Monday, September 18, 2023

Population Crisis Fix Means Getting Enough Babies Every Year Starting This Year





Yes folks. that is what emergency means. Every young lady needs to now produce at least three babies and the rest of us have to step up to support those young ladies.  If we do not start now, it will simply get harder.

It would be wonderful if medbeds can facilitate birthing.  The tool above has been used for a long time and combined with a holding rail, may well make all the difference as it allows maximum application of gravity and natural bracing.

This is a technical problem that needed to be addressed long ago.  why was it not?


Population Crisis Fix Means Getting Enough Babies Every Year Starting This Year

September 14, 2023 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2023/09/population-crisis-fix-means-getting-enough-babies-every-year-starting-this-year.html#more-187053

Japan and South Korea and many other countries are experiencing national demographic crisis due to falling birth rates. In 2023, Japan’s fertility rate was 1.367, which is far below the 2.1 children per woman needed for population stability. South Korea’s fertility rate dropped to a record low of 0.7 in the second quarter of 2023.



Japan and Korea leaders have declared national emergencies around these issues. They have spent billions over the past 20-30 years and plan to spend tens of billions. However, Nextbigfuture believes the programs have already been flawed and inadequate. Japan’s problem is not just that they have already dropped from a peak of 128 million people to 122 million today and are headed to 100 million people in 2050.


If you are drowning, then going from twenty feet underwater to ten feet underwater is nice but you want to be breathing at the surface all the time. Being below replacement birth rate means that mothers are not replacing themselves with a daughter. The mother ages out around 30. It is still possible to have a baby after 30 but the percentages start dropping a lot especially if the women does not have a partner yet and they are not already trying. Twenty years of 1.1 or less fertility rate means that the country has half as many fertile women for the next generation.

Japan’s total fertility rate, the number of children a woman has in her lifetime, likely fell to about 1.2 in 2022, the lowest in 17 years. Getting to replacement of 2.07, we would need a 73% increase in birth rates. Instead of 800,000 babies per year there would need to be 1.38 million.

Japan needs to define the problem that they need to get at least an additional 580,000 babies born in 2023 and another 580,000 to 600,000 babies born in 2024. Every day, every week and every month they can check the hospitals and see that they had maybe 60,000 to 70,000 babies in a month but needed to have 50,000 to 60,000 more that month.

Japan is touting the “success” of a small city. Akashi’s population has grown for 10 years in a row to over 300,000. As of 2021, women here had an average of 1.65 kids compared to 1.3 children nationwide. Many Akashi residents credit the city’s success to Fusaho Izumi, the city’s mayor from 2011 until April.

Yes, 1.65 is better than 1.3. However it is still far less than 2.07. It is also one city and not the whole country. It is like a country in WW2 saying look we only lost 20% of out troops in one battle and not 50%.

Izumi notes that he doubled the city’s child care spending not by increasing taxes, but by cutting spending on public works. He insists Akashi’s success can be replicated nationwide, but he doesn’t think that Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s plan will do the trick. Kishida has pledged to double Japan’s spending on child care by the early 2030s. He’s promised bigger subsidies for families with kids, more spending on education and medical care for children with disabilities. He’s not said exactly where the money will come from to pay for all this. Kishida highlighted the urgency of the issue in a June 1 speech. In the current generation, only 25% of households have children. That means the other 75% don’t have children. Therefore, for lots of people, this is someone else’s problem.

This is supposed to be an URGENT national emergency. This is a national emergency than has been happening since the early 1970s. Japan’s women and families stopped replacing mothers with daughters in 1974. This is falling below replacement of women with daughters. Japan’s entire economy peaked in 1995. The economy is down about 20% in less than 30 years ago. In the same 30 years the US economy has tripled its GDP.

The Prime Minister is saying it is important but the measures are to try and replicate a “success” to get to 1.65 fertility in the 2030s.

It is like Soviets saying in WW2. Ok, we have lost 500 miles of land to the Nazis. We will take ten years to slow down their annual advance by half. This is not a plan to win, it is not a plan to stop it is a plan to lose and die slower at some number of years later…maybe if we are lucky.


The urgent plan is to rapidly increase incentives every month until there are replacement level babies in a month. In Japan, this is about 120,000 per month and in China it is 1.5 million per month instead of 800,000 per month. The incentives need to stay at that level to sustain the replacement level of babies every month. The incentives can be reduced or modified after the data indicates adjustments can be made to be more efficient while sustaining the mathematically correct level.

An urgent problem needs to have short time frame metrics. It cannot be decade or more long metrics. If you were fighting an avalanche or a flood, then actions would be measured in fractions of a second and not minutes or hours, let alone days or years.

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