January 02, 2015
The it’s hard to get good help crowd keep trying to push the bizarre line that the world is running out of people. This theme appears in a NYT piece on Japan’s efforts to end gender discrimination in the work place and to make it easier for women to hold on to jobs as they raise children. For example, it tells readers:
“The national birthrate is just 1.4 children per woman, among the lowest in the world and well below the level needed to ward off a sharp decline in population in the coming decades. And when Japanese women do have children, they quit their jobs more often than mothers in other industrialized countries, leaving a hole in an already dwindling work force.”
There is no obvious problem with a declining work force. This means that there will be more demand for the workers Japan does have. They will shift from relatively low productivity jobs (e.g. the midnight shift at a convenience story or parking cars at restaurants) into higher productivity and higher paying jobs that otherwise might go vacant. From the standpoint of the well-being of the Japanese population, this is good news since it is likely to increase pay for most workers, even if it means less overall growth. It is per capita income that is relevant for well-being, not total GDP. People in Denmark are much wealthier than people in Bangladesh, in spite of the higher GDP in the latter.
Also, it is important to note that in even modest increase in productivity growth will swamp the impact of plausible differences in the dependency ratios that would result from more children. (Also, the relevant dependency ratio includes dependent children.) It is also necessary to remember that hours worked can various enormously. Since the collapse of its bubbles in 1990 the length of the average work year has declined by almost 15 percent in Japan, the equivalent of more than seven weeks of annual vacation. This is not a pattern we would expect to see in a country suffering from a shortage of workers.
Finally, a smaller population will make it easier for Japan to reduce its greenhouse emissions, helping to contain global warming. It will also make a densely populated island less crowded.
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