RiC#Code

One interesting thing about Japan:

Japan is the 10th most populated country in the world…which is nothing compared to China and India

(both countries make up 40% of mankind!)

Still, Japan is able to bring nice enough imagery when the thought of world overpopulation comes to mind

Regardless of this, the Japanese people are constantly being urged to increase the country’s birth rate!

yes we can!

 

Some of the "grow and multiply" encouragement packages include:

• Endorsing studies in ways to make prospective parents interested in building a family.
• Giving away cash for kids

Which I find interesting, I mean: have a payback per child of about 300,000 yen or 2,400 euros, when most hospitals in Japan will charge a new mom, an amount of around 1000,000 yen per delivered baby, which equals to about 8,000 euros…

So how does a nation with scenes like this:

Encourages an increase in birth rate?

The reasoning seems to be:

• Japan’s birth rate is amongst the lowest in the world
• Japan’s life expectancy is the highest in the world
• Japan's labor force is projected to shrink 33 percent by 2050

Points to consider (besides the obvious elephant in the room: the country is already overpopulated)

• Japanese are like human pandas in the bedroom
•   Raising a family is so expensive, Japanese often opt for abortion
  • the abortion rate is well above child birth rate
    • rate of 13 abortions vs  7 successful childbirths per 1000
• When abortion isn't an option, the child may end up being abandoned
  • On a happy note, the Jikei Hospital, has come up with a novel way for allowing parents to “drop” unwanted babies anonymously:

My 2 cents on all of this:

I find it very difficult to believe that the decreasing birth rate is the real problem (or the right problem), or that the solution can be found in increasing the birth rate…

Actual births in 2009 were in the range of 970,000 as opposed to 920,000 in 2008, this means that the actual number of births is increasing, even if the rate decreased between 2008 and 2009!

There  seems to be a paradox here:

The worry is that, people live too long nowadays, (or so the message from the government seems to point out), and therefore require even more young people to pay the cost, on the other hand, people are dying in greater numbers than they are being born, which is the root cause of the c.b.r. deficit…

Does this mean most people dying comes from the productive demographic group? That’s a whole different problem isn’t it?

Try adding the number of suicides in Japan (30,000/year) to that thought and we just might be on to something.

I would personally prefer to have people not kill themselves rather than try to convince them to have more babies…

In sum:

Yes, the ratio between the number of births, (people who will be paying taxes in the future), versus the ones who will stop paying taxes at the same time, will be negatively disproportionate, and that will be a problem, with the current economic system.

But that just means the current economic system, doesn’t work

Point is, pensioners aren’t freeloaders, they paid their taxes too, and that should account for something.

The real problem is the fact governments keep spending everything people pay on taxes as soon as the money comes in…why not use the novel idea of actually keeping “some” capital (real money) in the coffers huh?

I was going to say, why not do as banks do, where value of the money we put in, increases with time, but recent economic events prove that wrong...

Add that to teaching people what money is, how to use it, in school!

I mean, it should be part of school curriculums, to teach people how money works, a little education could be what’s needed to put a positive spin on the average person’s general crazy unrealistic overspending.

Once that’s done, we should also set boundaries relating (realistically) the price of a product, against the cost of manufacturing it. yay

If this can be done without going too much on to the so called dark side of socialism, which we all agree would end up depriving us of our so called freedoms (including the freedom to buy useless junk until we go bankrupt--and bring the economy down with us) then I’m all up for it!

 

Funny enough, even in Japan where people like to follow the leader, most will respect public announcements and requests from officials, there isn't a great number of people wanting to pay attention to government pleas for help in increasing the birth rate; I wonder why.

Some people end up in government (read "management people") because they they have risen to their level of incompetence

Other interesting and related cultural issues in Japan:

• Gokon and other artificial forms of “arranging” blind dates
• Tanshin funin (stay away parents)
• Nisetai jutaku (stay at home grandparents)

On a tangent, a decrease in the number of Japanese people wanting to have babies, makes for an increase (in the ratio) of children, born to foreign parents in Japan (1 in 30)

• Obsessive compulsive disorders

An average of only 5% of samples of the Japanese population under study show themselves NOT to have OCD

Japanese crazes which are a form of OCD:

• Anything Otaku
• Itasha 
• Nevada tan
• Cosplay

Actually, in Japan, OCD is well accepted in Japanese culture, usually the cleaning mania type:

This song is about a girl, who is recollecting on her best childhood memories, the time she spent cleaning the toilet, for her grandma while she was growing up.

The song is a real tear jerker and a huge hit here in Japan as you can imagine.

There are games and game items for OCD people in Japan:

There are more of these interesting issues, but these ones really do seem to stand out the most.

In contrast, there is a little country called Pitcairn, population: 50

And you can fit an entire population of a country in one single photo :) awesome!