This is one of those thing, yes that is a true statement but what do you do with that information? Would you be willing to make that call?

Looks like the trolley problem in action.

Yes, because otherwise your economy and country collapse sooner or later. ie everyone dies. Why do think homogenous countries like Japan and South Korea are finally opening up the immigration floodgates? Because there’s currently no other choice. The other options (directly lowering the costs of child care, lowering work hours, robots, et al) still haven’t worked. Immigration buys you time.

If you don’t want immigration, but you still want to buy time then you have to end socialist entitlement programs for the elderly.

It isn't just about getting it above 2.0, it is having those people in the work force. Even if you could magic up enough babies today, it would be about 20 years until they would be actively offsetting the issue. The is why demographic issues are so insidious. The problems that keep birth rates down today, end up amplifying these issues in the future further suppressing them. Eventually you hit equilibrium but it is a long way down until you get there.

Yep, there is a lot of evidence that says even nomadic tribes heavily intermingled with others because it was seen as a means of building resilience for all.

There is a lot of evidence that didn’t happen all at once and funded by social programs that effectively discourage integration.

I was going to say, Japans history is one that was very... combative. They fought amongst themselves heavily for a long time.

I think a lot of places were at various points in time, right? It's always a little easier to paint with a broad brush and lump hundreds of years into a single statement when you're talking about the history of "foreign" places that we don't learn the history of very deeply in western education. For Japan in particular, it's hard because a big part of the Meiji nationalist movements was to recast Japanese history with a heavy focus on the "bushido" and an arguably manufactured version of some points in the country's history that _were_ undoutably bloody. That yarn-spinning from 100+ years ago has actively shaped how the rest of the world thinks about Japanese history. Western governments during WW2 were happy to take that narrative and paint the entire history as blood-soaked and brutal to dehumanize their enemies. But it's not hard to find evidence of how many long stretches of internal peace existed in Japan. After the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate there was 250 years of more or less continuous peace internally. Arguably continental Europe from the middle-ages onward is more fractured and bloody in total than Japan was in the same period. Classical Greece was a zillion times more bloody.

Eventually that will be the case but it just takes decades of the demographic bubble to work its way through.

And there are the increasing infertility rates as well to hamper the efforts.

Personally, I would love to have a few kids but after many years of trying and all manner of treatments we have gotten nowhere at all. But that is just how if falls I guess.

This touches on a core part of this. Don't think about it from a money point of view but form a labor/time point of view.

There is just not enough labor/time for people to have kids and also sustain the elderly that can no longer contribute to the same degree.

I suspect this is why China is going in so hard of humanoid robots over the last few years. They have seen a potential future in Japan and are now trying to avoid this at all costs. It is big long term bet but we will know if it worked in about 20-40 years.

The unfortunate flip side of this is that when you bring in a lot of immigrants, it can keep a lot of markets pumped up far beyond what the markets would usually dictate.

Here in Australia, we tipped below replacement rate in 1976 and it has never recovered, we just increase immigration to cover the gap. Culturally this has been brilliant but economically it has made some oddities in that housing is through the roof as there is far more customers for it than their would have been otherwise. But it does provide a lot of younger workers that manage to keep the pension system going and the demand on that system is only going to grow for decades to come.

The alternative is that you restrict immigration and we end up in the Japan position. A crumbling pension system and a lack of people to keep ever maintenance up of a lot of infrastructure and sheer labor availability.

I have wondered that as this situation grows globally, what happens when a lot of nations that have typically had a lot of emigration end up shutting the tap off as yhey feel they need their people more in their country? They can starve others of immigrants and potentially become a large political tool in decades to come. Interesting times ahead.

It is the difference between a solution and a predicament. A solution fixes the issue, a predicament has only response merely that try to take the least bad path down. This looks like a predicament.

I do fear for the younger folks, the kids and a generation or two afterwards nowadays as they are going to end up lumped with this mess. But after that things should settle down into a new stable phase. This isn't the end of civilizations it is just a re-calibration, it just take generations to occur.

I suspect part of the problem is that people are worked hard and don't really have a vision of the future that they are actively building towards as a nation. Hard work alone doesn't dissuade people from having kids but not having a positive or even constant future target combined with that can cause folks to just give up on that kind of aspiration.

This is an issue that develops over decades and places like Japan, South Korea and potentially China, this is already baked in to the point that it is unstoppable. The same is coming to many other nations over the coming decades.