>Under Katsube’s direction, Junko also enrolled in a program that helps shut-ins learn social skills by engaging in activities such as gardening, music, sports, and volunteering.
America desperately needs this. I fear the rise of social media has caused more and more people to stay inside all day without interacting with any real humans. I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the house.
I did find it interesting how closely moving out and getting married was linked here. I've seen members of my family have children, without moving out and I definitely moved out while single.
Your fix for technology enabled social distance was more technology.
I love it.
Perhaps social media has done that to some people. But I still see my neighbors out in their garden, and even outside with musical instruments. My musical friends come over and play outside with me. I garden alone because socializing over everything is insane to me.
I disagree there’s a real problem.
Re: people living at home still.
That trend was there before social media and COVID. Along with women having kids later, and adults finding career success later.
The economic math always points to the gerontocracy locking up capital, and of course their generational peers in government refuse to use their legislative powers to do anything but hand sacks of capital to their buddies, who then point us toward shovels.
This isn’t magic. We know where the problem is. Believing we need to import another fad for people to consume is ridiculous.
I agree with you, but I'm not sure we're aware of this problem as a society.
People still think that people making 6 figures are the elite and cheer every time a progressive income tax targeting someone marginally richer than them is introduced by their government.
They are not the enemy, they're not the people lobbying the government so their business can make extra millions or avoid paying taxes with loopholes.
The political discourse always ends up on some hot issue backed by group identity (whether it's minorities, poor people or some other kind of victim).
I don't think the government will ever be able to tackle this conflict of interest and actually impact the ultra rich which maintain politicians.
I just hope we won't get to a violent revolution and physically killing of the rich middle class (kulaks 2.0)
We need to start thinking about what happens when those people die and our incredibly permissive inheritance laws allow them to pass down literal trillions to... basically a bunch of 50, 60, and 70 year olds.
Especially since a lot of that inheritance is going to be stakes in critical businesses that the heirs are in no way, shape, or form qualified to run.
I was thinking before Corona, last year was very good for me.
Once you realize social media is mostly fake validation seeking behavior you can decide if that's what you want . Ends up being tons of stress and mental anguish for nothing at all. I'll say without a doubt people are absolutely meaner via social media vs real life. I recall when I lived in Chicago how everyone in certain areas knew each other. Act like a jerk and word travels fast. Thus this keeps people friendly. On Reddit, which I had to step back from , it take 10 seconds to create a username. Then you can throw out all types of vitriol at people you'll never meet. Why be apart of that ? I do find Reddit to be very helpful if you have a specific technical question, but the moment you venture out of tech people get really nasty really fast. I'm still debating if it's worth returning to.
It's at the point where I might hire someone to run the social media accounts for a product I may be releasing. I have absolutely no interest in using social media myself.
I have a sort of live now list for once Corona ends
So why the finger pointing like all the other commenters on HN? Go out and fix it! If this problem could be solved with some NOSQL, a Raspberry PI, and soldering, this forum would collectively rally behind the solution. But suddenly when a problem is deemed "social" our hands go in the air and it's not in my backyard?
We're both techies, myself I'm pivoting my career into psychology 5 years after I thought I was done with college. We need more techies fixing this, and you clearly have some interest this problem, why not join the solution?
I'm sure you were just intended to be encouraging, but posts like this, telling other people what to do with a tinge of moralizing, are crossing into personal attack. Please err on the side of avoiding that here.
The problem is that there's usually a 1000x discrepancy between how a comment appears to the person making it vs. the person receiving it. Comments in the rear-view mirror are much larger than they appear!
The illusion of control and the ability to make a difference. It's why tech-minded people are notorious for trying to find clean technical solutions for messy social/political problems. It's comforting to feel you can reduce a vast societal problem to something you can tinker with in your living room and solve, and doing so also gives you a feeling of power and control.
I feel like the "Jobless and living with parents" pejorative is missing the mark.
Jobless -- So what? If a country has figured out how to provide for its people w/o jobs, so what? For example if we had perfect AI-robot slaves we'd all be jobless. Would it be a problem? Maybe we should ask people why they want a job, maybe what they want to do doesnt require one?
"Living with their parents" - Again, so what? Much of the world and across much of history this was just how it was. No one denigrates someone 0-20 for living with their parents, why should a 30 yr old be denigrated for the same. Plus, for many of us so lucky the same scenario, with opposite take, will occur-- our parents will move in with us later in their life and we'll "live with our parents" again. Plus when you add that median sq foot of homes (at least in USA) is rising, you can comfortably live with more people in "home". With double master bedrooms more common and more square feet we're blurring the lines of what a single home means. Some houses are so big that you could just put a dividing wall and a separate entrance and you'd have 2 homes...
I guess if you remove all other data points/context and only stick with the words "jobless" and "living with parents" I guess "so what" is a valid question. It would be a valid question for most issues where ones has barely any other information.
But if you read a little about the price that japan (and this demographic in particular) has been paying and what they think about it, I'm pretty sure you won't find anyone asking "so what".
Your point on how USA (and other countries) should be making better use of their living arrangements is valid. I don't think it compares to the situation Japan or most deeply densed urbanized countries in Asia.
Right, and I think it's the negative stigma of the former ("jobless") than the latter ("living with parents").
Multi-generational family cohabitation is nothing new and still the norm in many parts of the world. There's many advantages of it, though also carries risks (example is Italy's seniors exposure to COVID19).
The "jobless" part is more cross-cultural in its negative stigma, on the expectation that adults are contributing members of their respective societies. But as this article goes into detail, the quality of the job matters as much as having one. "Gainfully employed" > "employed", especially for the person in question.
I think another aspect of this is the age of the individual. When one is in their early 20s, then being "jobless" and "living with parents" is much more acceptable (both by the self and the society). But as one gets older, such as in the article's 40+ year old norm, then it becomes much harder. Add on top the Japanese/Asian emphasis on image and honor, then the resulting perceived sense of shame/failure can be very burdensome.
That's because the scenario you've mentioned does not describe these households. The problem here is that there are adults who are partially or wholly supported by their parents in a house where they are not living with (nor was it designed for them to live with) a spouse or children.
> If a country has figured out how to provide for its people w/o jobs, so what?
Except no country has done that yet. We are far from full automation and most of the structural unemployment is due to emerging differential between labor demand and existing labor supply, not because we are in a state to provide everyone everything they want.
Also I want you to consider that a vocation is not only about covering one's needs, but also about our need to do something that matters for other people, with other people, to feel useful (vocation = calling). There is only so much need for every unemployed person doing arts and crafts, or another youtube channel to watch gadgets shredded in blenders or mentos put into a swimming pool full of coke. We deep down desire to do things that really matter, really meaningful.
> "Living with their parents" - Again, so what?
There is "living with parents because I value kin work and kin relationships" and there is "living with parents because I need to financially and psychologically". Meaningful participation in society requires having a degree of autonomy, individuation and agency. I would push even further; freedom from serious mental health problems, societally and individually, requires those. This is not an advocacy of hyperindividualism, it is about healthy ego-separation and self-actualization, which counter-intuitively also helps with social cohesion because it prevents ressentiment.
The "So What" comes into play here in that this may not be the situation that this generation wants to be in. It is one thing, if this generation is choosing to not seek employment and cohabit with their parents, it is quite another if they have no choice and are being forced into this situation.
It is a bit like saying, people are living in tents on the sidewalk. "So what?". Plenty of people live with less than a tent and some even choose to do so. We have to go one step further and ask ourselves if this is a life that these people are choosing to lead, or if it is one that has been thrust upon them through a lack of options.
Interesting advocacy both for [1] and against [2] nuclear families. Many more such studies and articles on both sides. As long as the median demographic for family formation continues to bleed usable income with each passing decade, the advocacy for either way won't matter if there simply is insufficient economic incentive to have children and raise them, and we'll see continued patterns like extended family or high-trust non-familial clans grouping together for sheer survival. We can handwave the trends away by hiding in median compensation figures, but societies with big and durable bifurcations aren't fun to live in for most people on the wrong end of that bifurcation.
I agree. These terms are common, euphemistic allusions to other problems. They should state plainly the issue: lack of buying power, economic leverage among the working class, lack of choice, and inadequately available housing. These are of what we're actually suffering.
Problem is not that these people are not working. They never enter into adulthood. They do not have purpose/responsibility in theirs life. No spouse, children or anything to care. They will quickly develop mental problems and become homeless once parents die. They will become bigger problem than NEET generation in UK.
I think those two properties are probably assumed to be indicative of a pretty unsurprising ticking timebomb for the poor situation brewing in the individual's future. Basically it's a strong signal of lack of independence and a strong sign of dependence, dependency upon a parent who is the one taking care of business in some way that keeps the bills paid and the both of them alive. When the parent passes on how will these individuals function and survive I think is the big gaping question.
To further aggravate things too I suppose, if the parent's health declines and requires the financial help of their children who cannot provide it then you're left with a situation where two dependents are present to the situation.
> For example if we had perfect AI-robot slaves we'd all be jobless. Would it be a problem?
i mean, it almost certainly would be, right? feel like we very instinctively/subconsciously derive our self-worth from what we're worth to our society (which tautologically comes from the share of responsibilities we take on).
maybe the jobs wouldn't resemble anything like those of today, but i have no doubt we have an innate need to be doing things that
Is employer granted employment the only way to have value in a society?
Personally I value motherhood far more than anything a woman could do in the workplace. Of course it's her choice what she wants to do with her life, but it's my opinion that there's little more important to a society than intensive investment in its children.
I wonder if it does not go back a bit further than that. An internal bias towards not living with your parents could be the foundation of modern humans dispersing into every marginally habitable corner the planet in not many generations.
(disclaimer; source unfounded speculation by me)
Of course it's perjorative. The issue isn't with staying at home, it's with staying at home and doing nothing. If you have all your needs provided for you should seek out to do something meaningful.
I wonder how much the stories about Japanese unemployment are just driven the the need for a good story vs. looking at actual figures. The Japanese labor force participation rate for 15-64 year-olds rose from about 70% in 1990 to 79% in 2020, as estimated by the International Labour Organization. In that time frame, it overtook China and the US (both have falling labor force participation rates) and the only other country with a similar trajectory I could find is Germany. Most other countries I tried have much lower rates.
The participation rate is a really coarse measure.
In Japan, it has increased mainly because among the younger generation, far more women stay in the workforce after their 20s. But as the article describes, their career prospects are very limited and few of them ever get a chance at stable lifetime employment that used to be the norm (but is also becoming less and less available) for men.
The male labor force participation rate grew from 83% to 86%. So although the increase was greater for women (from 57% to 72%), that hasn't reduced male employment.
By "stable lifetime employment" do you mean staying at a single company for one's whole working life? Do you have any statistics showing that this is decreasing? (Even if it does, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.)
It's very easy in japan to find a "baito" job, that is low skill, part time and paid at the hour and with no benefits. People like the "freeters" cumulate several of these jobs to earn a decent monthly wage. The problem is of course that there is no security of employment, very little rights and as I said no benefits like pension. Housing is still doable as the market is not too high tension, but it's pretty much impossible for them to get a loan for anything. Raising children and sending them to higher education is pretty much not feasible.
I guess for US people it's pretty similar to the fast-food workers earning less than livable wage.
This is more a story about a particular subset of unemployed that follow a rather stereotypical pattern, not the norm. They fizzle out around college, then practically never do anything which requires initiative after that. It seems like just a manifestation of how mental illness can play out within that particular culture.
* 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.
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
So it's not one of those. I submit that it's organization - the Japanese society and economy is extremely rigid and maintains some egregious inefficiencies in the labor market, simply because it's always been done that way.
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.
On HN when people discuss CS/privacy/programming the conversation is very thorough and interesting.
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.
"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.
>That's not how economy works.
>There is no such thing in general as "too many people for the economy".
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.
Like others having lived there for a short period of time, I agree with this observation. The cultural premium on risk, that may merely inconvenience someone, is unreasonably high (by my standard, anyway). Ever have to pay a bribe to a landlord to rent an apartment as a matter of accepted business protocol? Look up "reikin". Then you'll realize why some think it's totally reasonable to live out of an internet cafe.
Economies not only produce, they also take. For example, two free people could engage in free trade where one is holding a gun and the other voluntarily gives up their wallet. At scale we call that a Trade Agreement.
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).
> There is no such thing in general as "too many people for the economy".
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.
I watch NHK US a bit. Every night they have some show with a westerner riding some train line or riding a bike around and the landscape - which is pretty thin on people. Train lines manned by retired workers just to keep them going. Cyclist stops at at famous peach or strawberry orchards and there is some 90 year old on their knees weeding, kids are all in the city. Of course, it will all become industrial agro-farming once they're gone, but is that the best cultural, social, economic solution?
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.
Western Ireland has been like that since the Great Potato Famine in 1840. Beautiful country; I've ridden from Carna to Galway on horseback. Not good farmland, though.
This sounds interesting, I'd love to watch it, could you link to one of those videos? I see lots of video results for NHK US, but a lot don't seem to be of the type that you're talking about.
what a ridiculous assumption that there could be too many people and not enough for them to do.
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...
> 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.
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.
People here are disagreeing with you, but I actually think you're exactly right about most modern economies: too many people and too few jobs leads to all sorts of social issues from wealth inequality to excessive hours to crazy house prices.
> too many people and too few jobs leads to all sorts of social issues from wealth inequality ...
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.
But not just quantity of work, but also quality; the US is infamous for having millions of bullshit jobs with bad pay, poor working conditions, and no future prospects.
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.
I also agree with you. I feel that if there were a real shortage of labour (as opposed to our current shortage of cheap labour), a lot of bullshit jobs[1] would become a huge waste of resources.
So Malthus was in a sense right, as the “too many people” issue has showed up constantly since he wrote his stuff. And before anyone comes and tells me that “he was wrong because the Earth can sustain 8-9 billion humans, like it does right now”, I’ll say that there’s no way Earth’s actual ecosystem can sustain a major part of that population regularly eating beef, or regularly flying, or having scattered individual houses instead of buildings with tens or more flats each etc.
The population of Japan is shrinking. A lot. The population peaked in 2011 and is down about 2 million since then. Outside of Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya, Japan is emptying out.
Japan does not have too many people.
I love how you are exposing the cognitive dissonance between too many people for the economy/world and immigrants do not depress wages. How can someone hold these two views simultaneously are they not the same, just at a different scale?
A friend of mine works at Amazon Japan. She's working 10-12 hrs a day, 6 days week. She gets paid no overtime. AFAIK that's illegal in Japan but here Amazon is doing it.
Not a big news, Amazon is a crap company exploiting its workers worldwide and creating a lot of externalities. If the practice is illegal, an employee could sue (and win) but that personal choice.
On the 10-12 hours, the concept of "work" in Japan is a big different than in the West, in particular because there seems to have almost no notion of productivity. I often see 4 people on a task that would be allocated to one worker in Europe, or 12 person cleaning the same square meter. That combined with perfectionism (again, with no notion of productivity) that if 1% improvement can be done with 300% effort they try to do it, is a perfect cocktail to raise the total "worked" hours.
And finally there is the bureaucracy. Today I spoke with someone about implementing an idea, where the implementation of the idea is literally sending an email. I spend 10 minutes explaining it. But that could not be done directly! No, that person need to consult her boss. How long this will take? Probably at least half an hour... 2 or 3 times more if there is back and forth with me through the intermediate person. How many "worked" hours does this represent in total? I plan on a least one man/hour. In my country: doing the task directly, which represents at least a 120 times better productivity...
Isn't it like a cultural thing over there where you're expected to work overtime and essentially kill yourself for your company? Might be dated info but I remember someone saying nobody even thinks about going home before the boss regardless of when they got in so the boss never has the chance to see them leave.
In Japanese employment, you can have a contract that pays you for overtime regardless of if you work it. Thus, in effect you don't get paid more for working more, but you are technically getting paid overtime by law.
With that boost, people could work less and they could afford to pay them more. It's a win win situation, but it's hard to change views when it comes to work.
Folks want to believe that working more is better, but really it's about quality over quantity.
We'd see crazy economic benefits if we stopped being traditionalists about work and started following the science / data.
That depends entirely on government incentives to maintain wages and labor's power to demand the same.
The idea that wages are driven by market forces is only half true. Someone has to pull the trigger on underpaying people who ought to be earning a piving wage.
They would adjust depending on how paid, salary or hourly. I believe productivity would be boosted over time as the rusty unemployed got back into the groove.
The hikikomori are written about a lot in the Japanese and western press, and I think it's great that Japanese society is making a conscious effort to reach out to people and see how they can be made more happy and productive.
The stats in the article are probably correct, but leaves out some very important context.
- Many Japanese adults live with their parents. Multi-generational households are quite common, especially outside of the big cites. This is not new. In fact, it is becoming less common, not more.
- Japan has an official unemployment rate of about 2%, but for almost all jobs there are more openings than applicants.
From the article:
> For the class of 2021, the ratio is set to dip to 1.53 jobs per graduate, from 1.83 this year. “It’s like the employment ice age,” Kubo says. “It’s happening again.”
The situation for these people is not nearly as dire as many try to paint it.
Do they count people as unemployed only if they are actively looking for work? If it was the case, there could be many people without a job and not looking for one, which could explain the discrepancy
Readit News
America desperately needs this. I fear the rise of social media has caused more and more people to stay inside all day without interacting with any real humans. I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the house.
I did find it interesting how closely moving out and getting married was linked here. I've seen members of my family have children, without moving out and I definitely moved out while single.
I love it.
Perhaps social media has done that to some people. But I still see my neighbors out in their garden, and even outside with musical instruments. My musical friends come over and play outside with me. I garden alone because socializing over everything is insane to me.
I disagree there’s a real problem.
Re: people living at home still.
That trend was there before social media and COVID. Along with women having kids later, and adults finding career success later.
The economic math always points to the gerontocracy locking up capital, and of course their generational peers in government refuse to use their legislative powers to do anything but hand sacks of capital to their buddies, who then point us toward shovels.
This isn’t magic. We know where the problem is. Believing we need to import another fad for people to consume is ridiculous.
People still think that people making 6 figures are the elite and cheer every time a progressive income tax targeting someone marginally richer than them is introduced by their government. They are not the enemy, they're not the people lobbying the government so their business can make extra millions or avoid paying taxes with loopholes.
The political discourse always ends up on some hot issue backed by group identity (whether it's minorities, poor people or some other kind of victim). I don't think the government will ever be able to tackle this conflict of interest and actually impact the ultra rich which maintain politicians.
I just hope we won't get to a violent revolution and physically killing of the rich middle class (kulaks 2.0)
Especially since a lot of that inheritance is going to be stakes in critical businesses that the heirs are in no way, shape, or form qualified to run.
Except a lot of the meetups where I live either haven't come back or they are "virtual". :(
Once you realize social media is mostly fake validation seeking behavior you can decide if that's what you want . Ends up being tons of stress and mental anguish for nothing at all. I'll say without a doubt people are absolutely meaner via social media vs real life. I recall when I lived in Chicago how everyone in certain areas knew each other. Act like a jerk and word travels fast. Thus this keeps people friendly. On Reddit, which I had to step back from , it take 10 seconds to create a username. Then you can throw out all types of vitriol at people you'll never meet. Why be apart of that ? I do find Reddit to be very helpful if you have a specific technical question, but the moment you venture out of tech people get really nasty really fast. I'm still debating if it's worth returning to.
It's at the point where I might hire someone to run the social media accounts for a product I may be releasing. I have absolutely no interest in using social media myself.
I have a sort of live now list for once Corona ends
Read _Industrial Society and Its Future_. It has the path paved out already. Japan is, as seems to be customary, ahead of the curve in some respects.
So why the finger pointing like all the other commenters on HN? Go out and fix it! If this problem could be solved with some NOSQL, a Raspberry PI, and soldering, this forum would collectively rally behind the solution. But suddenly when a problem is deemed "social" our hands go in the air and it's not in my backyard?
We're both techies, myself I'm pivoting my career into psychology 5 years after I thought I was done with college. We need more techies fixing this, and you clearly have some interest this problem, why not join the solution?
The problem is that there's usually a 1000x discrepancy between how a comment appears to the person making it vs. the person receiving it. Comments in the rear-view mirror are much larger than they appear!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's already a technical solution to this problem.
I've seen startups which appear to be meetup alternatives as well.
Jobless -- So what? If a country has figured out how to provide for its people w/o jobs, so what? For example if we had perfect AI-robot slaves we'd all be jobless. Would it be a problem? Maybe we should ask people why they want a job, maybe what they want to do doesnt require one?
"Living with their parents" - Again, so what? Much of the world and across much of history this was just how it was. No one denigrates someone 0-20 for living with their parents, why should a 30 yr old be denigrated for the same. Plus, for many of us so lucky the same scenario, with opposite take, will occur-- our parents will move in with us later in their life and we'll "live with our parents" again. Plus when you add that median sq foot of homes (at least in USA) is rising, you can comfortably live with more people in "home". With double master bedrooms more common and more square feet we're blurring the lines of what a single home means. Some houses are so big that you could just put a dividing wall and a separate entrance and you'd have 2 homes...
But if you read a little about the price that japan (and this demographic in particular) has been paying and what they think about it, I'm pretty sure you won't find anyone asking "so what".
Your point on how USA (and other countries) should be making better use of their living arrangements is valid. I don't think it compares to the situation Japan or most deeply densed urbanized countries in Asia.
Multi-generational family cohabitation is nothing new and still the norm in many parts of the world. There's many advantages of it, though also carries risks (example is Italy's seniors exposure to COVID19).
The "jobless" part is more cross-cultural in its negative stigma, on the expectation that adults are contributing members of their respective societies. But as this article goes into detail, the quality of the job matters as much as having one. "Gainfully employed" > "employed", especially for the person in question.
I think another aspect of this is the age of the individual. When one is in their early 20s, then being "jobless" and "living with parents" is much more acceptable (both by the self and the society). But as one gets older, such as in the article's 40+ year old norm, then it becomes much harder. Add on top the Japanese/Asian emphasis on image and honor, then the resulting perceived sense of shame/failure can be very burdensome.
Except no country has done that yet. We are far from full automation and most of the structural unemployment is due to emerging differential between labor demand and existing labor supply, not because we are in a state to provide everyone everything they want.
Also I want you to consider that a vocation is not only about covering one's needs, but also about our need to do something that matters for other people, with other people, to feel useful (vocation = calling). There is only so much need for every unemployed person doing arts and crafts, or another youtube channel to watch gadgets shredded in blenders or mentos put into a swimming pool full of coke. We deep down desire to do things that really matter, really meaningful.
> "Living with their parents" - Again, so what?
There is "living with parents because I value kin work and kin relationships" and there is "living with parents because I need to financially and psychologically". Meaningful participation in society requires having a degree of autonomy, individuation and agency. I would push even further; freedom from serious mental health problems, societally and individually, requires those. This is not an advocacy of hyperindividualism, it is about healthy ego-separation and self-actualization, which counter-intuitively also helps with social cohesion because it prevents ressentiment.
It is a bit like saying, people are living in tents on the sidewalk. "So what?". Plenty of people live with less than a tent and some even choose to do so. We have to go one step further and ask ourselves if this is a life that these people are choosing to lead, or if it is one that has been thrust upon them through a lack of options.
Interesting advocacy both for [1] and against [2] nuclear families. Many more such studies and articles on both sides. As long as the median demographic for family formation continues to bleed usable income with each passing decade, the advocacy for either way won't matter if there simply is insufficient economic incentive to have children and raise them, and we'll see continued patterns like extended family or high-trust non-familial clans grouping together for sheer survival. We can handwave the trends away by hiding in median compensation figures, but societies with big and durable bifurcations aren't fun to live in for most people on the wrong end of that bifurcation.
[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-real-roots-of-the-nuclear-fam...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...
This is a fair point, but the problem in this case is that the country hasn't figured out how to provide for them.
To further aggravate things too I suppose, if the parent's health declines and requires the financial help of their children who cannot provide it then you're left with a situation where two dependents are present to the situation.
i mean, it almost certainly would be, right? feel like we very instinctively/subconsciously derive our self-worth from what we're worth to our society (which tautologically comes from the share of responsibilities we take on).
maybe the jobs wouldn't resemble anything like those of today, but i have no doubt we have an innate need to be doing things that
1) are necessary/valuable to other people
2) visibly satisfy 1)
Is employer granted employment the only way to have value in a society?
Personally I value motherhood far more than anything a woman could do in the workplace. Of course it's her choice what she wants to do with her life, but it's my opinion that there's little more important to a society than intensive investment in its children.
The closest I can think of is Brunei and (previously) Saudi Arabia.
Both countries have massive oil income that is generated without regard to whether the citizens are employed.
They don’t use “robot slaves”, but hire foreigners to pump the oil - and do everything else.
Neither are particularly libertarian. They use religion as a way of imposing social discipline.
Saudi Arabia has been moving away from this model.
https://thediplomat.com/2020/02/brunei-spoiled-subjects-of-t...
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?location...
In Japan, it has increased mainly because among the younger generation, far more women stay in the workforce after their 20s. But as the article describes, their career prospects are very limited and few of them ever get a chance at stable lifetime employment that used to be the norm (but is also becoming less and less available) for men.
Male https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.MA.ZS?locat...
Female https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.FE.ZS?locat...
By "stable lifetime employment" do you mean staying at a single company for one's whole working life? Do you have any statistics showing that this is decreasing? (Even if it does, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.)
* 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.
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:
So it's not one of those. I submit that it's organization - the Japanese society and economy is extremely rigid and maintains some egregious inefficiencies in the labor market, simply because it's always been done that way.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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o
They just stand around doing nothing the whole day.
India, though...
On the 10-12 hours, the concept of "work" in Japan is a big different than in the West, in particular because there seems to have almost no notion of productivity. I often see 4 people on a task that would be allocated to one worker in Europe, or 12 person cleaning the same square meter. That combined with perfectionism (again, with no notion of productivity) that if 1% improvement can be done with 300% effort they try to do it, is a perfect cocktail to raise the total "worked" hours.
And finally there is the bureaucracy. Today I spoke with someone about implementing an idea, where the implementation of the idea is literally sending an email. I spend 10 minutes explaining it. But that could not be done directly! No, that person need to consult her boss. How long this will take? Probably at least half an hour... 2 or 3 times more if there is back and forth with me through the intermediate person. How many "worked" hours does this represent in total? I plan on a least one man/hour. In my country: doing the task directly, which represents at least a 120 times better productivity...
With that boost, people could work less and they could afford to pay them more. It's a win win situation, but it's hard to change views when it comes to work.
Folks want to believe that working more is better, but really it's about quality over quantity.
We'd see crazy economic benefits if we stopped being traditionalists about work and started following the science / data.
The idea that wages are driven by market forces is only half true. Someone has to pull the trigger on underpaying people who ought to be earning a piving wage.
The stats in the article are probably correct, but leaves out some very important context.
- Many Japanese adults live with their parents. Multi-generational households are quite common, especially outside of the big cites. This is not new. In fact, it is becoming less common, not more.
- Japan has an official unemployment rate of about 2%, but for almost all jobs there are more openings than applicants.
From the article: > For the class of 2021, the ratio is set to dip to 1.53 jobs per graduate, from 1.83 this year. “It’s like the employment ice age,” Kubo says. “It’s happening again.”
The situation for these people is not nearly as dire as many try to paint it.
Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/unemployment...