Outside a train station near Tokyo, hundreds of people cheer as Sohei Kamiya, head of the surging nationalist party Sanseito, criticizes Japan’s rapidly growing foreign population.
As opponents, separated by uniformed police and bodyguards, accuse him of racism, Kamiya shouts back, saying he is only talking common sense.
Sanseito, while still a minor party, made big gains in July’s parliamentary election, and Kamiya’s “Japanese First” platform of anti-globalism, anti-immigration and anti-liberalism is gaining broader traction ahead of a ruling party vote Saturday that will choose the likely next prime minister.
Japan’s population crisis is caused by its young people being too overworked and overcharged to want to have children. Their population by age is becoming very top-heavy which means that the young are paying a lot to keep the old alive.
The solution to this (apart from don’t get into such a situation) is to import young workers to even out your population spread and to raise wages in line with the cost of living and raising a family.
They appear to be shouting “Damn foreigners! Coming over here and making all our elderly live longer than we can economically support them! Overworking our breeding generation so they don’t want kids! Curse those foreigners!”
(overworks and robs an entire generation to death)
“Why would foreigners do this?”
Also I’m almost getting tired of posting this brilliant illustration but sheesh, if the jingoistic authoritarian entitlement clan isn’t using the same playbook every. Time.
It really is the best illustration of exactly what’s happening.
I’m not sure I like this comic because it suggests:
- The immigrant worker is absent a cookie not the other way around
- That the working class is dimwitted and easily hoodwinked into racism
I think both assumptions are actually copes by a middle class who, afraid to look at its own complicity in neoliberalism, find’s easier to condemn the common people as racist and intellectually deficient.
In actuality I think the working class is intuitively aware that their disfranchisement is directly connected to policies like immigration. Along with the opening up of global markets which had a disruptive affect on wages the policy of open immigration has kept wages low and fractured communities and a common sense of culture.
- The immigrant worker is absent a cookie not the other way around
Statistically and visibly just how it is. Those dudes work two jobs that are both really bad to live in a shithole, because they have no choice.
- That the working class is dimwitted and easily hoodwinked into racism
'Member WWII, or WWI, or the various imperial wars before that? I 'member. The prejudices are intuitive alright.
I think not acknowledging that both are true and happen over and over again is a cope. The subset of middle class people who realise what’s going on are that way, because they’re basically working class people, but for whatever reason are privileged enough to spend time actually learning and understanding.
I’m not sure I like this comic because it suggests:
The immigrant worker is absent a cookie not the other way around That the working class is dimwitted and easily hoodwinked into racismSo you dislike it because it’s real and accurate? I don’t understand, it could not be more accurate and straight forward for a comic
I think the cookie represents entitlements or government services granted to citizens.
The wealthy person has oodles of subsidies and tax breaks, but is trying to scare the working person by talking about the immigrant seeking equality.
That is literally the messaging from corporate media sources. The comic doesn’t really get into whether the working person believes it or not, to me it’s more about the messaging used by the wealthy.
I don’t actually think global markets or immigration are inherently bad things. It’s vastly superior to nationalism and rigid borders. The problems are entirely caused capital and the exploitation of workers, hence the plate overflowing with cookies. The wealthy are the problem, not immigrants.
The cookie could just be stuff in general. Rich people have lots for no reason, workers have a little or none depending on whether their ancestors were from a lucky region.
I think the cookie represents entitlements or government services granted to citizens.
No, the cookie is just employment (money for work)
Then why does the rich bald guy have so many? He doesn’t do shit.
Funny math. Here’s a pretty nice explainer.
TBF it’s not a universally agreed on theory, but it’s plausible and can produce the exact real distribution of wealth with minimal changes.
nepo baby
Boomers of the world consumed all resources and pulled up all ladders behind them. American Boomers are especially oblivious to their roles in creating the current world, and seemingly oblivious to concepts like basic empathy. Their entire worldview is a function of how they can best benefit. “Generation Me,” was the perfect tag.
Got mine, fuck you
Japan’s population crisis is caused by its young people being too overworked and overcharged to want to have children
While this may be a contributing factor, there is obviously more to it. Japanese workers actually work less than the OECD average hours per year. Take a look at a handful of countries such as: Mexico, South Korea, United States, Finland, Germany, and Japan (generally representative of their respective regions and income levels)
Then compare those country’s hours worked to their fertility rate
Mexico works the most hours of any of those countries by far, only behind Colombia in terms of hours worked, yet has the highest fertility rate of any countries I listed
South Korea works a lot of hours, second highest of those countries, just above the US. They have by far the lowest birth rate. A bit over half that of Italy and Japan, the 2nd and 3rd lowest birthrate countries, yet both Italy and Japan work far less hours than South Korea
Germany and Finland, famed for their quality of life and lower working hours, both have relatively low fertility rates. Far less than the US and Mexico, countries with far more hours worked, and far fewer legal protections to workers - especially pregnant women
In short, when comparing different countries, I don’t see a substantial correlation between hours worked and fertility rate
Its basically the exact same issue happening everywhere in the western world, Japan is just a few steps further a long.
Basically, a shrinking population is good for the people, because there’s fewer people among which to divide the resources that the land can provide, so on average that should mean more resources for people, in other words a lower cost of living (since cost of living depends on resource availability). And it also means that there’s less supply of human labor on the labor market, and by the rule of Supply and demand that means that the prices for human labor (wages) are gonna go up, i.e. people are gonna get paid better for what they do.
That intuitively makes sense, because if your country has 10 million people instead of 100 million, then your CEOs and companies are better gonna treat your workers better or they’re gonna strike, and since there’s fewer other people to replace those workers, their strike would have greater impact and therefore more power.
on top of that, you can’t just assume that there will be a high demand of human labor in the future. You have to assume that automation is going to reduce jobs, so if you don’t also reduce the number of workers, you’re gonna face an unemployment crisis, and that can be very bad for the workers.
More humans = more demand for labor, because there are more needs.
And humans are a resource too, a very important one nowadays. And more humans = more specialization.
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It’s actually scary how quick they’re rising. I live in Japan, and I once heard them at a intersection nearby on a car giving a speech. I hated how they speak. They sounded like they were heavily appealing to the emotion and used a lot of sentence final particles like ne, in a tone that sounded half-aggressive and also… very conservative in a way. They were talking some shit about how Japanese people should come first and that we should “protect Japan”, as if there was some sort of foreign force trying to tear Japan down to pieces. What’s worse was that there were actually people cheering for them. I actually wanted to go downstairs to shout at them but I restrained myself from doing that. I still sort of regret not going there to shout at them.
Their society will collapse from this racism in a generation or so. No point in correcting people who can’t see the writing on the wall. As much as the current regime tries to deny it, immigrants have been the strength of the US.
That party is minority. So yeah, fuck them. But what about the rest of the people in the country? There are many well intentioned folks in Japan, some of them have some xenophobic beliefs, but that doesn’t mean they’ll all never learn.
But they haven’t learned.
They’re scared. If you believe the info out there, population collapse is imminent. Someone shouting out patriotism, rallying the people, is probably a comforting thought to them. They need someone to blame, the outsiders are easiest.
When people don’t feel they can afford the time and money to have kids, populations break and noone is addressing it. The world could probably stand to have some population regulation back down from 8bil, but this isn’t the way :(
They need someone to blame, the outsiders are easiest.
The first sign of a feeble mind.
Alas, it’s so ubiquitous :(
It’s absolutely horrifying how effective it is to stand in front of a group of people, name their fears and then suggest ill-concieved solutions to the fears. They’re so desperate for someone to come along and solve their problems that they don’t want to think critically about what is being said. Humanity as a whole is just so easy to control.
Japanese people are being fed the same kind of propaganda as UK citizens and Americans. People say ridiculous things like “What if the number of foreigners increases to 20% of the total population? Then women will be sexually assaulted.” Instead of immigrant gangs taking over apartment buildings and eating the pets it’s foreigners buying up all the land to build compounds for foreigners to live in and pooping in the streets.
But there is also a feedback loop where nationalists in Japan make the news, and it’s repeated by right wing foreigners who don’t know Japan but admired their idealized, racially pure Japan where everyone is polite and orderly and this would never happen, and then that gets repeated to Japanese people as if it were large numbers of foreigners warning them not to let immigration ruin Japan as it has ruined those other countries. Most of the Japanese people in this loop don’t understand English, and the right wing foreigners don’t understand Japanese. The reality isn’t always faithfully translated in either direction, and the language barrier makes it harder for people to realize the discrepancy.
I’d like to clarify that I had never hardly ever pooped on a street.
Is anyone making a list of those anti-foreigner countries, so we know where not to shop, where not to visit, and where not to invest in?
A better question is if you can name a country that isn’t “anti-foreigner” or don’t have a significant % of the population that’s anti-foreigner. This is a widespread problem everywhere you go, even supposedly “woke” European countries (especially those countries, really).
Sweden is becoming pretty bad in that regard too, they recently cracked down on immigration because old white people don’t like people of color.
In defence of Sweden, they did mismanage a lot of the post-2016 migration by ignoring migrants and refugees once settled, and taking a pretty relaxed approach to integration.
Vietnam seems very accepting, even towards Americans and French.
What in the fuck is happening. I’m disgusted that we have this plague of racism in 2025.
A better question would be is anyone making a list of the people financing these candidates. Id bet anything if you follow the money trail, there’s a common denominator.
Billionaires who want the working class divided against itself. Some of them might even be from other countries, but I strongly suspect any foreign influence is dwarfed by local oligarchs.
My list so far:
- United States of America
- Hungary
- Russia
- Japan
But… I expect there are a lot more.
Wait… wait Your list is mild… let me add these and feel free to look up each on youtube and wikipedia:
Canada : against Indians , Africans, Arabs + others
Germany : against Romania , Turkish + everyone thats not white
Norway & Sweden : against Romania and Syrian and Iraqi regufees.
Netherland & Italy: againat Gypsies, Romania & Africans
France : against Moroccons & Lybia & Africans
Australia : againat Indians and nonwhite
Irland & UK : against Indians, Pakistan, Arabs and others who are nonwhites
… And here more are some unexpected ones: Developing and 3rd world countries:
Thailand : against Mynamar & Lao + others
India : against Bangladesh and Nepal.
Bangladish : against Myanmar (Rohingya).
Pakistan : against Afghans
South Africa : against migrants from Zimbabwe, Mozambique + others
Kenya : againat Somalis and Nairobi.
Nigeria : against Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.
Lebanon: against Syria and Palestine
Kuwait: against Eygptions and Syria, Lebanese + others
Ethiopia : against Somalia and Eritrea
Honduras : against El Salvador and Guatemala.
Venzula : against Columbia
And… that’s why xenophobia and socio-economy leave me speechless because I’m pretty sure I have not listed all. It’s really just worldwide , and they all cry about forigners hiking up housings and rents, and taking our jobs.
China, against Japanese and Koreans.
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I was hoping to get some additions, thank you.
In addition Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, UK, Germany off the top of my head .
I think the list of pro immigration non racist countries is smaller. Spain is sort of accepting I guess?
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Japanese people are extremely racist. They genuinely put republicans to shame.
I’ve known several people who are half Japanese and whose grandmothers would never forgive them for that fact. They’d love all the cousins and shit on them. It’s really sad.
The open secret of most Asian societies!
The nazi party is funded by Russia btw and there’s so much propaganda in Japan rn its insane. One major piece still making news is that foreign tourists dont pay their hospital bills and losing “Japan so much money”. The amount of unpaid bills was 400k usd that year and foreign tourists revenue was 58 BILLION usd. That’s 0.00069% loss of total revenue.
This constant propaganda around the world is so depressing and not because its there but because truth is right next to it and nobody’s looking.
funded by Russia btw
This constant propaganda around the world is so depressing and not because its there but because truth is right next to it and nobody’s looking.
That much is obvious. Japan only has miniscule amount of foreigners compared to other countries but somehow managed to also have been stoken up with anti-foreign sentiment. It’s all the dark money flowing into social media algorithms brainwashing people. And the truth is that data is the new gold. Personal information is not only commodified but also weaponised. However, as you said, the truth is next to it but nobody is looking.
Here’s a bit of a rant.
Japanese people have notoriously been xenophobic, racist, or ignorant… but they also tend to be quiet and polite since the war, so they’ve really cleaned up their image.
They’ve also had their egos constantly stroked with all the TV networks showing stupid shows where all the foreigners are SO AMAZED by Japanese culture. Same with all these social media content. It’s really annoying. Being proud of your culture and heritage shouldn’t need recognition by foreigners and it certainly shouldn’t need belittling of others.
Not saying that everyone is a racist. Not by a long shot. It’s just that this kind of self-centered, xenophobic ember had been kept alive in a non-negligible number of people. And I feel like now, there is this perfect environment for which the shitty few to really have themselves heard for maximum exposure and influence. It sucks.
Racism and xenophobia aside, how many humans do we need? Our poor earth. A declining population is probably an ok thing. I think it’s the capitalist class ringing the alarm bell as they see their profit forecasts take a blow. How many hundreds of millions should that island hold?
I’m all for persons voluntarily opting to have fewer (or no) progeny. Certainly, that is my intent.
But, Malthus was wrong on so many levels, and regulating reproductive activity even with the best of intent is going to be abused by eugenicists for genocide.
The already posted SK vid explains how the current social systems in most countries need at least replacement birth rates. It might be possible to have a society that could survive less-than-replacement birth rates, but I don’t see how.
but I don’t see how.
Tax the F out of the rich and give it to child-bearing families. The amount is based on the rate of decline. Hand it out as a monthly stipend, and enforce checks for kids’ quality of life.
Free government-staffed daycare.
3 Months Paid Paternity/Maternity, guaranteed jobs.
Free Fertility Clinics.
It’s going to be expensive AF for a generation or two.
That’s not how to survive with less-than-replacement birth rates, that’s how to get higher-than-replacement birth rates (possibly without immigration). (I will admit that I was unclear that I meant “I don’t see how” to long-term sustain population decreases.)
But, absolutely, to get more birth, you need to have lots of support for child-raising, so that it is seen as more joyful than it is stressful. I know SK is having problems getting the political (or even democratic) will to implement those things, and even if they did all of that today AND birth rate immediately soared, they’d still have a “demographic squeeze” that their current economy can’t sustain.
I don’t think Japan is facing the demographic squeeze, yet. I don’t think you’d find much support for these “COMMUNIST” ideas among Kamiya’s followers, tho.
It’s tunable. You don’t need to exceed, you can run at 99.95 and slowly back down.
Still going to have the geriatric problem, but that seems more approachable.
It might be possible to have a society that could survive less-than-replacement birth rates, but I don’t see how.
I want to add that historically, in the US from 1680 to 1880, the population has grown by approximately 3% annually. Source
(In the table, since the growth rate given is per 10-year interval, you have to divide it by 10, roughly, to get 3% annual growth)
This suggests that it should be possible (at least in theory) that the population can shrink at the same speed, i.e. 3% annually. This would mean an average fertility rate around 0.66 children/woman. Currently, in most western nations, it’s around 1.4, while 2.1 would be “replacement levels”, i.e where the population numbers stagnate.
The reason why i think you can have a 3% annual population decline is because it’s kinda symmetric: instead of a surplus in children (which eat and consume resources but don’t contribute through their labor power), you have a surplus of old people (which, mostly, also consume resources but don’t work). So, the situation is kinda symmetric, and that’s why i suggest that it should be possible.
because it’s kinda symmetric
That’s not what I’ve been told, but I’m not an expert.
I imagine part of that is due to an interaction with economics, particularly inflation. A 3% inflation is considered healthy, but a 3% deflation is almost certainly a monetary system in a death spiral.
This vid explains the situation better than I can (it’s about South Korea but Japan is basically in the same boat)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
From a higher abstraction vantage point, you are not wrong, but you are basically advocating for entire countries to disappear
If the entire country wants to enact policies and cultures that would lead to their disappearance then who are we to tell them otherwise?
rational people?
But you are being disingenuous here… it’s not the entirety of Japan, same as the entirety of Murica did not choose to swim in the sewer with MAGA… yet they are forced to by a loud minority and a push over majority
I think we should at least warn them; perhaps they don’t have enough information to connect that outcome to their currently preferred policies. I.e. they don’t actually “want to enact policies and cultures that would lead to their disappearance”. Preventing persons from unintentionally harming themselves seems like a good thing.
Preventing persons from harming others (unintentionally or not) seems like a moral imperative. And, I think there are probably SK citizens that don’t consent to the current policies that will be harmed.
But, at the end of the day, I don’t have any action items. I see it mostly as a cautionary tale to drive my own policy preferences.
Welcome to the era of Misinformation
Why do you think we are here? getting people to vote against their own benefit is how we get Billionaires and eventually devolve into fascism before we step into another WW
Yeah, the hostile information environment is … tough. But, until we figure out how to navigate it, we won’t have a truly global society, and I’m not sure that separate, non-hostile communities/associations/syndicates are a stable configuration.
Critical thinking skills are part of that, but exercising them as a defense in that environment is not something you can sustain indefinitely. Everyone needs time to rest and everyone is going to make mistakes.
but you are basically advocating for entire countries to disappear
In biology, a species is considered threatened if there’s fewer than 200 individuals of that species around.
Here’s your short reminder that south korea has 52 million people, so even if people almost stop having children for a generation or two and the population stabilizes at 5 million people, which is 1/10 of what it currently is, it’s still very far away from extinction.
ugh… watch the video and then come back once you ditch the pedantry
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
if a country of 52 is reduced to 5, they would literally roll back to per-industrial living
It’s a delicate feedback loop. Statisticians say that once you reach a certain decline rate, you end up exponentially shrinking and lose most of your middle-aged population in a couple of decades. The lower ages continue to decimate, and the geriatrics end up living in poverty.
Especially in Japan where the reproductive numbers are already barely sustaining.
Taxes have to skyrocket to keep things running, the economy and real estate go fallow. It’s a particularly nasty downward spiral they paint. Supposedly, even if you try to recover, people won’t be able to afford to have kids and they’d need to be having a LOT of kids each. Could be some horrible forced breeding shit if a few generations just to keep us from dropping to unsustainable levels.
Ideally, you evenly distribute the young, working people that are available on Earth. Japan has too few, Africa has gobs. (Although I don’t even know if the trickle of foreigners they’re taking in are from high-birth places)
Unfortunately, whatever the local majority group is is against whatever group isn’t, and that’s how you get history, and history happening again.
I’m not sure how many people Earth will hold in the future, but we can look at historical data. Source
We know that worldwide human population was around 300 million for most of the medieval age (500 AD to 1500 AD). That was sustainable, i.e. people lived like that for a thousand years without incurring some ecological catastrophe. I’m not sure whether it’s needed to return to these numbers, but it’s certainly possible.
Is it possible there wasn’t much census data between 500 AD and 1500 AD in the regions we’re seeing a big explosion of people?
There’s indeed not much data for the medieval age, at least not in Europe, but we know data from the roman empire and the modern age, and we can interpolate what happened in the thousand years between.
Well it’s also the pension system that will become hard to financially sustain. Generally you want the population to at least kind of replace itself to avoid economic upheaval.
While true, that’s an inherently unsustainable model. Pensions need to be self-sustaining, rather than relying on the next generation to pay for them. It’s ridiculous that one generation basically got a free generation and now every generation afterwards is paying the previous generation’s retirement
There’s the quantatitve thing of currency, but also simply the reality that people actually have to work to provide the things the retired people need. In this case the money issue is modeling a more intrinsic issue. With fewer young workers the retirement age has to go up to maintain a viable ratio of non-workers to workers. Yes technology and such can also help things for the better, but roughly that’s the state of things.
There’s the quantatitve thing of currency, but also simply the reality that people actually have to work to provide the things the retired people need. In this case the money issue is modeling a more intrinsic issue.
It’s good that people consider the reality behind the fiction that money is. Money is literally paper, it’s made-up literature. Reality, however, is real.
Yes, as people are disabled through aging, they eventually stop “producing” more than is necessary to sustain them. People with excess “production” have to transfer it to them. This can take various forms, but both a “self-sustaining pension” and a U.S. style “social security fund” use money as this method of transfer; the former is a bit more abstracted since interest / market gains (rather than direct contribution) are used, but it’s still the same flow. Making disabled care a cultural norm is even more direct, but also has a lot of coordination problems, and the people with excess production are often geographically (and socially) separated from the people with production deficits.
Of course, the ideal is not just about discontinuing labor participation due to disability, but because we actually want some time insofar as we can afford it.
A mark of, ideally, a bit of ‘overproduction’ is that we can work fewer hours and/or fewer years. If our ambitions and capabilities allow us to work 32 hour workweeks for a decade and then nope on out on retirement in our 30s for the rest of our lives, that would be a pretty good economic state to be in. A fantasy in practical terms, but a concept to keep in mind as a hypothetical if we ever do manage amazing ‘productivity’ without enough ‘ambition’ to consume it all.
I think that if that ever comes, it will be because “retirement” is/becomes a time when you still have excess production but you aren’t maximizing production, or that instead of 32hr/wk for 10 years, we do 8hr/wk for 40 years, with 3-5 years in there for pivot+retrain or relax+restore+refocus.
I doubt I’ll live to see it, tho.
Another fair point, that we could be targeting a more distributed “retirement” instead of taking it all at the end. How we model it so that we are comfortable with the concept wild be interesting… when and if we ever get there
you’re wrongly assuming that pensions have to be paid by labor taxes. there is no natural law of the universe that forces that. introduce taxes on the rich and pensions will be easily paid for.
I think you may be underestimating how much pensions cost on a yearly basis. In the Netherlands it totals over 50 billion euros each year, half of which is paid through labor taxes. I’m not sure we could easily squeeze that amount out of the 1% every year 🤔
… and just like the USA, it’s all populism, rage baiting and ZERO actual solutions
As it turns out, we are all human and are all vulnerable to the same psychological manipulations. No country is immune without active resistance.
yes but the more ignorant a population is, the easier the target
It’s very easy to judge from the outside looking in. Every country has a version of MAGA. But there are probably people around the world who also sees the entire USA as MAGA, in the same way this post sees Japan as dominated by racists.
I was comparing the racist japanese candidate with the trump clown show
Yes, that’s how these things manifest. I don’t disagree. When I said “this post”, I didn’t mean yours, but the post in general, with all the replies. Some are saying the Japanese hate children, or they wouldn’t go there anymore because of the anti-foreigner stance, or that everyone is overworked.
It’s social media, if you get a half assed knee jerk reaction you got lucky… there are no intelligent discussions going on here
Japan will be the test case for declining populations. They will be the first to show us the consequences and the right and wrong ways to deal with the issue.
Short of Malthusian disasters, I don’t think any sort of economy in human history has had to deal with this.
More people need to raise hell about this group because they also have members who deny the Nanking Massacre.
So do Japanese history school books, they call it the Nanjing incident and divide the numbers of murdered by 10-ish
Japan is also led by a right wing government, just not as anti-immigration as these guys
I can’t say for sure regarding the textbooks because my kids aren’t old enough to have learned about it, and I grew up in Canada.
And yes, you’re definitely right about the government as well. At least they care about how they look to the world. Sanseito, on the other hand, don’t give a shit.
that headline brilliantly conveys the absurdity of the situation
Exactly my thought. It’s crazy.
In December 2024, there were 3,768,977 foreign residents in Japan, representing 3.04% of the Japanese population.
Fucking foreigners sucking up all the jobs and destabilizing a country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#Foreign_residents
RIP. I really want to study abroad there and have been making plans, but the current admin + Japan’s rising anti-foreigner stance really dampens my hopes. I get there’s been some awful, entitled, shitty tourists and vloggers over there in the past few years, but I wish they’d realize that we’re not all like that…
Japan is nice to visit, not so nice to live there (there’s better and more easily approachable places). Racial discrimination is not new in Japan and their laws don’t indicate of any changes like western societies have been implementing. You aren’t getting lynched, but expect housing refusals, difficulties finding jobs, social exclusion, and stereotypes.
This is a gross overgeneralization though. If you find like minded people, they’ll accept you. Shit, if you grew up playing Final Fantasy, chances are, your peers there did too and any stereotype is quickly forgotten.
But in general, don’t be surprised when you don’t get served beer cause you ain’t Japanese.don’t be surprised when you don’t get served beer cause you ain’t Japanese
I lived in Japan for a few years. In the entire time I lived there, there was two instances I could say I experienced discrimination based on being a foreigner
Instance 1: I had a few friends visiting that don’t speak Japanese, and we went to Sapporo. We were looking for a place to eat on the outskirts of the city, walked in a small ramen shop and were immediately told, in English, that the shop was closed (we had been speaking English among ourselves). In Japanese, I passive aggressively said, “Oh, I saw the sign saying the shop was open… sorry, I’ll leave”. It was like 6:30PM. They had their “open” sign on the door. The shop was almost certainly open
Instance 2: A bar in Shinjuku had a sign saying “No foreigners”. I popped my head in and politely asked the master, in Japanese, what was up with the sign. He sit up when I spoke in Japanese and said because he doesn’t speak English he didn’t want to deal with the hassle of customers that can’t speak Japanese
Which is to say, as a white foreigner from a high income country, the discrimination I’ve faced is public businesses that don’t want to deal with customers that don’t know the language and etiquette. Many of the other foreigners I’ve talked to had similar experiences, although outright racism or discrimination is not unheard of
just do it. the whole world is getting xenophobic and the good times are not coming back anytime soon. don’t let it keep you from living your life.
I second this. Please come to Japan before it disappears.
When I was growing up too many people I knew wanted to move to Japan because of the technology sectors and the “modernity”. Turns out both are a lie, and after learning about Japanese work culture, it’s even worse than the USA. I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to work in Japan over an EU country outside of family reasons.
They were living 20 years in the future in 1980. They are still living 20 years in the future of 1980.
Probably a millennial delusion shored up by gaming. Japanese tech hasn’t been anything to talk about for nearly 20 years.
It’s always outdone by Korean or Chinese tech.
In the 1980s, they had legitimately ground-breaking tech, from LCD displays to Toyota to PCs to walkman to BetaMax to unmanned railway stations.
Then the 90s happened, and decades of economic stagnation while society continues to be centered around the boomers (paper offices, Fax machines, they made new cassette tapes until like 2015, they still have payphones, cash-only businesses, etc).
Japanese tech
I would have a difficult time identifying Japanese tech that isn’t made in China.
When I was growing up too many people I knew wanted to move to Japan because they fetishized underage Japanese girls.
At any point they can start giving people a UBI and they will have the option to quit their jobs and raise a family.
The old ways of systemic slavery will not work as human societies progress, especially in our post scarcity world.
Scarcity is coming back, buckle up
there is a difference between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity.
Natural scarcity is one that is simply there for natural circumstances. Such as, your population grows, and now suddenly you have 7 kids to feed, so you have to work harder to farm enough food. That’s natural scarcity and everybody understands that you have to work to live through it. Another example would be natural disasters, or maybe if you develop a new technology and now you want to build a factory to produce a new type of product. You have to invest a lot of hard work to build that new factory, and everybody understands that. People are generally fine with that, and pull through with it.
Artificial scarcity is one that is purely man-made, for no underlying natural reason. Examples are when the rich siphon all the wealth away from society and people don’t have enough resources to live anymore. We live in a time with enormous productive capabilities, but those don’t reach the people because somebody mindlessly steals them. People are told to work 60+ hours/week, and that’s not because of some natural circumstances but because rent is made so expensive by nonsensical policies and greedy landlords that your wage doesn’t pay for it anymore. That’s artificial scarcity and people are not ok with it; in fact it makes them very angry.
That is why you have to distinguish between natural scarcity and artificial scarcity. People are largely ok with natural scarcity but NOT with artificial scarcity; and in fact artificial scarcity should be held small at all times; i believe.
I would personally consider it very shaky ground to found a family on if my ability to support them came in the form of a government stipend I have no direct control over.
Can’t we instead restore the economy to functionality rather than slapping a big “UBI” patch on the big crack in the dam?
Restoring earning power to the middle class such that a single income can support a household will give families the stability they need to start families with out handing over all the mechanisms of the economy to a single, potentially untrustworthy entity the way UBI does.
A UBI is a necessity for societies going forward.
Basically, wealth inequality is so bad now that our economies and societies no longer serve the majority of people’s needs.
So wealth redistribution is required to fix the problem, the question after realizing that is how to go about it.
We can do a one time redistribution of wealth, but without fundamentally changing the system with regulations, incomes will inevitably become imbalanced again. This is what we did after the Great Depression with the jobs program that was the national parks and highway/railroad projects.
IMO it’s better to just stop treating money like it’s harmless to allow excess accumulation. It would be better if all wealth were perpetually redistribed via a UBI, this would permanently maintain wealth equality. This is similar to what we did after the Great Depression in regards to corporate tax rates and setting a maximum profit.
I think absolute ceilings and floors on income and wealth will be needed. The wealthy are basically black holes that destroys everything within reach, if given time. Preventing such singularities of excess will have to be through a system designed to give everyone UBI, while making jobs rewarding but with a fixed scope of wealth accumulation.
IMO, a system of classifying entire job classes, and giving them a fixed income rank, would make it harder for wage theft, hoarding, and corruption to happen. By making it so that everyone of a job class has a clear income regardless of location or hours, it will be easier to track who is unnaturally wealthy, thus their hoard can be more easily confiscated before it can do harm to society.
Also, through having fixed incomes, it might prevent inflation. Sellers will have to price according to income brackets, otherwise their goods cannot sell easily to a demographic. In the rankings that I proposed, a basic worker has $30k, while the highest earners get $60k after taxation. This essentially means that CEOs and other high-end careers are only double the value of a waiter’s income. Goods will have to be priced accordingly, making it harder for inflation to take place.
I personally don’t think it’s healthy for a society to force a caste system like that. And I’m not really sure there’s truth to the “if everyone gets paid the same then nobody will want to be a Dr” argument. People would still probably pursue more difficult work even without a profit incentive.
People absolutely pursue difficult work without the extra pay. Cuba has always had plenty of doctors .
It isn’t a caste thing. Typically, castes are all about locking people into a social strata forever. What I proposed includes education paying people for learning, which allows the students to be fully educated for the higher ranks of jobs, if they so choose. Also, people who work earn retirement pay at a 1:1 ratio of days worked - eventually, people get to quit working outright if they want, regardless of rank, simply because two or three decades of work is also fully paid retirement. People who quit working the high end jobs, coincidentally leave those jobs to other people.
In any case, there isn’t a huge gulf of incomes in the proposed system. The real-world elite of our time has over a 1,000x the income of an entry wage worker. Merely double the income for the hardest professions doesn’t even register in comparison. More importantly, the increased money for a high position is to reward the effort, risk, and knowledge needed to hold that position.
Over the next two centuries, I expect automation to make work into a leisure activity, rather than a necessity. Until utopia is obtained, however, we should try to reasonably reward people to work the more difficult jobs, simply out of pragmatic utility and humanity for society as a whole. By ensuring the pool of experts is large, we can spread thin the amount of hours each individual has to work, preventing burnout and allowing them all to live fulfilling lives.
It is a caste thing.
What happens when the majority decide they want more pay, pursue education, and oversaturate the good paying jobs?
Those are the conditions that led to STEM being completely oversaturated.
This beleif that a garbage man is somehow less important to society than doctors, is just capitalist propaganda…
ERK: Effort, Risk, Knowledge. We can have a body of researchers study each occupation, and assign it a rank according to what is required for the task. Provided the standards are objective - the amount of hours, the physical conditions a worker has to undergo, how much education is required to do a good job, and so forth are fairly consistent, we can fairly designate the rank of a job.
Garbage men don’t require nearly as much training as a doctor, otherwise people die. In any case, a garbage man would likely be at the $60k rank, because it is harder than being a waiter. Lots of sitting and driving, with the odd garbage handling in person if something comes up. The biggest source of danger comes from crashes. Far as education goes, not much, I expect - mostly cartography of the route, scheduling, and so forth.
An immigrant worker would probably have their job class at $80k annual payout if they picked food. There is lots of exertion, sun, inclement weather, and so forth. The work itself isn’t dangerous nor requires an education, it is simply exhausting. Provided that 4 or so hours of a six hour shift are done before a hour-long noon lunch, the danger of heat exhaustion from the sun can be mitigated, especially if workers are given hats, water, and 5 minute breaks for each hour to recuperate. Hazard pay can be in effect during significant levels of rain, and appropriate gear mandated for those conditions.
As to STEM being oversaturated, I think that is incorrect. Rather, it is because corporations are hyper-fixated on crushing blood out of a stone to maximize perceived profit. Everyone in every working profession has to work longer and are paid less, because the companies force that to be the case. By deliberately creating ghost jobs, using maladjusted interviews, coercion, and so on, companies can artificially force workers to come to the table to beg for scraps. If there was a 6-hour workday, mandated vacations, and other ethical standards that are enforced, companies would have to employ many more STEM students to fill out the daily roster.
UBI is the new hotness in terms of popular modern means talked about to undo the ever-growing wealth gap, but it is completely untested in the real world. It has challenges even on paper, including the ones I alluded to above involving being exceptionally susceptible income uncertainty and government corruption.
And you are right to point out that anything we do now to correct the wealth disparity problem is wasted if we don’t do enough to prevent another regression back to this same state again. I’m sure UBI could work under the right conditions, as well as many other solutions, but the real success or failure of the program will be measured based on how well and for how long it can resist attempts to dismantle it by bad-faith actors.
I am pretty sure there’s a lot of agreement here on the core of the issue, I just have doubts about UBI because it puts the fate of the most vulnerable citizens with the most easily-ignored political voice even more into the hands of their government, who often do them dirty.
It’s been tested dozens of times, and every time it is tested, it shows people are happier and healthier, and so is their community.
So it does work and is possible, and it would fix a ton of problems.
I mean at the scale at which it would be used. A small pilot program that has millions of eyes on it is not going to get undermined by bad actors because everyone is watching. It is good to create tests and pilot programs to try new economic and governance systems, but it is also important to remember that those are idealized lab conditions.
Also, consider the context of the discussion. Literally any system where money is put in the hands of those in poverty is going to immediately result in improved conditions for those people and increased local taxable economic activity. I could give them a UBI stipend, big tax rebates, increased wages, or even drop cash from planes. The point is that it is not necessarily the method that made the difference but the result. In this case the result is “get buying power to poor people”, and any system that achieves that is going to be an economic and social good.
I’m just not convinced UBI is the safe way to do that. Its an inescapable fact that any government is going to have internal forces trying to undermine its protections to enrich themselves, so it is wise to remember that any government systems we come up with that are not made highly resistant to capture are only going to serve their intended purpose temporarily.
In every study they also witness no significant drop in labor participation, and it always enriches the local community. People become more altruistic, less stressed and agitated, family relationships improve. It’s good in pretty much every single way with no discernible downsides. Please look into more studies.
There isn’t going to ever be a study that is universal until we implement it universally, so there’s literally no way to test it in the way critics want, this argument is just baseless propaganda.
I’m sure that’s true, but again, the positive outcomes you’re describing are the result of the poor peoples’ increased buying power and reduced economic uncertainty. I don’t believe the specifics of HOW they got those things makes very much of a difference, if any. UBI is one way of many to do that.
And you are again correct: there is no way to “dry run” new social programs fully. You can only create small “labs” to partially test them, which is way better than nothing, but still leaves great unknowns. The only truly tested social and economic structures are the ones we’ve seen really used in the real world.
The fact that all past models have eventually failed doesn’t necessarily mean they were bad, though. It means that they were inadequately protected and eventually were corrupted from within (not counting conquest, which I think is safe to say is outside the scope of this conversation).
I understand your position and i think that you say a respectable thought. I like the way you think but i think you’re still wrong. Let me explain:
The labor market is the mechanism through which wages are determined. Human labor is bought and sold on the labor market; that means there is supply and demand. Supply comes from workers who are willing to work, while demand comes from companies who seek to employ people.
Now, as is always the case on any market that is regulated by supply and demand, if there’s a higher supply, prices go down; while if there’s higher demand, prices go up. Prices in the context of the labor market are the price that is paid for an hour of human labor, i.e. the hourly wage.
Now, companies don’t have a constant demand for human labor at all. In fact, how much demand companies have for human labor depends largely on how much the company intends to grow. Imagine it like a house: Building a single house might take thousands of days of human labor (i.e. 8 employees for 120 days) for a single-family brick-built home, but maintaining that house takes significantly less labor (it was traditionally done by a single house-wife, and nowadays it’s done in the spare after-work hours). So, growth requires intense labor input, while maintenance does NOT.
The same is true for the economy. As long as the economy grows, it requires a lot of human labor input. You have to remember that the Great Fire of London happened in 1666, and that is the starting point for large, stone-built cities in the modern age (before that most houses were built out of wood). Also since roughly that time (1800) we have the industrial revolution which has created steam engines, cars, and basically every commodity that we have today. Building all of that up from scratch required a lot of human labor input, and that is why there was such a large demand for human labor. But today, we have all these commodities and companies already built up, and maintaining them requires rather little work, which is why the demand for human labor is declining. That is a natural development and not a human-chosen development. Growth comes to an end (see also the 1970s study The Limits to Growth that discusses that) because planetary boundaries are reached, and either we find new planets to settle or we won’t have growth; but without growth we will have less demand for human labor, and that means lower wages. And that’s what we’re already observing for the last 25 years: wages have continuously declined.
I don’t think that wages could go up again; unless you move to mars and start developing the planet all over again. That’s why UBI is necessary; because people still need resources to live.
As the population ages out of the work force, and fewer replacements are coming in, where’s your tax base to support UBI? And if you say tax the rich, they won’t be rich long with no workers to leech off of.
If the disparity in wealth is reduced thanks to UBI and taxing the rich, then they can pivot towards taxing workers who will now have more money to pay said taxes.
It literally does not make sense to avoid taxing the wealthiest citizens when the disparity in wealth is as bad as it is. Unless you’re an idiot.
