the highest ever. ....

More: https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/23/health/j ... index.html

Japan doesn't have a lot of resources itself, so it may be an okay thing for it to lose some population. It has a lot of forests and sustainable farms thanks to it's policies. It might be okay to lighten the load a bit to make it through what's coming. There are 127 million people on that island now, and if they lost 1/2 million per year it will take 254 years to get down to nobody. It's going to take them down under 100 million at this rate in about 50 years. Fine! We should be doing it too.

JimBof wrote: If you took the 1000 calories per day that the average westerner eats:

Why spout complete nonsense? Why not look things up? Or make credible citations if you're going to make a wild claim?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c ... rgy_intake

As of a decade+ ago, the minimum caloric intake for any country was shown at nearly 1600.
In India it was nearly 2400 -- you know, India, where there are lots and lots of hungry people.

In the West it is more like 3000 or more.

In the US, more like 3800, where there is far too much obesity.

Actually JimBof said 1000 calories above what the westerner needs not that he only eats 1000 calories a day.

Cog wrote:Actually JimBof said 1000 calories above what the westerner needs not that he only eats 1000 calories a day.

Yes he did. I misread the statement and didn't copy a large enough text segment to catch that error.

My bad - 100%.

Excellent thread, lots to explore with this discussion.

Population reduction is inevitable. You can do it voluntarially or it can be forced. But it will happen. So we had better figure out how to deal with it.

I’ve been a strong advocate of degrowth generally and population reduction specifically for a while now. Clearly it’s a phenomenon humanity has yet to figure out. It doesn’t fit our Capitalist/Consumerist model. They are incompatiable.

This is LTG in action. In this first phase we will need to be flexible and adapt to the new situation. That will be tough going from positive growth to negative growth. We will have “growing pains” to make a horrible pun. In the second phase we will transition from degrowth to steady state.

That the Japanese are making the transition in a peaceful, if not graceful manner, without resorting to immigration is a good thing. If nothing else we should watch and observe how they do it, what works, what doesn’t.

In the USA we lament mechanization and robotics and AI that threatens to take away all employment. Then whey are we lamenting there won’t be enough folks to care for the elderly? It seems each elederly person creates at least 2 to 3 jobs. The bigger problem is what to do with all the extra health care workers once the elderly are all dead?

Of course we need skilled and compassionate elder care workers. Not so sure we are going to find that. Brining in immigrants does not solve a problem, it merely displaces it in time and makes it worse when the inevitable happens.

The real problem is not population, it is the exchange of money. It is phrased that we need a young population to support the elderly. Not true as noted above. We need enough taxpayers to support the cost of the elderly. Who pays? It’s a financial manipulation problem.

Forget money for an instant. If the USA has enough food and enough people to care for the elderly, why it it a problem? We have all the resources we need, we just need to redistribute those resources better. As the population decreases then there will be proportionately more resources to go around, all will be a little richer. But to make this happen you have to change your way of thinking about wealth and distribution.

I’ve no answers. But here it’s hard to see a very modest rate of depopulation as a catastrophe.

Japan right now has about the same population as the entire US had in 1940. We are at well over twice the population we had back then also. If we are going to get back to a population that's sustainable I think Japan is doing it in a very kind and gentle way. We need families and people to run things, but we don't need as many as we have now. The high consuming countries are all experiencing a drop, but that's okay. We can't have a whole planet of suburbanites.

Japan is on the leading edge of the big question about how we deal with a declining population. The importance cannot be understated. A big component of economic growth is having a population of consumers. When this population is shrinking how do you demonstrate economic growth which is a hallmark of any capitalistic society. In Japan we see the first test case. Questions arise

Being an insular country domestically but in business quite international, how will they adapt. Will they allow more immigrants in a desperate attempt to continue to grow economically.

Will they accept less economic activity, less growth and begin to adapt to a downsized economy.

This is worth watching as this is probably the first industrialized country to deal with this.

As many of us here often question how growth based capitalism adapts to a declining resource base and declining population, here we have an interesting example.

Time for some of those "damned statistics". I gleaned the following from Wikipedia on the search "Immigration to Japan":

Total authorized foriegn nationals resident in Japan are 1.75% of the population, and illegal immigrants are almost zero, estimated below 0.1%. The authorized foriegners break down as follows:

-Special permanent resident status
-Permanent Resident status
-Status of Residence based on Status or Position (Descendants of Japanese nationals)
-Individuals living in the country as registered spouses of Japanese nationals
-Individuals granted limited duration employment visas
-Individuals granted limited duration student or academic research visas
-Individuals on limited duration Technical Intern Training Program visas
-Registered refugee and asylum seekers

Japan is a signatory to the UN's "1951 Refugee Convention" and the "1967 Protocol". However, Japan rejects far more asylum applicants than other countries. For example the USA, Canada, and Germany each approve about 40% of asylum applicants, whereas in Japan the average since the refugee treaties is 0.2%. In 2017 for example, Japan approved 20 out of 19,828 applicants.

As a former USCG member, I will say of Japan that it has one of the most effective Coast Guard forces in the world. There are no boatloads of refugees coming ashore in Japan.

Perhaps you were not aware of racial strife in Japan. It exists and is hardly publicized by anyone, this is the briefest of summaries. I experienced it on the island of Hokkaido during the 1970s, while wearing a USCG uniform. In terms of Japanese of Japanese ethnicity, the Wajin majority, which originated as Korean immigrants and spawned the Samurai culture in fuedal Japan, has historically repressed the Ainu, which are the original island inhabitants. The Ainu share a common ancestry with the Kuril Islanders of Russia, and most live on the Northern Japanese island of Hokkaido. The majority of Japanese are Wajin and pretty much detest the Ainu, the Gaijin (foriegn devils), and anybody in a US uniform, which is something that dates back to when MacArthur was Governor of occupied Japan following WW2. They also seem to have some lingering animosity towards us because we dropped two nuclear weapons on the Japanese mainland.

In any case, Ibon used the word "insular", and that about sums it up. It's their island, they pretty much have a distinct culture, and want to keep it that way. Not to mention the overpopulation.

I'm not sure if they will ever change, but compared to the USA, which has hundreds of miles of open borders, Japan has no problem with immigrants. My office at my former employer was near the two Japanese liasons, which I got to know. Unlike all other countries, the Japanese branch of the company employed only Japanese, plus a couple of miserable tokens. They also had products shipped to a "remanufacturing facility" in Japan, where they stripped off packaging in other languages, substituted Japanese translations for multi-lingual labelling, and even applied Japanese labels over product markings. We were also warned that when we (meaning US employees) communicated with the Japanese, that they reserved the word "Domestic" strictly for Japanese products, and anything called "International" was despised.

They were of course, oh so polite about these things. But they'll likely never have immigration problems, unless their numbers fall to where they can no longer defend their own islands.