"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today.
A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
(Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unemployment rate, i'm talking about labor non-participation rate as a measure of people who could be enticed into the workforce with a living wage)
Even tho you added an edit. You’re still wrong. Garbage collection is typically a high paying job because no one wants to do it. But people still consider it “below” them and don’t want to do it even when there’s a high unemployment rate.
This is over 20 years old, and I'm sure doesn't hold true in all areas, but at least at one point there was high demand to be a "san man" ("san" as in "sanitation") in NYC:
> It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. [note: this is in 2003 dollars!] A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy.
And that's how it should be. Trash men should be making $200K and have high social status whereas the devs helping Bezos to his 5th super yacht or Zuck poison more kids should get minimum wage and treated as pariahs. Unfortunately at the country level it's reversed.
You are both wrong and this is why they win the salary of the coder is not high the taxes on bezos and co are less and the public workers pay less. That what needs to be change not labour be paid less no matter what kind of labour
Absolutely 100% agree, and I’m glad people are saying this.
The internet has become a joke since the digital advertisement agencies, Google and Facebook and so on got the web under their control.
While high functioning societies invest in their people’s infrastructure, some societies invest in propaganda and premiere greed over keeping the country clean.
I don't know if I would call it high pay anywhere ive lived. It is okay pay around me right now in a less prosperous area of the country for not requiring tools or previous skills. But the main thing going for it around here is stability of hours, a decent amount of holidays off, and you don't have to destroy your body.
For manual labor I thought the guys I know who do garbage pickup have a great job - their hours are shifted so they work from 4am to noon so they have plenty of time for hobbies and family outside of that. All the time sitting and driving the truck is hard though they rarely have to handle anything manually with standardized bins and hydraulic lifts.
Ok, but society can't bear the cost of $10M garbage men, so either people will do it themselves or go without.
The same argument applies to any job: in most scenarios, it pays what it's worth to society at the market clearing price. The government can interfere via licensing, minimum wages, quotas, etc; but broadly the job pays what it's worth.
Pay and worth are different, just like price and value are. Garbage collection is worth a lot, but its pay is determined by market dynamics. As the number of unemployed increases, it will pay less.
Society cannot function without garbage people. It must be done or society will collapse quickly, so society better find a pay rate that gets the job done.
This thread feels like it went off the rails given that every locale I've ever lived in (many across the US) had fine, working garbage collection, and plenty of competent garbage men who worked for what I'm guessing was decent pay, certainly less than $10 million a year.
The thread started out off the rails. Contrary to the claims of youre-wrong3, garbage collection is not a particularly high paying job and has no real trouble getting new hires.
I think in reality, it shouldn't be hard to find people willing to take out garbage by simply paying a little better than other manual-labor jobs. There's always going to be people who can't work other jobs for some reason, so if they're choosing between manual labor jobs, the one that pays more is going to be more attractive. They don't need to pay enough to hire a doctor, because not that many people can do high-value work like that competently.
I'm not sure you'll attract the right kind of people with that much money. Probably a lot of people looking for a quick buck will apply, do a good job for long enough to not get outright fired, collect a few cash checks, and then knock it off.
I think there would actually be enough people willing to do blue collar jobs if job security is alright. Low-status jobs are defined by low job security, not necessarily by harsh working conditions.
FWIW, this figure looks to be the fraction of 20–69 year olds in the entire population who are unemployed[0]. Referencing the official definitions[1], the standard unemployment figure of 2.6 (as of 2026-02) narrows that denominator to people who are receiving wages or actively looking for work.
> which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
From the above, 18% seems like the wrong number to look at. Heck, why not quote 38.1%, since it captures everyone who can legally work (including 15 and 90 year olds)?
IMO, the base population we want to look at is people who actually want a job, which is captured by various Labor Underutilization (LU) metrics. These all hover around 2.5–6.0% according to public records[2], and are also defined in the official docs[1].
It seems to be human nature to chase after easy to understand solutions rather than addressing ifficult bottlenecks and friction. Doctors are a great example. In order to be a doctor, you have to study for 12 years. But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade. Then on top of that, you have the limited spaces for residents anyway, so more great med students still != more doctors. And then on top of that you have the issue that teaching hospitals are usually split apart from regular hospitals and A med student who ends up at a particular teaching hospital basically ends up locked in until their residency finishes leaving them vulnerable to even more pressure.
> But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade.
There's a lot of value in knowing about more than just one thing. Anyone leaving their university with a degree should have at least some exposure to topics outside of the field they want to work in. People are more than just their jobs, having a well rounded education is useful, and matters outside of the field of medicine still have real impacts on the lives of doctors.
I'd certainly feel better about going to a doctor who has a reasonable baseline understanding of the rest of the world outside of his work. You could argue that people looking to become doctors should able to avoid some percentage of the other classes they're forced to take, but doctors can often pick up some relevant credits while still fulfilling those requirements too.
Maybe the particularities, but there are overall issues with placing in EU as well. There's a big discrepancy in general practice availability between large cities / capitals and smaller cities / country side. And it's not necessarily a lack of "living wages" nor is it poor conditions (often they'll have strong support from local municipalities w/ things like clinic space, local community support, etc) but it's simply that younger doctors don't want to move there.
Yep, this is the same almost everywhere. You're not going to find many young people who will go to a university to get the qualifications to be a medical professional, and then willingly move back to their middle-of-nowhere small town to do that job, even if it pays more.
The Soviets would attempt to solve it by requiring the graduates to work off about 3 years in the place chosen by the joint commissions from Gosplan/Ministry of Labour/Ministry of Higher Education (those same commissions determined the number of students to enroll in the first place, so...). And this system (called "distribution", as in, "distributing the graduates to the workplaces") was widely unpopular for obvious reasons.
Japan's employment rate is hard to compare, in that many of these job just wouldn't be seen as real jobs in any other country ("bullshit job"), and it's compound by half of the population being over 50. A high employment among the elderly could just be masking the harsher truth when that upper half passes away.
Humans are older than money, so evidently we don't need it to survive, but there is more to existence than mere survival. I agree that people's basic needs to be taken care of, but I think that is an issue that needs to happen because of automation. It needs to happen because it is simply the right thing to do. I would go as fas as saying It shouldn't just be basic needs. Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
Money is a tool (maybe not the best) to make an economy with division of labor work. It's not required and probably also doesn't work in societies where everybody knows everybody else and can make sure that the right things are done and nobody slacks off.
> Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I don’t know. Society should provide the framework within which people can achieve their needs (and wants), but not the needs and wants themselves directly.
Otherwise you put an artificial cap on human growth and inefficient allocation of resources.
You didn't answer the question, you answered a different question: "why would someone want to work, just in general?" The question that was posed was, why would someone who has already chosen to retire, or who is already fully occupied, or who is sick, want to work?
Why not simply pay the homemakers? Why is it so important that everyone produce economic output at the widget factory?
Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
IMO, basic income for parents is absolutely a policy that Japan should enact.
And the question of how much the payment should be has a straightforward answer: adjust until the birth rate reaches replacement.
If the payment ends up high enough that some mothers or fathers opt to leave the labor force to focus on raising their kids, then so be it; that's probably healthier for society in the long term.
It would be expensive, yes, but cheaper than the alternatives. And anyway, Japan's stagnant economy would likely benefit from the boost to consumer demand.
Those people can work for their income then; the policy I was discussing only relates to the government paying parents an income, ideally on a per-child basis (up to some maximum, maybe four; you need to have some people having bigger families to balance out the ones who don't have any children at all, but you also don't want people farming kids for money).
I don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job.
If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
Indeed. My first job was in a factory doing things that we had machines to do, but not enough of them or efficient enough. I spent the whole time dreaming of automating the factory properly.
I think that nihilistic sentiment arises only when you are materially satisfied, maybe in the 90s and 00s (like office workers in Fight Club or Office Space). Many of us are in survival mode now. We just need money to keep up with inflation. We don't have time to think about the deep meaning of life.
"Survival mode" is quite an overstatement of current conditions for most people in most of the West. Prices have risen, but people aren't in as rough of a position as 2008, 1970's stagflation, or certainly the great depression.
I agree with aspects of what you mean. But there are exceptions on both sides.
Ofc people dont want to become human fax machines (Morse decoders) nowadays, it would feel absurd.
But also if a role allows someone to feel satisfaction in accomplishment and in being an active member of a society it can be meaningful. For example tidying up streets/yards in low income neighborhoods can make the place look much better and you can feel like you're serving folks who are in need.
Huge amounts of effort go to feeding our desires, and to feeding our fears, but it actually doesn't take much to meet our needs.
Only 2% of our efforts as a society go to getting food out of the ground.
The reason to have a job, to own property, to earn and spend money, to reproduce and fight in wars, it seems, is to maintain a valid stake in the whole game lest your masters designate you an undesireable.
For said master the more viable the alternatives to humans become, the more all those excess humans start to look like a liability.
But this guy googled it and apparently there are 18% of Japanese people not working, so obviously their entire society pivoting towards automation is wrong.
Yep. In a society with an aging population and a low birth rate, people who would prefer to be full-time parents staying home and raising their kids ought to instead be doing undesirable, monotonous, easily-automatable jobs that robots can do. Or at least two families could agree to pay each other to raise the other's children, so that it counts as employment, rather than raising their own. Yes, maximizing labor force participation... That's how things ought to be.
yes. this is correct. but that is not how the market works unfortunately or else we would have 0% unemployment. market works in a way that if no one in the country wants to do the job for this wage then you import people from poorer countries that will be able to send money to their family even on a shitty wage.
Robots are the other solution and a much easier one for a society. you don't need to build the structure to welcome mass immigration from poorer countries and all the things you'd need to solve when bringing people from different - often less tolerant / more restrictive - cultures.
Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
> You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories.
This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.
Correct. I was using labor participation rates. As a society gets depressed and has a hard time people stop trying (ie they no longer count as unemployed, which doesnt count the people who are no longer trying to get a job).
Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)
His theory on the cause is wrong, and using the wrong number is dishonest here. I agree he more or less correctly cited labor force participation rate (still basically the best in the world) but badly misrepresented what that number is such that he should be apologizing and not doubling down. Dishonest.
I actually think we should only be using labor force metrics for everything, if someone stops looking because their depressed and can live at home - suddenly that's ok? I don't think we should stop counting people like that
The problem is differentiating between those who've given up and who do not want to work (have other means to sustain themselves).
In general, either is fine by me as long we are consistent: they are both proxies for percentage of people needing work and should correlate to a large extent.
1. There is only so much you can pay the people doing the kind of work like cleaning the Shinkansens or manning the 7-11's because it affects customer costs. i.e. There's a point where you increase the salary of 7-11 workers that it causes a $2 fried chicken snack to inflate to $10 that customers will refuse to buy
2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
It's not even just labor, it is the fully burdened labor (i.e., all costs of that labor, which is well beyond the wage/salary an employee sees...the true cost of labor, i.e., a $20/hr wage is actually a $25-28 expense), multiplied by the number of hours and number of people working during those hours that becomes a cumulative overhead cost that is added to the wholesale and other general overhead costs that the item margin must cover in addition to providing a certain profit.
Then there is also something like spoilage that comes into play in an example like your "fried chicken snack", which may not sell within FDA food regulation timeline and temperature, and therefore must be thrown away...a total loss.
But it's not just a total loss; not only did you then not make a profit on the sale of the "fried chicken snack", you also are in the hole to the tune of the wholesale cost of the chicken snack, e.g., $4, the labor and other indirect and overhead costs in addition to the opportunity cost, e.g., $1.
So a $1 earnings from a $6 "fried chicken snack" may turn into a $4 loss of the chicken at wholesale price and an additional loss of $1 for labor, overhead, etc. So now you are $5 in the hole when you had hoped to be $1 in the black, and now have to sell 6x$6 "fried chicken snacks" just to break even and finally make that $1 you had previously hoped for.
That's just a very simplified version of just something as simple as "fried chicken snacks". It gets way more complicated from there.
Different from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.
Huh, in Tokyo and Osaka I didn’t encounter a 7-11 without self checkout as an option. The smaller convenience stores sure, but not 7-11. China is much more aggressive in this regard though.
This. Also there is a social backlash against Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai service workers in Japan now (the people who tend to be working the counter at a kombini, but apparently Asians all look the same to Western HNers), as well as Western tourists.
Edit: can't reply
> I doubt many Chinese youths want to work for minimum wage in Japan
Chinese are the 2nd largest nationality of foreign agricultural and food workers in Japan [0].
As long as the median household income in China [1] remains below the minimum wage in Japan [2], members of the bottom half of Chinese society will continue to emigrate there, Korea, and other countries to work, that said not at the same rate as was seen a decade ago.
It's a very recent shift that began in the last 3-5 years.
Traditionally, India never had a Japanese vocational program in the manner you'd find in Vietnam, Thailand, China, Phillipines, etc but in 2021 [0], the Japanese and Indian government began working on a vocational/blue collar mobility program [1] to build a Vietnam, China, or Phillipines style pipeline.
There will be a lot of Indians coming, but they will be cycled back in 2-3 year batches to then become floor managers and foremen for Japanese fixed investments in India. It's the model that Japanese automotive JVs in India operated on for a decade [1].
And it's was these kinds of vocational programs that helped dramatically upskill Chinese manufacturing in the 2000s and 2010s.
If you click on the time the person you ‘can’t reply’ (where it says ‘n minutes’ or ‘n hours ago’) posted their comment you can reply to your hearts content.
This is what I did to reply to you.
You don’t have to say ‘ can’t reply’ then quote someone like that.
Context is preserved better the proper way but it’s not very discoverable.
This is a linkage in theory but in practice it's an indirect linkage and the 7-11 owner does not have a handbook dictating how prices rise or fall relating to labour costs.
As evidenced by the non arrival of across the board 10% rises in meal costs when tipping is banned.
TL;DR cost and price linkage is not amenable to simplistic claims about the impact on pricing.
No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan.
Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.
Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.
They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.
Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.
Edit: can't reply
> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film
It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.
> NYC sanitation dept...
Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.
Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.
> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there
What's with this kind of orientalism?!?
Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.
And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a Teidai/Sokei/Hitotsubashi/TokyoTech/Ivy/Stanford, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters.
There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].
I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film.
"Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself."
-- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/
People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics.
All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Many people want these jobs.
If you're a tech worker that likes a clean office and new technology this is boring.
But I'm sure there's a sanitation worker going on a similar rant about how terrible the tech industry is.
Japan is very different than most cultures in cleaning after yourself. It's very ingrained in their psyche, e.g. school students are trained to clean their classrooms in organized way.
So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there (and it's super-clean as people trash way less).
More of a “it’s an honourable job, and I respect people who do it, but personally I wouldn’t do it” kinda thing.
Status is ingrained in the culture. What you do, which neighbourhood you live in Tokyo, what school you went to and etc. matters a lot to a random person.
Good to know, thank. But the status thing is very much the same, if not even more important on in US. The whole red-vs-blue counties thing, is very much urban rich-vs-poor countryside.
Maybe not so much in Europe, although I'm not sure. Japan has a different sense of shame, that's for sure. But status (neighborhood/job) sounds the same.
Unlike many other developed countries, foreign employees working in cleaning and maintenance are still a minority. This is gradually changing, but I believe the main issue is that young people are completely uninterested in this kind of work. Most people working in these industries in Japan are old rather than foreign. The average is probably over 50+, and there are quite a few people working past retirement.
I went to a chain Family Restaurant recently here in Japan. The food is brought by a robot for a while now. Recently you get your seat selected at a touchscreen. You can pay at your table's tablet using PayPay. There is still some waiter staff, but it being reduced to the past. The only part that did not change much yet is the kitchen.
I said to myself to stop going, if there is no human staff left. On the other hand, small shops with good atmosphere are thriving.
Given waiters are not tipped here, I actually quite enjoy the quietness/quickness/streamlined atmosphere of a Jonathan's or Gust that has all that automation. I would not want the kitchen staff to be replaced by robots though, food prep should probably always been overseen by humans. But in general, I like not having to interact with people sometimes.
You are probably talking about Cafe Restaurant Gusto (ガスト). A robot bringing me the food improves my experience as I don't have to wait as long, and I can leave whenever I want, just get up and pay, it's more efficient and provides a better experience.
* destroying your body, stripping your bones, getting diabetes and temporarily (or permanently) disabling yourself with issues no healthcare provider will take seriously for decades to come for 2.6 babies in your youth.
–––
Someone called this a "belief."
There's a 10% to 4% probability that the average teenage girl will die from childbirth, given the cumulative risk of pregnancies in nations without modern medicine.
That's the default state of the human condition. Maternal mortality is frequent and 1 in 25 to 1 in 10 for women without modern medical interventions.
There's a reason why the more women become aware of the risks and downsides of pregnancy – the less likely they are to go through with it. Even when indoctrinated from the start. The only sane solution in an otherwise insane world is technological, external gestation / exowombs.
This happens, but it's not representative. Interesting belief, it seems like it should be self-extinguishing, the cultures that don't believe this kind of thing will tend to take over over time.
Most women have watched someone go through a difficult pregnancy in their lives before they hit 20. It's not a "belief" for the people who live through it.
People used to die – frequently – from this "belief." And women still do.
The belief I was talking about was that that was at all representative of the median case, and the implication that it’s not worth the risk to have kids (this was before you added the big chunk about mortality being 4-10% in places without a good medical system). I have first hand experience of some of the potential difficulties, so I know it happens, but I also know that it’s not every pregnancy, most are fine, and that if you do have difficulty, a high quality healthcare system can usually get you through it.
And this belief is interesting, because it seems like one of the most evolutionarily unfit ideas possible, at least on the individual level. But maybe it’s good for the survival of the group if it decreases resource contention.
Most of the world is below replacement rate (~2.1 TFR), the rest will get there in a decade or two. Educated, empowered women delay having children, have less children, or no children. Holds across both developed and developing countries.
> Dallin H. Oaks, the newly appointed prophet and president of the church, said that while birth rates within the church are higher than national numbers, they've still declined "significantly."
> Catholic University of America demographer Stephen Cranney crunched the numbers on the religion's families. In 2008, about 70% of Latter-day Saint women ages 18-45 had at least one child at home. In 2022, that number was 59%, a rate of decline mirrored in the American population at large.
Any uptick in birth rate in the US from first generation immigrants quickly reverts to the mean for subsequent generations.
That study has 7 to 12% error ranges for the LDS group. Even with that, the share of LDS women with a child at home is 50% more than non-LDS. Lastly, there's a huge difference in rate of decay when a group is at, above, or below replacement rate. If everyone's declining, but they're declining far slower, that still proves my point that the composition of these communities in 80 years could be far different if current rates hold.
Utah has one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, and average children per women is 1.8 in the state. It’s always hard to predict the future, but I argue the evidence is clear LDS fertility rates will rapidly coalesce with others within the next few years, maybe faster if young followers leave the church faster.
> In 2007, according to Pew, the LDS church retained 70% of childhood members in the U.S. (n = 581) In 2014, that was 64% (n = 661), and in 2023–24 it had declined still further to 54% (n = 525).
> That 54% current retention rate looks better than the GSS’ 38%, so that’s potentially good news for LDS leaders. But once again, we’re witnessing a clear drop from the fairly recent past. Both major U.S. surveys that track childhood affiliation are saying that more people are leaving than used to.
> What’s more, this is being driven by younger adults. In the general population, younger adults are noticeably more likely to have no religious affiliation than older adults — either because they’ve left religion or they grew up without one. It shouldn’t surprise us that it’s true in Mormonism as well.
So, the cohort leaving the church the fastest are the ones with fertility. What does this do to LDS fertility rate trends? It likely bends them downward.
Once you hit ~1.5 TFR, low fertility trap kicks in.
> Demographers in the early 2000s coined the “low-fertility trap,” hypothesizing that a series of self-reinforcing economic and social mechanisms make it increasingly difficult to raise the fertility rate once it dips below a certain threshold. The academics posited that lower fertility results in increased individual aspirations for personal consumption but at the same time it also results in an aging population and less job creation—and thus greater pessimism about the economic future—which in turn disincentivizes having more children. Moreover, as the average family size grows smaller and smaller generation after generation, the social norm of an ideal family size shrinks, too. These forces together lead to a persistent “downward spiral” for the fertility rate that can be impossible to reverse.
> China’s not the only country in the region or the world facing this kind of demographic crisis. Fertility rates across developed nations globally have almost uniformly dropped over the last few decades. China’s neighbors Japan and South Korea have among the lowest, and policymakers there have invested billions of dollars and pondered uniquely targeted policies, respectively, to try—so far unsuccessfully—to get young people to have more children.
Several European countries have already fallen in this trap. As pensioners comprise an increasingly large fraction of voters, pandering to them becomes far more politically attractive than investing in the future.
Japanese financial institutions massive capital positions across Asia, the US, and Europe which tend to be public-private ventures.
> Tax the robot’s income
Pretty much, in the sense that corporations and the Japanese government have spent decades working together to build a sovereign wealth model comparable to Singapore and the UAE's.
This is something that really needs to be done in the states imo.
IIRC we don't have a sovereign wealth fund, but we should in order to provide a social safety net for our citizens, especially with all the uncertainties regarding the future right now.
Time to share the meme again, sorry to my followers for reusing this joke:
‘I wanted a machine to do the dishes for me so I could concentrate on my art, and what I got was a machine to do the art so now I’m the one doing the dishes’
I’d be much happier with this AI revolution if I got a personal robot chef and house-keeper, while I could keep writing beautiful software. Now I’m looking to pivot into more blue-collar jobs to escape the existential dread, and making software a personal hobby rather than a career.
I think that many signs are indicating that Japan will re-emerge as a major technology powerhouse in the coming decades. And being confronted early to demographic transformation will end-up being an advantage. On the opposite side I think that immigration is a temporary band-aid that doesn’t solve any of the structural issues.
I'm also curious why they imagine a future-Japan-tech-powerhouse. I think Japan has a lot of potential for growing and improving as a place to live (especially if they embrace growth, instead thinking tiny-steps will convince women in Japan to magically start having babies[0])
Additionally, all signs do, in fact, point to fewer new immigrants to Japan in the coming decade.
Miti is basically a second government with real power, finance and expertise, and they appear to bet on the correct things, it should have happened earlier but from what I have seen they are moving faster than EU on the semiconductor and robotics fronts.
Strict immigration controls are a good thing. The people immigrating to your country should bring value, not problems. They should be positioned to contribute to your society, rather than take from it.
Specifically in this conversation, if Japan can use physical AI and robotics to create X goods and services, wouldn't it be better (for the Japanese) to divide X by the Y population of Japan, rather than Y + Z population of Somalia?
Sure, take that stricter immigration control. But if people assume upfront that immigrants are intrinsically the source of problems and it takes stricter and stricter controls to filter them down to only those that bring value, this strengthening of filtering will never end.
Remember that one does not _either_ bring value or cause problems. I expect a typical human being to bring some value and cause some problems at the same time. And you can never measure which one is bigger.
I never said that all immigrants are intrinsically a source of problems, and saying that any filtering inevitably leads to never-endingly stronger filters is a slippery slope fallacy.
You absolutely can measure the likely degree of problems an immigrant would bring. To an absurd, extreme, example: you have 1 spot open for immigration. Do you offer it to a semiconductor EE with a clean criminal record in his early 30s, or a 68 year old alcoholic high school dropout with multiple violent criminal convictions?
It's relatively easy to design a system that prioritizes skilled, contributory immigration: academic background, professional career, salary, age, ability to speak the host country's language, skills of relevance, health/fitness, etc.
Sure, the EE from my example can snap and commit a crime, or lose his job and get addicted to drugs; but at a population level, it's inarguable that some groups will cost a country and others will benefit a country.
It's not as if Japan (or any other country, for that matter) doesn't already have immigration restrictions. Japan uses a points-based merit system for permanent residence [1], not unlike the criteria you suggested. Just to give an example, having a PhD and speaking Japanese at an N1 level (~equivalent to B2 CEFR) is barely sufficient to qualify (unless you're older than 30, in which case it won't be).
The more interesting question to ask is: Why has Japan decided to tighten immigration requirements now? But in my opinion the answer is rather obvious, especially when you consider the current Prime Minister's nationalistic beliefs: It's much easier to blame foreigners for insufficient welfare, ailing infrastructure, etc than to actually improve welfare, infrastructure, etc.
Also, the example of "a 68 year old alcoholic high school dropout with multiple violent criminal convictions" is rather ridiculous. You're arguing a strawman. It's already impossible for such a candidate to immigrate almost anywhere barring some other exceptional circumstances.
This is misleading at best, straight up false at worst.
The points-based system is used to allow you to apply for a PR _on an accelerated timeline_; not apply at all.
Having 70/80 points lets you apply for a PR after being a resident for 1/3 years respectively; you can apply without any points after living here for 10 years.
My example is ridiculous, but it was the easiest way to point out the fallacy that "you can never measure which [immigrants bring value or cause problems]. You clearly can.
And no, that 68 year old alcoholic is free to pass into America under Democrat administrations and tens of thousands have. They technically are illegal, but if you selectively enforce immigration laws and offer things like asylum/refugee status without any checks or balances, the net effect is still the same.
Returning to Japan, as the other commenter pointed out, your PhD example is someone that qualifies for expedited permanent residency, a particular subset of migration that Japan has (correctly) decided to encourage.
The "skilled" immigrant is largely a myth. Many countries now have more graduates than ever before with rising graduate unemployment while these "skilled" immigrants just usually end up being another mediocre tech worker. The GDP per capita hasn't been growing since the crash in 2008 for many European countries despite the influx of "skilled" immigrants.
It is mostly propaganda. Said immigrants will likely still never truly socially fit in even with great effort.
The problem is that if you make the place feel very unwelcoming to newcomers because you don't want the people who bring problems, the people who bring value don't come either unless you're offering extremely high pay, which Japan does not.
Unwelcoming to immigrants with problems doesn't necessitate unwelcoming to all immigrants.
Japan's culture doesn't take well to immigration, but Canada bars many immigrants or even visitors on the basis of DUIs - I don't have a DUI, and I'd have to jump through many hoops to migrate to Canada regardless, but nobody can earnestly say Canada isn't receiving many, many (too many?) migrants.
Other than that loony High-School "Nostradamus", what signs do you see ?
They have some core technologies in some niches, but they lag behind both the US & China in Tech. This is esp. true in Robotics, and their academics/industrialists have massive egos & racial pride from a bygone era to ever be able to bridge this gap with immigration. They even removed the Phd scholarships for people moving to Japanese Universities (which have been falling in competitiveness for decades)!
I agree immigration is a band-aid, but that doesn't mean it can't be successfully used while planning and managing structural changes long term.
Of course that does make the issue more nuanced and harder to advocate for when we have all seen politicians don't usually push for long term solutions if their band-aid solution will outlast their term of office.
The problem with UBI is not that people would stop working, it's that the value of whatever amount is given as UBI will drop very quickly due to inflation.
UBI is basically the same as saying "everyone should earn above average".
This is why the Australian 1907 Harvester Decision didn't merely settle on an amount (42 shillings a week) but also included a needs based indexing (support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them).
Japan doesn't have UBI, but it's welfare system is extremely expansive as Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees a minimum standard of living through livelihood, housing, education, and medical assistance.
Additonally, Japan has spent decades thinking about this eventuality (at least since the 1970s), which is why Japan worked on the "Flying Geese" paradigm where Japanese public-private ventures would end up become major capital stake holders across Asia, the US, and Europe.
This short-term thinking makes me pessimistic about UBI. Everyone's addicted to work despite automation and AI creating less need for work. And thinking we live in a zero-sum game where if someone else is benefiting, it must be hurting them somehow so they must block it. If someone's getting a "handout", they're a lazy bum.
Why would you have to work harder when employers of jobs no one wants to do (for a given wage) have to either increase wages or embrace automation research and development (thereby likely speeding up its systemic adoption and reducing the necessity for manual work even more)?
Where developing countries have vendors on the streets, industrialized nations have vending machines instead, by pure economic and demographic necessity. The existence of an automation tool doesn't imply a human having to work harder somewhere else.
And why do you assume people would sit around doing nothing? I don't think that's a natural thing for most people to do.
How financial and social systems are set up seems to be very much a societal choice, unless it goes against some physical, basic economic or global trade limitation.
As a species, we need to evaluate our attitudes to work. The quote above resonates at some level, but maybe there are some people who enjoy doing dishes and laundry, who knows.
Most people are just surviving. It is a constant battle between slaving away in jobs (and have healthcare tied to our jobs) we don't like and rest of our lives, including relationships, hobbies, even health. Most people do not have the time or energy to think about anything else other than just getting through the day.
Not for that task, you don't. Just get a washer/dryer. They're very common where I live: the machine both washes and dries your clothes, and uses a heat pump system on the dryer side for high efficiency.
What's missing is a robot that will take the clothes out of your washer/dryer, fold them up, and put them away for you.
The solution is more teachers, smaller class sizes and not underpaying and abusing teachers to function as nanny’s also charged with raising your children.
This isn’t exactly a mystery problem, we’ve understood clearly how to educate humans well for quite a while. It’s just that doing it properly is “eXpEnSiVe” as if the alternative, isn’t quietly orders of magnitude worse, and more costly.
So the solution is to have less ladies in charge? Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?
currently most industrialised countries are in a demographic decline, sometimes patched by immigration that will burden their economies long term much more than they will help them
China is a deeper decline than Japan too, which will make their geopolitics volatile
All developed countries are in demographic decline (ex immigration), and need automation/robotics. There's only so many immigrants you can import before you lose your country's identity.
> There's only so many immigrants you can import before you lose your country's identity.
Is this true? The US has been doing this for over 100 years and it's been fine, I think. I mean, our countries identity has basically become "we're all immigrants" but that's not a new phenomena.
the jobs nobody wants is the beta test, production rollout includes jobs that poor people and teenagers want, next major version upgrade jobs that adults with limited educational opportunities want, and so on and so forth.
It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
These can't be simultaneously true. If all of our needs are taken care of, that is the same thing as unlimited luxury. Someone hoarding wealth is not that important when everyone has everything they want. Society is already being helped by all of the needs they are fulfilling. We don't need to also take their wealth too.
The idea that automation, AI, offshoring, and low-paid migrant workers are filling jobs no one wants is pure evil bullshit. The main goal of business is to generate the most income with the least expense, labor being the most cost for the most part. We're downstream from indentured servitude and literal slavery, and probably one bad event away from going back.
> The main goal of business is to generate the most income with the least expense
That's the goal of small business. It is the only way to stay afloat and try to grow while allowing the stakeholders enough to survive. Large business starts to generate so much income that it could never possibly spend it all anyway, so minimizing expenses doesn't really matter. What does matter, to the people running the show, is ensuring that they gain social status.
And for that you need visibility and connections. The way you get connections and visibility is to build impressive offices and fill them with notable people. The work might be technically pointless, but it generates a network of friends in high places and that is what provides social status. A trillion dollar business that is one guy in his parents' basement might sound appealing to the average software developer, but not to those who actually run these large companies.
The robot vote is a critical and quickly growing minority group since Wall-E v Sanders determined that all sentient robots were to be treated as citizens. Immediately after, Citizens United was rendered useless and large corporations moved their investments from campaign finance to literal voting machines.
Cobotics (robots doing trivial stuff that helps human and assist them rather than “replacing” them) has been a thing for decades, that’s not the issue here, the issue is corporate greed that are using robots or AI as a scapegoat to blame your low wages and/or fire you. If the job market is more regulated, you will those excuses vanishing quickly.
The article seems to say that it's not jobs nobody wants, but rather a labor shortage from an aging population. Japan just seems to be running out of people for its labor market.
This is explicitly part of the discourse, but I think it means robotics companies continuing to receive government grants while not actually delivering any labor saving technology, and immigration policy being held back. The industries needing labor will not get a suitable solution, the economy will continue to suffer, but the psychology of those around the world who believe in racial order, and correct positions of alleles on geography, will remain soothed.
They look at what happens to people that aren't xenophobic and they don't want that.
Not all cultures are trigger happy with irreversible population replacement dynamics, and simply don't consider mass immigration as a viable option. This is completely normal too.
Unfortunately peoples lives are very short to see things play out in the long term, and in the long term cultures that are okay with population replacement dynamics are very likely anomalies.
"No one wants" usually includes an insufficient wage, sometimes also an issue of insufficient investment in training for skilled folks. eg if you need a doctor in 12 years you have to start more or less today.
A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
(Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unemployment rate, i'm talking about labor non-participation rate as a measure of people who could be enticed into the workforce with a living wage)
Even tho you added an edit. You’re still wrong. Garbage collection is typically a high paying job because no one wants to do it. But people still consider it “below” them and don’t want to do it even when there’s a high unemployment rate.
This is over 20 years old, and I'm sure doesn't hold true in all areas, but at least at one point there was high demand to be a "san man" ("san" as in "sanitation") in NYC:
> It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. [note: this is in 2003 dollars!] A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/249/garbage
These guys are/were unionized, which certainly helps.
And that's how it should be. Trash men should be making $200K and have high social status whereas the devs helping Bezos to his 5th super yacht or Zuck poison more kids should get minimum wage and treated as pariahs. Unfortunately at the country level it's reversed.
You are both wrong and this is why they win the salary of the coder is not high the taxes on bezos and co are less and the public workers pay less. That what needs to be change not labour be paid less no matter what kind of labour
Absolutely 100% agree, and I’m glad people are saying this.
The internet has become a joke since the digital advertisement agencies, Google and Facebook and so on got the web under their control.
While high functioning societies invest in their people’s infrastructure, some societies invest in propaganda and premiere greed over keeping the country clean.
I don't know if I would call it high pay anywhere ive lived. It is okay pay around me right now in a less prosperous area of the country for not requiring tools or previous skills. But the main thing going for it around here is stability of hours, a decent amount of holidays off, and you don't have to destroy your body.
Starting 70, going to 100 as norm and 160 with overtime. That’s way higher than average wage.
It is actually a pretty good job. Civilization will always need garbage disposal.
So many people are locked in on on temporary contracts constantly in fear of termination.
For manual labor I thought the guys I know who do garbage pickup have a great job - their hours are shifted so they work from 4am to noon so they have plenty of time for hobbies and family outside of that. All the time sitting and driving the truck is hard though they rarely have to handle anything manually with standardized bins and hydraulic lifts.
How goes 4-12 give any more time for hobbies than 8-4 or 10-6?
Garbage collectors where I live used to make $30-$35/hr starting wage. It was a good job and they always had applicants.
Now they have the trucks that dump the bins without getting out of the truck. The driver's make $18/hr.
I guarantee you that a lot more people would be willing to put up with it for $10 million a year.
Ok, but society can't bear the cost of $10M garbage men, so either people will do it themselves or go without.
The same argument applies to any job: in most scenarios, it pays what it's worth to society at the market clearing price. The government can interfere via licensing, minimum wages, quotas, etc; but broadly the job pays what it's worth.
> pays what it's worth to society
Pay and worth are different, just like price and value are. Garbage collection is worth a lot, but its pay is determined by market dynamics. As the number of unemployed increases, it will pay less.
Society cannot function without garbage people. It must be done or society will collapse quickly, so society better find a pay rate that gets the job done.
This thread feels like it went off the rails given that every locale I've ever lived in (many across the US) had fine, working garbage collection, and plenty of competent garbage men who worked for what I'm guessing was decent pay, certainly less than $10 million a year.
The thread started out off the rails. Contrary to the claims of youre-wrong3, garbage collection is not a particularly high paying job and has no real trouble getting new hires.
I think in reality, it shouldn't be hard to find people willing to take out garbage by simply paying a little better than other manual-labor jobs. There's always going to be people who can't work other jobs for some reason, so if they're choosing between manual labor jobs, the one that pays more is going to be more attractive. They don't need to pay enough to hire a doctor, because not that many people can do high-value work like that competently.
I'm not sure you'll attract the right kind of people with that much money. Probably a lot of people looking for a quick buck will apply, do a good job for long enough to not get outright fired, collect a few cash checks, and then knock it off.
I think there would actually be enough people willing to do blue collar jobs if job security is alright. Low-status jobs are defined by low job security, not necessarily by harsh working conditions.
You would probably need to face voters questioning whether that's the best way to use their money.
In many places, garbage collection is done by competing private firms.
okay, so the lack of robots/supply increases garbage collector wages, which broadly results in wealth distribution vs robots.
Why do you think that making people do what they don't want to do for more money is the most effective way to distribute wealth?
Paying people more to do work that less people want to do makes sense.
> … the most effective way to distribute wealth?
Nobody said this is a template for every problem, opportunity or other situation in economics.
> A quick google suggests ~18%
FWIW, this figure looks to be the fraction of 20–69 year olds in the entire population who are unemployed[0]. Referencing the official definitions[1], the standard unemployment figure of 2.6 (as of 2026-02) narrows that denominator to people who are receiving wages or actively looking for work.
> which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
From the above, 18% seems like the wrong number to look at. Heck, why not quote 38.1%, since it captures everyone who can legally work (including 15 and 90 year olds)?
IMO, the base population we want to look at is people who actually want a job, which is captured by various Labor Underutilization (LU) metrics. These all hover around 2.5–6.0% according to public records[2], and are also defined in the official docs[1].
[0]:https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/sokuhou/tsuki/pdf/gaiyou....
[1]:https://www.stat.go.jp/data/roudou/pdf/hndbk5_2.pdf
[2]:file:///var/folders/96/k0p95wxn7sg5_xjnv5n233bc0000gn/T/gaiyou-1.pdf
It seems to be human nature to chase after easy to understand solutions rather than addressing ifficult bottlenecks and friction. Doctors are a great example. In order to be a doctor, you have to study for 12 years. But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade. Then on top of that, you have the limited spaces for residents anyway, so more great med students still != more doctors. And then on top of that you have the issue that teaching hospitals are usually split apart from regular hospitals and A med student who ends up at a particular teaching hospital basically ends up locked in until their residency finishes leaving them vulnerable to even more pressure.
> But four of those years involve studying generally unrelated topics like any other college degree despite medicine effectively being a trade.
There's a lot of value in knowing about more than just one thing. Anyone leaving their university with a degree should have at least some exposure to topics outside of the field they want to work in. People are more than just their jobs, having a well rounded education is useful, and matters outside of the field of medicine still have real impacts on the lives of doctors.
I'd certainly feel better about going to a doctor who has a reasonable baseline understanding of the rest of the world outside of his work. You could argue that people looking to become doctors should able to avoid some percentage of the other classes they're forced to take, but doctors can often pick up some relevant credits while still fulfilling those requirements too.
That’s a North American quirk.
Maybe the particularities, but there are overall issues with placing in EU as well. There's a big discrepancy in general practice availability between large cities / capitals and smaller cities / country side. And it's not necessarily a lack of "living wages" nor is it poor conditions (often they'll have strong support from local municipalities w/ things like clinic space, local community support, etc) but it's simply that younger doctors don't want to move there.
Yep, this is the same almost everywhere. You're not going to find many young people who will go to a university to get the qualifications to be a medical professional, and then willingly move back to their middle-of-nowhere small town to do that job, even if it pays more.
The Soviets would attempt to solve it by requiring the graduates to work off about 3 years in the place chosen by the joint commissions from Gosplan/Ministry of Labour/Ministry of Higher Education (those same commissions determined the number of students to enroll in the first place, so...). And this system (called "distribution", as in, "distributing the graduates to the workplaces") was widely unpopular for obvious reasons.
In the US today, they try to entice people to those places by forgiving their student loans if they work there long enough.
I should have done better with my comment. I intended to reference the pre-med undergraduate degree.
Does that include stay at home parents?
18% is one of the.lowest rates on the planet. 4th in fact.
This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
Japan's employment rate is hard to compare, in that many of these job just wouldn't be seen as real jobs in any other country ("bullshit job"), and it's compound by half of the population being over 50. A high employment among the elderly could just be masking the harsher truth when that upper half passes away.
It's still 10s of millions of people who could be given a job (and some hope and purpose too btw)
Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
Why would the retirees want to be put back to work?
Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once?
Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task?
Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed?
There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
Money, money, money, and money. We need it to survive. Until people's basic needs are taken care of for them, they need to do what they can to live.
Humans are older than money, so evidently we don't need it to survive, but there is more to existence than mere survival. I agree that people's basic needs to be taken care of, but I think that is an issue that needs to happen because of automation. It needs to happen because it is simply the right thing to do. I would go as fas as saying It shouldn't just be basic needs. Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
Money is a tool (maybe not the best) to make an economy with division of labor work. It's not required and probably also doesn't work in societies where everybody knows everybody else and can make sure that the right things are done and nobody slacks off.
> Society should be aiming to provide the entire hierarchy of needs for everyone.
I don’t know. Society should provide the framework within which people can achieve their needs (and wants), but not the needs and wants themselves directly.
Otherwise you put an artificial cap on human growth and inefficient allocation of resources.
You didn't answer the question, you answered a different question: "why would someone want to work, just in general?" The question that was posed was, why would someone who has already chosen to retire, or who is already fully occupied, or who is sick, want to work?
Why not simply pay the homemakers? Why is it so important that everyone produce economic output at the widget factory?
Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
IMO, basic income for parents is absolutely a policy that Japan should enact.
And the question of how much the payment should be has a straightforward answer: adjust until the birth rate reaches replacement.
If the payment ends up high enough that some mothers or fathers opt to leave the labor force to focus on raising their kids, then so be it; that's probably healthier for society in the long term.
It would be expensive, yes, but cheaper than the alternatives. And anyway, Japan's stagnant economy would likely benefit from the boost to consumer demand.
There is no guarantee people with no wants will have kids, in fact I expect the opposite
Those people can work for their income then; the policy I was discussing only relates to the government paying parents an income, ideally on a per-child basis (up to some maximum, maybe four; you need to have some people having bigger families to balance out the ones who don't have any children at all, but you also don't want people farming kids for money).
Sounds good. You're welcome to pay those people as much as you like. No one is stopping you.
Huh. You used to be concerned with declining birth rates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11000823
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38735888
Not if it costs something.
Again, we're talking about retirees, homemakers, college students, disabled, etc. here.
I don't know what's more crushing, not having a job, or knowing deep-down that there is a machine that can trivially do your job.
If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
Indeed. My first job was in a factory doing things that we had machines to do, but not enough of them or efficient enough. I spent the whole time dreaming of automating the factory properly.
I think that nihilistic sentiment arises only when you are materially satisfied, maybe in the 90s and 00s (like office workers in Fight Club or Office Space). Many of us are in survival mode now. We just need money to keep up with inflation. We don't have time to think about the deep meaning of life.
"Survival mode" is quite an overstatement of current conditions for most people in most of the West. Prices have risen, but people aren't in as rough of a position as 2008, 1970's stagflation, or certainly the great depression.
Yes, if anything we are over fed and awash in consumer goods.
I agree with aspects of what you mean. But there are exceptions on both sides.
Ofc people dont want to become human fax machines (Morse decoders) nowadays, it would feel absurd.
But also if a role allows someone to feel satisfaction in accomplishment and in being an active member of a society it can be meaningful. For example tidying up streets/yards in low income neighborhoods can make the place look much better and you can feel like you're serving folks who are in need.
Huge amounts of effort go to feeding our desires, and to feeding our fears, but it actually doesn't take much to meet our needs.
Only 2% of our efforts as a society go to getting food out of the ground.
The reason to have a job, to own property, to earn and spend money, to reproduce and fight in wars, it seems, is to maintain a valid stake in the whole game lest your masters designate you an undesireable.
For said master the more viable the alternatives to humans become, the more all those excess humans start to look like a liability.
Japan has one of the lowest unemployments on the planet, 2.5%.
Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't.
As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.
But this guy googled it and apparently there are 18% of Japanese people not working, so obviously their entire society pivoting towards automation is wrong.
Yep. In a society with an aging population and a low birth rate, people who would prefer to be full-time parents staying home and raising their kids ought to instead be doing undesirable, monotonous, easily-automatable jobs that robots can do. Or at least two families could agree to pay each other to raise the other's children, so that it counts as employment, rather than raising their own. Yes, maximizing labor force participation... That's how things ought to be.
That's how you ensure the birth rate stays low.
I think you are missing the sarcasm.
yes. this is correct. but that is not how the market works unfortunately or else we would have 0% unemployment. market works in a way that if no one in the country wants to do the job for this wage then you import people from poorer countries that will be able to send money to their family even on a shitty wage.
Robots are the other solution and a much easier one for a society. you don't need to build the structure to welcome mass immigration from poorer countries and all the things you'd need to solve when bringing people from different - often less tolerant / more restrictive - cultures.
In case you think 18% is Japan's unemployment rate: it's not. Japan's unemployment rate is 2.5%.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...
This is basically the best in the world.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2...
Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
> You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories.
This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.
Yes, I agree. The person I'm replying to knows only enough about employment rates to have bad conspiracy takes.
Correct. I was using labor participation rates. As a society gets depressed and has a hard time people stop trying (ie they no longer count as unemployed, which doesnt count the people who are no longer trying to get a job).
Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)
I think that fudging the numbers to bolster your pet theory is not an acceptable way of looking at this data.
He wasn't fudging anything, his phrasing was
> ~18% of their working age people *do not have jobs*
Which is a correct interpretation of participation rate. His theory on the causes may be off, but his numbers weren't
His theory on the cause is wrong, and using the wrong number is dishonest here. I agree he more or less correctly cited labor force participation rate (still basically the best in the world) but badly misrepresented what that number is such that he should be apologizing and not doubling down. Dishonest.
I actually think we should only be using labor force metrics for everything, if someone stops looking because their depressed and can live at home - suddenly that's ok? I don't think we should stop counting people like that
The problem is differentiating between those who've given up and who do not want to work (have other means to sustain themselves).
In general, either is fine by me as long we are consistent: they are both proxies for percentage of people needing work and should correlate to a large extent.
1. There is only so much you can pay the people doing the kind of work like cleaning the Shinkansens or manning the 7-11's because it affects customer costs. i.e. There's a point where you increase the salary of 7-11 workers that it causes a $2 fried chicken snack to inflate to $10 that customers will refuse to buy
2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
Out of curiosity, what percentage of a fried chicken snack's final cost do you think is labor from that 7-11 worker?
It's not even just labor, it is the fully burdened labor (i.e., all costs of that labor, which is well beyond the wage/salary an employee sees...the true cost of labor, i.e., a $20/hr wage is actually a $25-28 expense), multiplied by the number of hours and number of people working during those hours that becomes a cumulative overhead cost that is added to the wholesale and other general overhead costs that the item margin must cover in addition to providing a certain profit.
Then there is also something like spoilage that comes into play in an example like your "fried chicken snack", which may not sell within FDA food regulation timeline and temperature, and therefore must be thrown away...a total loss.
But it's not just a total loss; not only did you then not make a profit on the sale of the "fried chicken snack", you also are in the hole to the tune of the wholesale cost of the chicken snack, e.g., $4, the labor and other indirect and overhead costs in addition to the opportunity cost, e.g., $1.
So a $1 earnings from a $6 "fried chicken snack" may turn into a $4 loss of the chicken at wholesale price and an additional loss of $1 for labor, overhead, etc. So now you are $5 in the hole when you had hoped to be $1 in the black, and now have to sell 6x$6 "fried chicken snacks" just to break even and finally make that $1 you had previously hoped for.
That's just a very simplified version of just something as simple as "fried chicken snacks". It gets way more complicated from there.
Probably quite a lot, 20% of the marginal cost or so? Maybe the truck driver has a bigger share, but they're a very similar case.
Different from the USA, 7-11 in Japan and China are mainly self checkout at least, so they can technically run a store with less people since they don’t have to man cash registers to get people checked out.
I don't know about China, but I live in Japan and most konbini I have visited still have real human cashiers.
Yeah but more and more have self service cashiers as well with cashless payments
Huh, in Tokyo and Osaka I didn’t encounter a 7-11 without self checkout as an option. The smaller convenience stores sure, but not 7-11. China is much more aggressive in this regard though.
As an option yes, but not most of the cashiers.
But who's going to unlock the expensive items from the plexiglass case?
You mean the hot food in the display case? They still have a person for that, but they aren’t taking money.
This. Also there is a social backlash against Vietnamese, Chinese, and Thai service workers in Japan now (the people who tend to be working the counter at a kombini, but apparently Asians all look the same to Western HNers), as well as Western tourists.
Edit: can't reply
> I doubt many Chinese youths want to work for minimum wage in Japan
Chinese are the 2nd largest nationality of foreign agricultural and food workers in Japan [0].
As long as the median household income in China [1] remains below the minimum wage in Japan [2], members of the bottom half of Chinese society will continue to emigrate there, Korea, and other countries to work, that said not at the same rate as was seen a decade ago.
[0] - https://catalog.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/opac_download_md/4738336/...
[1] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202507/t202507...
[2] - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%80%E4%BD%8E%E8%B3%83%E9...
I saw Indian workers in convenience stores when I was there. I thought that was kind of cool.
Yep!
It's a very recent shift that began in the last 3-5 years.
Traditionally, India never had a Japanese vocational program in the manner you'd find in Vietnam, Thailand, China, Phillipines, etc but in 2021 [0], the Japanese and Indian government began working on a vocational/blue collar mobility program [1] to build a Vietnam, China, or Phillipines style pipeline.
There will be a lot of Indians coming, but they will be cycled back in 2-3 year batches to then become floor managers and foremen for Japanese fixed investments in India. It's the model that Japanese automotive JVs in India operated on for a decade [1].
And it's was these kinds of vocational programs that helped dramatically upskill Chinese manufacturing in the 2000s and 2010s.
[0] - https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/govt-clears-india-jap...
[1] - https://www.jim-jec.in/
If you click on the time the person you ‘can’t reply’ (where it says ‘n minutes’ or ‘n hours ago’) posted their comment you can reply to your hearts content.
This is what I did to reply to you.
You don’t have to say ‘ can’t reply’ then quote someone like that.
Context is preserved better the proper way but it’s not very discoverable.
This is a linkage in theory but in practice it's an indirect linkage and the 7-11 owner does not have a handbook dictating how prices rise or fall relating to labour costs.
As evidenced by the non arrival of across the board 10% rises in meal costs when tipping is banned.
TL;DR cost and price linkage is not amenable to simplistic claims about the impact on pricing.
No one wants to clean s#it, especially in a country with as broad a social welfare net as Japan.
Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.
Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.
They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.
Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.
Edit: can't reply
> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film
It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.
> NYC sanitation dept...
Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.
Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.
> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there
What's with this kind of orientalism?!?
Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.
And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a Teidai/Sokei/Hitotsubashi/TokyoTech/Ivy/Stanford, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters.
There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...
[1] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf
[2] - https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/11d033af448e404c3f5...
I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film.
"Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself." -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/
There's a subreddit for the NYC sanitation dept because it's so competitive to get into.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DSNY/comments/1rwayil/what_was_the_...
People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics.
All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Many people want these jobs.
If you're a tech worker that likes a clean office and new technology this is boring.
But I'm sure there's a sanitation worker going on a similar rant about how terrible the tech industry is.
Trash collection is not even all that dirty in a developed first world country.
Japan is very different than most cultures in cleaning after yourself. It's very ingrained in their psyche, e.g. school students are trained to clean their classrooms in organized way.
So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there (and it's super-clean as people trash way less).
More of a “it’s an honourable job, and I respect people who do it, but personally I wouldn’t do it” kinda thing.
Status is ingrained in the culture. What you do, which neighbourhood you live in Tokyo, what school you went to and etc. matters a lot to a random person.
Good to know, thank. But the status thing is very much the same, if not even more important on in US. The whole red-vs-blue counties thing, is very much urban rich-vs-poor countryside.
Maybe not so much in Europe, although I'm not sure. Japan has a different sense of shame, that's for sure. But status (neighborhood/job) sounds the same.
Unlike many other developed countries, foreign employees working in cleaning and maintenance are still a minority. This is gradually changing, but I believe the main issue is that young people are completely uninterested in this kind of work. Most people working in these industries in Japan are old rather than foreign. The average is probably over 50+, and there are quite a few people working past retirement.
I clean shit for free often.
I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.
You’re allowed to type shit. We’re all adults here.
I went to a chain Family Restaurant recently here in Japan. The food is brought by a robot for a while now. Recently you get your seat selected at a touchscreen. You can pay at your table's tablet using PayPay. There is still some waiter staff, but it being reduced to the past. The only part that did not change much yet is the kitchen.
I said to myself to stop going, if there is no human staff left. On the other hand, small shops with good atmosphere are thriving.
Given waiters are not tipped here, I actually quite enjoy the quietness/quickness/streamlined atmosphere of a Jonathan's or Gust that has all that automation. I would not want the kitchen staff to be replaced by robots though, food prep should probably always been overseen by humans. But in general, I like not having to interact with people sometimes.
You are probably talking about Cafe Restaurant Gusto (ガスト). A robot bringing me the food improves my experience as I don't have to wait as long, and I can leave whenever I want, just get up and pay, it's more efficient and provides a better experience.
The job no one wants?
Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35.
Who’s paying for your nursing home? Tax the robot’s income? Will your demographic replacements vote for that?
–––
Someone called this a "belief."
There's a 10% to 4% probability that the average teenage girl will die from childbirth, given the cumulative risk of pregnancies in nations without modern medicine.
That's the default state of the human condition. Maternal mortality is frequent and 1 in 25 to 1 in 10 for women without modern medical interventions.
see: The probability that a 15 year old girl eventually dies from a pregnancy-related cause, assuming constant levels of maternal mortality and number of births per woman. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/lifetime-risk-of-maternal...
There's a reason why the more women become aware of the risks and downsides of pregnancy – the less likely they are to go through with it. Even when indoctrinated from the start. The only sane solution in an otherwise insane world is technological, external gestation / exowombs.
Indeed. Gotta keep that body in a tip-top shape so that we can pull off all-nighters at some dude's AI startup while eating pizza and pretzels.
This happens, but it's not representative. Interesting belief, it seems like it should be self-extinguishing, the cultures that don't believe this kind of thing will tend to take over over time.
Most women have watched someone go through a difficult pregnancy in their lives before they hit 20. It's not a "belief" for the people who live through it.
People used to die – frequently – from this "belief." And women still do.
the women most afraid of child rearing live in countries with the best maternal healthcare.
something irrational is happening wether you want to admit it or not.
The belief I was talking about was that that was at all representative of the median case, and the implication that it’s not worth the risk to have kids (this was before you added the big chunk about mortality being 4-10% in places without a good medical system). I have first hand experience of some of the potential difficulties, so I know it happens, but I also know that it’s not every pregnancy, most are fine, and that if you do have difficulty, a high quality healthcare system can usually get you through it.
And this belief is interesting, because it seems like one of the most evolutionarily unfit ideas possible, at least on the individual level. But maybe it’s good for the survival of the group if it decreases resource contention.
Most of the world is below replacement rate (~2.1 TFR), the rest will get there in a decade or two. Educated, empowered women delay having children, have less children, or no children. Holds across both developed and developing countries.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/15/5-facts-a...
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert...
The world, yes, but specific niches no. Look at the Mormons, or Nigeria, or Somalis in America at 3x the US birthrate.
Latter-day Saints are having fewer children. Church officials are taking note - https://www.npr.org/2025/10/31/nx-s1-5535654/latter-day-sain... - October 31st, 2025
> Dallin H. Oaks, the newly appointed prophet and president of the church, said that while birth rates within the church are higher than national numbers, they've still declined "significantly."
> Catholic University of America demographer Stephen Cranney crunched the numbers on the religion's families. In 2008, about 70% of Latter-day Saint women ages 18-45 had at least one child at home. In 2022, that number was 59%, a rate of decline mirrored in the American population at large.
Any uptick in birth rate in the US from first generation immigrants quickly reverts to the mean for subsequent generations.
The Fertility of Immigrants and Natives in the United States, 2023 - https://cis.org/Report/Fertility-Immigrants-and-Natives-Unit... - May 1st, 2025
Reproductive freedom (or rather, freedom from reproduction, and its costs and burdens) is culturally contagious.
"Latter-day Saints still have more children"
That study has 7 to 12% error ranges for the LDS group. Even with that, the share of LDS women with a child at home is 50% more than non-LDS. Lastly, there's a huge difference in rate of decay when a group is at, above, or below replacement rate. If everyone's declining, but they're declining far slower, that still proves my point that the composition of these communities in 80 years could be far different if current rates hold.
Utah has one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, and average children per women is 1.8 in the state. It’s always hard to predict the future, but I argue the evidence is clear LDS fertility rates will rapidly coalesce with others within the next few years, maybe faster if young followers leave the church faster.
Utah slides to No. 10 for fertility in U.S. - https://www.deseret.com/family/2025/04/07/utah-drop-fertilit... - April 7th, 2025
US Gen Zers and millennials are leaving the LDS church, data confirms - https://religionnews.com/2025/12/10/us-gen-zers-and-millenni... - December 10th, 2025
> In 2007, according to Pew, the LDS church retained 70% of childhood members in the U.S. (n = 581) In 2014, that was 64% (n = 661), and in 2023–24 it had declined still further to 54% (n = 525).
> That 54% current retention rate looks better than the GSS’ 38%, so that’s potentially good news for LDS leaders. But once again, we’re witnessing a clear drop from the fairly recent past. Both major U.S. surveys that track childhood affiliation are saying that more people are leaving than used to.
> What’s more, this is being driven by younger adults. In the general population, younger adults are noticeably more likely to have no religious affiliation than older adults — either because they’ve left religion or they grew up without one. It shouldn’t surprise us that it’s true in Mormonism as well.
So, the cohort leaving the church the fastest are the ones with fertility. What does this do to LDS fertility rate trends? It likely bends them downward.
Right, it looks pretty catastrophic for some areas (eg South Korea) if it doesn’t stabilize.
But I’m also skeptical of anything that extrapolates anything related to human behavior out 75 years.
Once you hit ~1.5 TFR, low fertility trap kicks in.
> Demographers in the early 2000s coined the “low-fertility trap,” hypothesizing that a series of self-reinforcing economic and social mechanisms make it increasingly difficult to raise the fertility rate once it dips below a certain threshold. The academics posited that lower fertility results in increased individual aspirations for personal consumption but at the same time it also results in an aging population and less job creation—and thus greater pessimism about the economic future—which in turn disincentivizes having more children. Moreover, as the average family size grows smaller and smaller generation after generation, the social norm of an ideal family size shrinks, too. These forces together lead to a persistent “downward spiral” for the fertility rate that can be impossible to reverse.
> China’s not the only country in the region or the world facing this kind of demographic crisis. Fertility rates across developed nations globally have almost uniformly dropped over the last few decades. China’s neighbors Japan and South Korea have among the lowest, and policymakers there have invested billions of dollars and pondered uniquely targeted policies, respectively, to try—so far unsuccessfully—to get young people to have more children.
https://time.com/6306151/china-low-fertility-trap-birth-rate...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2005...
Several European countries have already fallen in this trap. As pensioners comprise an increasingly large fraction of voters, pandering to them becomes far more politically attractive than investing in the future.
I wonder how humanity managed to survive until today having to deal with childbirth.
Such a 2026 tech worker type of comment.
You raise 3rd world risks and act like they apply to Japan. In Japan your very own data shows < 0.01%.
One uncomfortable truth is that being younger is better when it comes to starting a family.
Nothing will destroy you physically, mentally, and emotionally than grinding 12hrs a day just so you can make someone else’s wealthier.
off topic. all risks you mention are in developing countries without good medicine. that's not Japan.
Lol my wife is in better shape now after kids than when she was pregnant, and she was in amazing shape before.
For some people having kids crystallizes the importance of health, etc.
> Who’s paying for your nursing home
Japanese financial institutions massive capital positions across Asia, the US, and Europe which tend to be public-private ventures.
> Tax the robot’s income
Pretty much, in the sense that corporations and the Japanese government have spent decades working together to build a sovereign wealth model comparable to Singapore and the UAE's.
This is something that really needs to be done in the states imo.
IIRC we don't have a sovereign wealth fund, but we should in order to provide a social safety net for our citizens, especially with all the uncertainties regarding the future right now.
No no no. We’re a Christian nation. Fuck them kids (literally, on an island). Get rich, fuck young models. Just like the President.
> filling the one [job] nobody wants.
Time to share the meme again, sorry to my followers for reusing this joke:
‘I wanted a machine to do the dishes for me so I could concentrate on my art, and what I got was a machine to do the art so now I’m the one doing the dishes’
I’d be much happier with this AI revolution if I got a personal robot chef and house-keeper, while I could keep writing beautiful software. Now I’m looking to pivot into more blue-collar jobs to escape the existential dread, and making software a personal hobby rather than a career.
I think that many signs are indicating that Japan will re-emerge as a major technology powerhouse in the coming decades. And being confronted early to demographic transformation will end-up being an advantage. On the opposite side I think that immigration is a temporary band-aid that doesn’t solve any of the structural issues.
Can you share some other signs you think may indicate it rising as a powerhouse? Living in Japan, I am interested what others see.
Regarding immigration, Japan is actually making it a lot stricter now. Not sure how that will play out.
I'm also curious why they imagine a future-Japan-tech-powerhouse. I think Japan has a lot of potential for growing and improving as a place to live (especially if they embrace growth, instead thinking tiny-steps will convince women in Japan to magically start having babies[0])
Additionally, all signs do, in fact, point to fewer new immigrants to Japan in the coming decade.
[0](https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260401/p2g/00m/0na/04...)
Miti is basically a second government with real power, finance and expertise, and they appear to bet on the correct things, it should have happened earlier but from what I have seen they are moving faster than EU on the semiconductor and robotics fronts.
You mean "METI"? METI is your key driver?
You're really overselling their capabilities.
See the "lost decades" or most recently, the hundreds of billions deployed for the failed hydrogen initiatives.
Strict immigration controls are a good thing. The people immigrating to your country should bring value, not problems. They should be positioned to contribute to your society, rather than take from it.
Specifically in this conversation, if Japan can use physical AI and robotics to create X goods and services, wouldn't it be better (for the Japanese) to divide X by the Y population of Japan, rather than Y + Z population of Somalia?
Sure, take that stricter immigration control. But if people assume upfront that immigrants are intrinsically the source of problems and it takes stricter and stricter controls to filter them down to only those that bring value, this strengthening of filtering will never end.
Remember that one does not _either_ bring value or cause problems. I expect a typical human being to bring some value and cause some problems at the same time. And you can never measure which one is bigger.
I never said that all immigrants are intrinsically a source of problems, and saying that any filtering inevitably leads to never-endingly stronger filters is a slippery slope fallacy.
You absolutely can measure the likely degree of problems an immigrant would bring. To an absurd, extreme, example: you have 1 spot open for immigration. Do you offer it to a semiconductor EE with a clean criminal record in his early 30s, or a 68 year old alcoholic high school dropout with multiple violent criminal convictions?
It's relatively easy to design a system that prioritizes skilled, contributory immigration: academic background, professional career, salary, age, ability to speak the host country's language, skills of relevance, health/fitness, etc.
Sure, the EE from my example can snap and commit a crime, or lose his job and get addicted to drugs; but at a population level, it's inarguable that some groups will cost a country and others will benefit a country.
It's not as if Japan (or any other country, for that matter) doesn't already have immigration restrictions. Japan uses a points-based merit system for permanent residence [1], not unlike the criteria you suggested. Just to give an example, having a PhD and speaking Japanese at an N1 level (~equivalent to B2 CEFR) is barely sufficient to qualify (unless you're older than 30, in which case it won't be).
The more interesting question to ask is: Why has Japan decided to tighten immigration requirements now? But in my opinion the answer is rather obvious, especially when you consider the current Prime Minister's nationalistic beliefs: It's much easier to blame foreigners for insufficient welfare, ailing infrastructure, etc than to actually improve welfare, infrastructure, etc.
Also, the example of "a 68 year old alcoholic high school dropout with multiple violent criminal convictions" is rather ridiculous. You're arguing a strawman. It's already impossible for such a candidate to immigrate almost anywhere barring some other exceptional circumstances.
---
[1] See here, eg, to see how you would fare: https://japanprcalculator.com/
This is misleading at best, straight up false at worst.
The points-based system is used to allow you to apply for a PR _on an accelerated timeline_; not apply at all.
Having 70/80 points lets you apply for a PR after being a resident for 1/3 years respectively; you can apply without any points after living here for 10 years.
My example is ridiculous, but it was the easiest way to point out the fallacy that "you can never measure which [immigrants bring value or cause problems]. You clearly can.
And no, that 68 year old alcoholic is free to pass into America under Democrat administrations and tens of thousands have. They technically are illegal, but if you selectively enforce immigration laws and offer things like asylum/refugee status without any checks or balances, the net effect is still the same.
Returning to Japan, as the other commenter pointed out, your PhD example is someone that qualifies for expedited permanent residency, a particular subset of migration that Japan has (correctly) decided to encourage.
The "skilled" immigrant is largely a myth. Many countries now have more graduates than ever before with rising graduate unemployment while these "skilled" immigrants just usually end up being another mediocre tech worker. The GDP per capita hasn't been growing since the crash in 2008 for many European countries despite the influx of "skilled" immigrants.
It is mostly propaganda. Said immigrants will likely still never truly socially fit in even with great effort.
The problem is that if you make the place feel very unwelcoming to newcomers because you don't want the people who bring problems, the people who bring value don't come either unless you're offering extremely high pay, which Japan does not.
Unwelcoming to immigrants with problems doesn't necessitate unwelcoming to all immigrants.
Japan's culture doesn't take well to immigration, but Canada bars many immigrants or even visitors on the basis of DUIs - I don't have a DUI, and I'd have to jump through many hoops to migrate to Canada regardless, but nobody can earnestly say Canada isn't receiving many, many (too many?) migrants.
Other than that loony High-School "Nostradamus", what signs do you see ?
They have some core technologies in some niches, but they lag behind both the US & China in Tech. This is esp. true in Robotics, and their academics/industrialists have massive egos & racial pride from a bygone era to ever be able to bridge this gap with immigration. They even removed the Phd scholarships for people moving to Japanese Universities (which have been falling in competitiveness for decades)!
I agree immigration is a band-aid, but that doesn't mean it can't be successfully used while planning and managing structural changes long term.
Of course that does make the issue more nuanced and harder to advocate for when we have all seen politicians don't usually push for long term solutions if their band-aid solution will outlast their term of office.
If Universal Basic Income was a thing, this would probably happen much faster globally
The problem with UBI is not that people would stop working, it's that the value of whatever amount is given as UBI will drop very quickly due to inflation.
UBI is basically the same as saying "everyone should earn above average".
This is why the Australian 1907 Harvester Decision didn't merely settle on an amount (42 shillings a week) but also included a needs based indexing (support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them).
Japan doesn't have UBI, but it's welfare system is extremely expansive as Article 25 of the Constitution guarantees a minimum standard of living through livelihood, housing, education, and medical assistance.
Additonally, Japan has spent decades thinking about this eventuality (at least since the 1970s), which is why Japan worked on the "Flying Geese" paradigm where Japanese public-private ventures would end up become major capital stake holders across Asia, the US, and Europe.
> "Flying Geese" paradigm
Can you name any one of these that are successful or prominent? I am not aware of this paradigm.
How so? Why would I work harder, If it's all going to pay for someone to sit and do nothing?
After entire generations are subsidized by ubi, the system will collapse on itself.
In the US, native tribes get ubi when they turn 18. The end result isn't happiness or prosperity.
This short-term thinking makes me pessimistic about UBI. Everyone's addicted to work despite automation and AI creating less need for work. And thinking we live in a zero-sum game where if someone else is benefiting, it must be hurting them somehow so they must block it. If someone's getting a "handout", they're a lazy bum.
UBI is a solution to there not being jobs at all if they're all automated. Now whether we actually get to such a level is debatable.
Why would you have to work harder when employers of jobs no one wants to do (for a given wage) have to either increase wages or embrace automation research and development (thereby likely speeding up its systemic adoption and reducing the necessity for manual work even more)?
Where developing countries have vendors on the streets, industrialized nations have vending machines instead, by pure economic and demographic necessity. The existence of an automation tool doesn't imply a human having to work harder somewhere else.
And why do you assume people would sit around doing nothing? I don't think that's a natural thing for most people to do.
How financial and social systems are set up seems to be very much a societal choice, unless it goes against some physical, basic economic or global trade limitation.
Interesting note on the native tribes though!
> In the US, native tribes get ubi when they turn 18.
This is a myth; fact check please.
Meanwhile in the US they're replacing artists, writers, and teachers
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.
From: https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238
As a species, we need to evaluate our attitudes to work. The quote above resonates at some level, but maybe there are some people who enjoy doing dishes and laundry, who knows.
Most people are just surviving. It is a constant battle between slaving away in jobs (and have healthcare tied to our jobs) we don't like and rest of our lives, including relationships, hobbies, even health. Most people do not have the time or energy to think about anything else other than just getting through the day.
The funny thing is that dishes and laundry are already automated and people are still complaining about them.
Do we need a humaniform robot to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer? Maybe we just need smarter appliances.
> laundry [is] already automated
Partially. Ironing/steaming is only partially automated. Folding/hanging is not.
Not for that task, you don't. Just get a washer/dryer. They're very common where I live: the machine both washes and dries your clothes, and uses a heat pump system on the dryer side for high efficiency.
What's missing is a robot that will take the clothes out of your washer/dryer, fold them up, and put them away for you.
Yeah, that's Rosie from the Jetsons. Still a few years away unfortunately.
It's also killing websites. It's an extinction event for the open internet.
I agree with the teachers one. Having one lady in charge of educational instruction for that many kids will be looked back upon as barbarism.
The solution is more teachers, smaller class sizes and not underpaying and abusing teachers to function as nanny’s also charged with raising your children.
This isn’t exactly a mystery problem, we’ve understood clearly how to educate humans well for quite a while. It’s just that doing it properly is “eXpEnSiVe” as if the alternative, isn’t quietly orders of magnitude worse, and more costly.
Even if you doubled the number of teachers (which you won't), we're still not getting to anything that resembles individual instruction.
We're still basically warehousing those kids, and we can do better.
class sizes of 15 is better than 30 and 7 is better than 15.
So the solution is to have less ladies in charge? Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?
> Who's going to wipe snot off the kids' noses, pull legos out of their mouths, and tell them not to hit each other?
The robots? That's what we're discussing in this thread.
Jobs everyone thinks are easy and nobody likes the people who do it.
Why would people not like artists?
Some think of art as the ridiculous "fine art" market for snobs and money launderers.
Some think of the kind of people who use Macintoshes for a living, and are therefore pretentious latte-sipping slackers who couldn't get a real job.
And various other negative stereotypes.
Rampant anti-intellectualism and machismo
Japan is in a demographic decline. They need all the robots they can get.
currently most industrialised countries are in a demographic decline, sometimes patched by immigration that will burden their economies long term much more than they will help them
China is a deeper decline than Japan too, which will make their geopolitics volatile
All developed countries are in demographic decline (ex immigration), and need automation/robotics. There's only so many immigrants you can import before you lose your country's identity.
> There's only so many immigrants you can import before you lose your country's identity.
Is this true? The US has been doing this for over 100 years and it's been fine, I think. I mean, our countries identity has basically become "we're all immigrants" but that's not a new phenomena.
> our countries identity has basically become "we're all immigrants" but that's not a new phenomena
This is a very "New World" perspective which won't cut it for the "Old World" until their countries hit their own crisis points.
The US implemented severe immigration restrictions in the 1920s that were lifted gradually over the 1950s–1960s.
just like nobody in the US is qualified to work in tech so companies have to outsource jobs?
the jobs nobody wants is the beta test, production rollout includes jobs that poor people and teenagers want, next major version upgrade jobs that adults with limited educational opportunities want, and so on and so forth.
It’s amazing to use technology to save humans from toil. The question is, who owns the robot? Who benefits from the labor it produces?
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
Either that or the people in poverty will get angry at the disparity and burn everything to the ground.
Yikes, that's not the utopia I imagine at all. A world where nobody has to work sounds horrific.
> A world where nobody has to work sounds horrific.
Why?
Because then the only way to obtain power and status is to wage war.
I believe that is the plan.
Viva La revolution
>All our needs are taken care of
>while the rest of us die in poverty.
These can't be simultaneously true. If all of our needs are taken care of, that is the same thing as unlimited luxury. Someone hoarding wealth is not that important when everyone has everything they want. Society is already being helped by all of the needs they are fulfilling. We don't need to also take their wealth too.
> These can't be simultaneously true.
Nobody said that they can.
>The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure.
All our needs are taken care of in an imagined techno utopia.
> But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
That utopia can not come if there is private ownership of those automated systems.
The idea that automation, AI, offshoring, and low-paid migrant workers are filling jobs no one wants is pure evil bullshit. The main goal of business is to generate the most income with the least expense, labor being the most cost for the most part. We're downstream from indentured servitude and literal slavery, and probably one bad event away from going back.
> The main goal of business is to generate the most income with the least expense
That's the goal of small business. It is the only way to stay afloat and try to grow while allowing the stakeholders enough to survive. Large business starts to generate so much income that it could never possibly spend it all anyway, so minimizing expenses doesn't really matter. What does matter, to the people running the show, is ensuring that they gain social status.
And for that you need visibility and connections. The way you get connections and visibility is to build impressive offices and fill them with notable people. The work might be technically pointless, but it generates a network of friends in high places and that is what provides social status. A trillion dollar business that is one guy in his parents' basement might sound appealing to the average software developer, but not to those who actually run these large companies.
Robot war will be cinematic, will probably safe lives
That assumes those in power agree that only robots may be harmed.
The robot vote is a critical and quickly growing minority group since Wall-E v Sanders determined that all sentient robots were to be treated as citizens. Immediately after, Citizens United was rendered useless and large corporations moved their investments from campaign finance to literal voting machines.
Cobotics (robots doing trivial stuff that helps human and assist them rather than “replacing” them) has been a thing for decades, that’s not the issue here, the issue is corporate greed that are using robots or AI as a scapegoat to blame your low wages and/or fire you. If the job market is more regulated, you will those excuses vanishing quickly.
The article seems to say that it's not jobs nobody wants, but rather a labor shortage from an aging population. Japan just seems to be running out of people for its labor market.
> but rather a labor shortage from an aging population.
combined with ridiculous cost of living, terrible work/life balance and incredibly xenophobic immigration policies.
Ridiculous cost of living in Japan? What do you mean by that?
Japan has a very low cost of living. Work/life balance, however, is not good. And neither is the increasingly hostile immigration policies.
Rather than encouraging immigration they come up with this.
"Physical AI"?
I must've missed the last terminology update patch…
(I can see what it's trying to say, but… my brain just refuses this one. AI is a concept, which… just, no.)
They're coming for the jobs immigrants would be taking if the Japanese government weren't so xenophobic.
This is explicitly part of the discourse, but I think it means robotics companies continuing to receive government grants while not actually delivering any labor saving technology, and immigration policy being held back. The industries needing labor will not get a suitable solution, the economy will continue to suffer, but the psychology of those around the world who believe in racial order, and correct positions of alleles on geography, will remain soothed.
> Japanese government weren't so xenophobic
Japanese people are, this is normal.
They look at what happens to people that aren't xenophobic and they don't want that.
Not all cultures are trigger happy with irreversible population replacement dynamics, and simply don't consider mass immigration as a viable option. This is completely normal too.
Unfortunately peoples lives are very short to see things play out in the long term, and in the long term cultures that are okay with population replacement dynamics are very likely anomalies.
> They look at what happens to people that aren't xenophobic and they don't want that.
They did sakoku before the technological means that would even allow them to see this was a thing. It's baked deep in the culture.
What is the point of letting in immigrants if they won't have jobs.
Why does Japan need immigrants? Japan is one of the safest countries in the world because of its immigration policies.
> japan is going to shit because of all the immigrants
> japan is better than pussy thanks to it being strict on immigrants
pick whichever convenient
This should be the top comment :)