America desperately needs this. I fear the rise of social media has caused more and more people to stay inside all day without interacting with any real humans. I've found Meetup to work very well for getting out of the house.

I did find it interesting how closely moving out and getting married was linked here. I've seen members of my family have children, without moving out and I definitely moved out while single.

I love it.

Perhaps social media has done that to some people. But I still see my neighbors out in their garden, and even outside with musical instruments. My musical friends come over and play outside with me. I garden alone because socializing over everything is insane to me.

I disagree there’s a real problem.

Re: people living at home still.

That trend was there before social media and COVID. Along with women having kids later, and adults finding career success later.

The economic math always points to the gerontocracy locking up capital, and of course their generational peers in government refuse to use their legislative powers to do anything but hand sacks of capital to their buddies, who then point us toward shovels.

This isn’t magic. We know where the problem is. Believing we need to import another fad for people to consume is ridiculous.

People still think that people making 6 figures are the elite and cheer every time a progressive income tax targeting someone marginally richer than them is introduced by their government. They are not the enemy, they're not the people lobbying the government so their business can make extra millions or avoid paying taxes with loopholes.

The political discourse always ends up on some hot issue backed by group identity (whether it's minorities, poor people or some other kind of victim). I don't think the government will ever be able to tackle this conflict of interest and actually impact the ultra rich which maintain politicians.

I just hope we won't get to a violent revolution and physically killing of the rich middle class (kulaks 2.0)

Every single person in this country that makes more than $100,000 has outsize political clout and the capacity to change things for the better, and simply don't. Your retirement is more important, or your children's education, or your career. Fiddling while Rome burns.

"But the cost of living." What about it? Take a stand. You make $100k, $200k a year. Collapse the property value pyramid scheme with direct action. Throttle your mortgage payments. Throw out eviction notices. Hire gangbangers to protect your house when the police come to throw you out. Organize with your neighbors to build a series of self-governed mini-ethnostates based on the first two digits of your house addresses, where your trashed credit score and criminal record are meaningless.

Clearly I'm halfway joking. I'm not clever enough to come up with a real solution. But to act like making twice, thrice, quadruple the average household income as an individual still leaves you handcuffed is farcical. You all pay too much for necessities and you buy goods and services you don't need, and you use it to justify inaction while 2/3 of the rest of country languishes in sickness and poverty. Figure out what you're willing to sacrifice to make this better for everyone, gather it up into a big ball and catapult launch it at the walls of the establishment. If a few days off work and some posterboard can set cities ablaze, the power of someone with 5-6 figures to burn and the willingness to really do something substantial would be awesome indeed to behold.

And (completely serious this time) don't tell me that people with six-figure incomes don't donate to political campaigns because you do.

... in the US. The world extends slightly beyond the US of A, where your statement doesn’t necessarily apply.

Especially since a lot of that inheritance is going to be stakes in critical businesses that the heirs are in no way, shape, or form qualified to run.

Except a lot of the meetups where I live either haven't come back or they are "virtual". :(

Once you realize social media is mostly fake validation seeking behavior you can decide if that's what you want . Ends up being tons of stress and mental anguish for nothing at all. I'll say without a doubt people are absolutely meaner via social media vs real life. I recall when I lived in Chicago how everyone in certain areas knew each other. Act like a jerk and word travels fast. Thus this keeps people friendly. On Reddit, which I had to step back from , it take 10 seconds to create a username. Then you can throw out all types of vitriol at people you'll never meet. Why be apart of that ? I do find Reddit to be very helpful if you have a specific technical question, but the moment you venture out of tech people get really nasty really fast. I'm still debating if it's worth returning to.

It's at the point where I might hire someone to run the social media accounts for a product I may be releasing. I have absolutely no interest in using social media myself.

I have a sort of live now list for once Corona ends

HN is somewhat unique in not fostering or tolerating that sort of thing. Sure, sometimes a comments gets downvoted, because it expresses an unpopular view, but not so much if it is well thought-out & presented. And it's extremely rare to come across comments that are mean or otherwise unproductive without it quickly going dead. It's no Utopia of internet peace & tranquility, but you can have a real conversation.

We have a similar problem in The Netherlands. For starters it is hard to buy a house (mortgage), free sector rent is expensive, and social housing is in huge shortage. Result: Young adults remain living with their parents. Daughter of my neighbor is well within her 30s, still living with mom.

Generic going out meetups tend to be very strange, and socially awkward.

Before Corona hit I would go to tech meetups and board gaming meetups. I'd specifically warn against going to a Meetup thinking that you're going to get anything out of it aside from just enjoying the Meetup itself.

With that in mind, I happen to meet a nice girl last year after asking if she was there for the meetup. She wasn't , but she took my number down and we enjoyed each other's company.

But if you're looking at meetups in your area, and you're imagining which one's going to be the best, to meet someone you're not going to have a good time . You'll be so focused on that, you won't enjoy yourself.

You're in the US so there's probably not English meetups, but there's probably an Esperanto interest group or you could try to find a group for another language you're learning.

I haven't personal been to SF but I figure you there's SIGs for a tech stack you like.

Read _Industrial Society and Its Future_. It has the path paved out already. Japan is, as seems to be customary, ahead of the curve in some respects.

The problem is that there's usually a 1000x discrepancy between how a comment appears to the person making it vs. the person receiving it. Comments in the rear-view mirror are much larger than they appear!

https://hackernews.hn/newsguidelines.html

That's already a technical solution to this problem.

I've seen startups which appear to be meetup alternatives as well.

Jobless -- So what? If a country has figured out how to provide for its people w/o jobs, so what? For example if we had perfect AI-robot slaves we'd all be jobless. Would it be a problem? Maybe we should ask people why they want a job, maybe what they want to do doesnt require one?

"Living with their parents" - Again, so what? Much of the world and across much of history this was just how it was. No one denigrates someone 0-20 for living with their parents, why should a 30 yr old be denigrated for the same. Plus, for many of us so lucky the same scenario, with opposite take, will occur-- our parents will move in with us later in their life and we'll "live with our parents" again. Plus when you add that median sq foot of homes (at least in USA) is rising, you can comfortably live with more people in "home". With double master bedrooms more common and more square feet we're blurring the lines of what a single home means. Some houses are so big that you could just put a dividing wall and a separate entrance and you'd have 2 homes...

But if you read a little about the price that japan (and this demographic in particular) has been paying and what they think about it, I'm pretty sure you won't find anyone asking "so what".

Your point on how USA (and other countries) should be making better use of their living arrangements is valid. I don't think it compares to the situation Japan or most deeply densed urbanized countries in Asia.

Multi-generational family cohabitation is nothing new and still the norm in many parts of the world. There's many advantages of it, though also carries risks (example is Italy's seniors exposure to COVID19).

The "jobless" part is more cross-cultural in its negative stigma, on the expectation that adults are contributing members of their respective societies. But as this article goes into detail, the quality of the job matters as much as having one. "Gainfully employed" > "employed", especially for the person in question.

I think another aspect of this is the age of the individual. When one is in their early 20s, then being "jobless" and "living with parents" is much more acceptable (both by the self and the society). But as one gets older, such as in the article's 40+ year old norm, then it becomes much harder. Add on top the Japanese/Asian emphasis on image and honor, then the resulting perceived sense of shame/failure can be very burdensome.

Living with your parents in a wealthy suburb is very different from living with your parents in a trailer park.

A family has more money, so they can afford better education for their kids, so their kids make more money.

A family can afford a good house, in a low-crime neighborhood, with neighbors who are corporate executives. Their kids grow up living next door to the rich and powerful.

Living at home with mom and dad at age 25 might mean living in a house with lead paint and drug use. Or it might get you free membership at the neighborhood country club.

Among others:

- Crippling depression for many of those who are jobless and living with their parents in a culture that is not exactly friendly to them.

- An increased incidence of health issues that are correlated with depression and loneliness.

- Decreased quality of life for elderly parents who need to support their children within the confines of a difficult, stressful job market and a pension system that sees increasing pressure from an aging population.

- An aging working population that has difficulties filling positions around a particular range of experience, which -- in turn -- can make it harder to sustain the social programs required to help people cope.

- Increased pressure on social spending in the long term, since people who are struggling to find jobs in their fourties are unlikely to be in a super well-paid position by the time they're sixty.

It's not like these people are basking in a Russell-esque life of idyllic idleness, like they're taking a perpetual sabbatical year. Many of them don't want to be in the position they're in.

I wonder what proportion. In some online circles, being a NEET is actually a bit of a badge of honor. In others (in fact, on both sides of the political spectrum), those working regular jobs (in particular low-paid jobs) are prejoratively referred to as wageslaves (or "wagie"). What's more, many hikikomori in Japan have developed pop-culture interests and spend their time consuming media. I can imagine someone in that state of mind finding it hard to get bored, but I can also imagine many who would get bored after a month or two. It may just come down to personal disposition.

I wonder how much of this is due to societal pressure vs actualization ?

If the world's message is "you should feel bad because X" it seems unlikely to me that people would feel good about X.

Having a job is a second order attempt to solve many of these things rather than solving the root issues. A job is a technology for solving an issue, I think it's time for a better technology.

People don't want to stay home and play video games all day. They want to be able to create, or master some sort of skills.

I totally get the sentiment and I agree.

I knew a girl once who really wanted to be a teacher. She had a hard time finding a job as a teacher though. I was discussing this situation with her and asked "What is it you want to do?" and she was like "Get a job as a teacher?" and so I probed further, "So you just want to get the job with title teacher, regardless of the duties?" And she was like "I dont care about the job and the title, I want to teach kids and see them grow" . To which i pondered with her, "so go volunteer as a tutor?" . Yes, she did want to earn an income, but her real goal and actualization was by doing the thing... She was able to do some tutoring in the meantime and it really really improved her outlook and was a great outcome for the kids too!

So often the things we want to do only have the barriers we've constructed/adopted.

I don't know what the results would be, but I can guess that a large percentage of unemployed 30- and 40-somethings living with their parents would very much rather not be. Is it 10%, 35%, 65%? I'm guessing over 50% to be sure.

You can argue that the society is set up wrong. But there it is, with this large cohort of people isolated and shut in. In an economy that still relies on a younger population to take care of its elders.

Robots might one day deal with all productive work, but we're nowhere near that yet.

I guess I should have sharpened the question a bit: "Would you prefer to have a job and family of your own?"

And, to those who have those things: "Would you prefer to be single and live with your parents?"

I suspect the answers to #1 would be mostly "yes", and the answers to #2 mostly "no".

This is the wrong question. The real question is do you daily want to do the things it takes to have those things. So often a goal is made, but the person doesn't want to be the thing that makes them get the goal.

Eg: Run a marathon, but they loath the daily training and food discipline

eg2: Speak a language, but they dont want to do the practice or be vulnerable speaking to another person.

Jame clear says you have to want to daily be the person that ends up achieving <x>

Such a society would be pathologically deranged.

I don't really care what the economy needs, I'm far more interested in what people need.

Except no country has done that yet. We are far from full automation and most of the structural unemployment is due to emerging differential between labor demand and existing labor supply, not because we are in a state to provide everyone everything they want.

Also I want you to consider that a vocation is not only about covering one's needs, but also about our need to do something that matters for other people, with other people, to feel useful (vocation = calling). There is only so much need for every unemployed person doing arts and crafts, or another youtube channel to watch gadgets shredded in blenders or mentos put into a swimming pool full of coke. We deep down desire to do things that really matter, really meaningful.

> "Living with their parents" - Again, so what?

There is "living with parents because I value kin work and kin relationships" and there is "living with parents because I need to financially and psychologically". Meaningful participation in society requires having a degree of autonomy, individuation and agency. I would push even further; freedom from serious mental health problems, societally and individually, requires those. This is not an advocacy of hyperindividualism, it is about healthy ego-separation and self-actualization, which counter-intuitively also helps with social cohesion because it prevents ressentiment.

It is a bit like saying, people are living in tents on the sidewalk. "So what?". Plenty of people live with less than a tent and some even choose to do so. We have to go one step further and ask ourselves if this is a life that these people are choosing to lead, or if it is one that has been thrust upon them through a lack of options.

Interesting advocacy both for [1] and against [2] nuclear families. Many more such studies and articles on both sides. As long as the median demographic for family formation continues to bleed usable income with each passing decade, the advocacy for either way won't matter if there simply is insufficient economic incentive to have children and raise them, and we'll see continued patterns like extended family or high-trust non-familial clans grouping together for sheer survival. We can handwave the trends away by hiding in median compensation figures, but societies with big and durable bifurcations aren't fun to live in for most people on the wrong end of that bifurcation.

[1] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-real-roots-of-the-nuclear-fam...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...

This is a fair point, but the problem in this case is that the country hasn't figured out how to provide for them.

To further aggravate things too I suppose, if the parent's health declines and requires the financial help of their children who cannot provide it then you're left with a situation where two dependents are present to the situation.

i mean, it almost certainly would be, right? feel like we very instinctively/subconsciously derive our self-worth from what we're worth to our society (which tautologically comes from the share of responsibilities we take on).

maybe the jobs wouldn't resemble anything like those of today, but i have no doubt we have an innate need to be doing things that

1) are necessary/valuable to other people

2) visibly satisfy 1)

Is employer granted employment the only way to have value in a society?

Personally I value motherhood far more than anything a woman could do in the workplace. Of course it's her choice what she wants to do with her life, but it's my opinion that there's little more important to a society than intensive investment in its children.

And I know it seems like "Can't the contribute more at the workplace? Imagine a woman with IQ >= 120 What about research etc?" Well to the extent that desirable traits are heritable is to the extent we want/need these women to be mothers. And iirc the research indicates children grow optimally w/ their biological parents, both of them, and plenty of bonding time. This is in direct contradiction to the mother making deep commitments outside the home. Sadly it becomes a binary choice between being a fantastic mother or a fantastic contributor to a cause/research/business. I dont say this to denigrate anyone, but to recognize the real human limits of everyone involved.

IMO kind of like clean air/water or stable food supply we under estimate the importance of the task because of it being commonplace.

Remove the ability (or actuality) of having kids and much of our society would collapse in ~20 yrs time. All the people involved with making goods for, teaching, training, sports etc around children would be unemployed. Housing market would have a massive shift because who needs extra bedrooms? Politicians + news anchors would just Say "Women" insted of "Women and children" etc. It would completely disrupt society.

my point wasn’t meant to be about employment, but about having something important to do/contribute, should have caveated that it wasn’t just about “jobs”

The closest I can think of is Brunei and (previously) Saudi Arabia.

Both countries have massive oil income that is generated without regard to whether the citizens are employed.

They don’t use “robot slaves”, but hire foreigners to pump the oil - and do everything else.

Neither are particularly libertarian. They use religion as a way of imposing social discipline.

Saudi Arabia has been moving away from this model.

https://thediplomat.com/2020/02/brunei-spoiled-subjects-of-t...

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?location...

In Japan, it has increased mainly because among the younger generation, far more women stay in the workforce after their 20s. But as the article describes, their career prospects are very limited and few of them ever get a chance at stable lifetime employment that used to be the norm (but is also becoming less and less available) for men.

Male https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.MA.ZS?locat...

Female https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.FE.ZS?locat...

By "stable lifetime employment" do you mean staying at a single company for one's whole working life? Do you have any statistics showing that this is decreasing? (Even if it does, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.)

Mainly I mean a full-time, non-temporary work contract. Traditionally, in Japan that kind of contract also implies "staying at a single company for one's whole working life".

> Do you have any statistics showing that this is decreasing?

Look at the second chart here: https://www.nippon.com/en/currents/d00151/

> Even if it does, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

You think so because in the US and Europe, "staying at a single company for one's whole working life" is usually sub-optimal for the employee's career and earning potential. When switching companies, you can usually negotiate a higher salary than you could get via raises at your old company.

In Japan, it's different. High salaries and career prospects are basically only available in those "staying at a single company for one's whole working life" gigs, and they are given only to fresh university graduates. If you don't manage to get one of those (because companies weren't hiring when you were a fresh graduate), you'll be forever a second-class employee with a temporary contract, lower pay and less benefits.

* 3rd largest economy.

* 11th largest population (top 10 until recently, they basically tie with Mexico).

* If you look at a table of countries by area, they are there. Even in the top half, thanks to places like Tuvalu.

I think there is a very strong on-the-face-of-it argument that they just have too many people and not enough for them to do, economically speaking. If they could drop their population and keep the economy about the same (and if they have so many dead-end jobs and so few opportunities, they could) then they would be both a wealthy country and absurdly wealthy on a personal level.

There is no such thing in general as "too many people for the economy".

"The economy" is the sum of goods and services produced and consumed. Everyone who lives consumes, and could easily consume more. The economy is generally limited by the ability to produce, and is generally limited by the number of working-age people to do the producing. Unemployment can be result of production being bottlenecked by something else:

  * raw materials - but Japan never had an abundance of those even when their economy looked like it would dominate the world in the 80s
  * education - but the people the article talks about have university degrees
  * capital - again not something Japan lacks

Companies would rather hire a new 22 year old graduate at full pay than give a 30 year old with an even better degree a chance at a 30% discount, not out of concerns over the 30 year old's skills being outdated but simply because hiring new graduates is what you do. They'll hire non-graduates only on temporary contracts when short of workers, but never in a million years consider promoting them and converting them to regular employees, no matter how good they are.

When the discussion is about economics (the topic I have studied at uni) most comments are just plain wrong and show a complete ignorance about the topic.

If one wants a counter argument to "too many people for the economy" one can start here : https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523702?seq=1

"Using data from the Current Population Survey, this paper describes the effect of the Mariel Boatlift of 1980 on the Miami labor market. The Mariel immigrants increased the Miami labor force by 7%, and the percentage increase in labor supply to less-skilled occupations and industries was even greater because most of the immigrants were relatively unskilled. Nevertheless, the Mariel influx appears to have had virtually no effect on the wages or unemployment rates of less-skilled workers, even among Cubans who had immigrated earlier. The author suggests that the ability of Miami's labor market to rapidly absorb the Mariel immigrants was largely owing to its adjustment to other large waves of immigrants in the two decades before the Mariel Boatlift."

There are many causes explaining unemployment some due to macroeconomic factors such as the monetary policy, others due to regulations of the labor market, others due to the lack of innovation, ..... They have been studied in depth. But "too many people for the economy" is not one of them.

This seems to be a problem inherent to many such forums on the internet. When the discussion is controlled by a certain subset of that population, usually via comments, submissions and voting, that subset tends to self-select and alienate alternative viewpoints. Participants are rewarded with a sense of validation for things that appeal to the group but aren't necessarily true or accurate(or humane, fair, respectful, etc).

I think this topic needs a whole lot more analysis and public debate as more and more opinions are solidified in these balkanized communities. I quit reddit over these issues and am hanging on to HN by a thread. At this point I'd rather pay to hear opinions and analysis of experts than be influenced by, and participate in, internet echo chambers.

The workaround is to try to get better at using methods to pool the wisdom of "experts", to evaluate their claims based on external attributes (eg. looking at the journal that published the paper, looking at other claims of the expert, looking at the methods used to arrive at the claims, examining the used statistical methods, etc.), see also how prediction markets force "experts" to support their confidence with their money - and of course these markets are not infallible either.

Or you can just point out that, well, if there are too many people, just (virtually) split the country down the middle: voila, fewer people in the country.

A more sophisticated argument brings up density. But it's usually the sparsely populated parts of a country that are poorer.

Imagine how little they know about the topics you haven’t studied.

The overall quality of comments here is the same as every other niche discussion forum. OK on the original topic. Pretty poor on everything else. The only advantage is that this place at least has some moderation.

I think curating a discussion board to have knowledgeable discussion about many things is a really hard task. On many professional boards, discussions about other subjects are put into an OT corner. HN doesn't split discussions into topics so I guess expectation of comments' quality carries over.

I would just make a mental note: Oh this is not about CS/privacy/programming and adjust accordingly.

I suppose it's one of the reasons one should acquaint themselves with people from a variety of backgrounds and don't run away when others are not as knowledgeable about CS/privacy/programming. Actually

For example, I emailed the staff with regard to the prevalence of COVID-19 misinformation on HN and the response was that it is policy not to remove COVID-19 misinformation (including raving conspiracy theories) but also to allow flagging by the 'community' to remove posts pointing out that something is misinformation.

Tacitly allowing the platform to be used to give a mouthpiece to spread misinformation and allowing users to bully people for injecting some degree of factual reality does not encourage good discussion.

Facilitating knowledgeable discussion across a broad range of topics starts with attracting people who are knowledgeable in many areas, and that cannot happen in an environment where the administration allows mob bullying--through the very thin veneer of the downvote/flag system--of people who actually know things.

I think you have it wrong as well. The size of the economy doesn't really matter. We don't say Norway isn't viable because its size is only a fifth of that of the UK. There is no point in doubling the size of the population to make the economy twice as big when each person is no better off. Especially when we are increasingly bumping up against ecological limits.

Ex. 50/mo + 240 gift money (for a 2 year lease) == 60/mo without gift money.

It’s basically just a one-time fee that is paid up front - something which is not at all uncommon in the world of commerce.

I also explained that the problem is not just that employers are picky because of an oversupply, they are picky in ways that are actually not really in their own interest and which contribute to the oversupply problem.

And no, it is not easy for investors to outcompete incumbents simply by being more efficient with their employment policies, especially not in a society like Japan. And my point is that employers are not hiring older people even though they could pay them less.

The malthusian argument has been used since the old ages to argue for fewer people because of resource shortages (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusianism#Modern_Malthusia...). It has not eventuated.

The more people there are, the more minds there are at looking for solutions to problems, the more able the human race will be. But of course, these people need investment to obtain benefit - they can't just be empty mouths to feed.

Drought has contributed to the Syrian civil war and Egypt threatened Ethiopia with war over their megadamming project on the Blue Nile. Places like Yemen have an order of magnitude more people than in 1950 while relying on the same water resources.

This is not an easy problem to solve, water is too heavy to transport in significant amounts to places like Sanaa (elevation 7000 ft, over a million people, mild desert climate).

There is a physical limit somewhere. Just because we didn't find it in the last hundred years doesn't mean we won't in the future. Real growth in % terms eventually stops because it hits a physical limit; that isn't a controversial idea. It is almost too obvious to state. Humanity can't maintain 1% Year-on-year growth in crop yield indefinitely. At some point; the improvements stop. The longer the improvements have been going on for the more likely it is they will stop.

But concerning the actual topic at hand, Japan's labor market problems have nothing whatsoever to do with a resource or land shortage.

I'm not sure how much of an advantage they gain from having very easy port access by virtue of being an island (probably quite a big one, I assume). But it is hard to accept they wouldn't be having a much easier time if they had easy access to something like the Saudi oil fields, the US oil fields, the Chinese coal fields, etc etc. They are a long way away from the good sources of natural resources.

And they struggle to be self sufficient in food in the first result I found [1]. That is pretty different from somewhere like the US. There is a real risk of war in East Asia, so I imagine they'd be quite uncomfortable with that.

They have completely different resource-use problems than the economies that are larger than they are. The idea that the US would have to exert itself to be self sufficient in food is rather weird, as is the idea that China would struggle to justify transporting resources to the country from Mongolia, etc. It is obvious to me what could be done with more people in the US or China. In Japan there is probably something, but it does require actual ability to find instead of just "dig more, grow more, build more, forge more" that their competitors for the best-economy crown can manage.

Japan needs transformative technological improvements to grow. The US needs warm bodies. China needed to stop the Great Leap Forward and put competent leaders in charge. The Japanese challenge is much greater.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mines_in_Japan

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture,_forestry,_and_fis...

Your counterargument is that they didn't have a problem in 1980, when they had less people and the same amount of land. I can't disagree with that, but it isn't relevant.

> Many, many other countries don't have a lot of natural resources and are not having these problems.

They have the 3rd largest economy in the world. It goes US, China and then Japan. 30% higher GDP than the next contender, Germany. If there are any non-linear economic effects at all between size and labour market, Japan is going to find them first.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan

And the chart in that article shows that they basically stopped having children in 1980 which would be consistent with a "running out of resources" hypothesis as a root cause. If they hit a wall in economic carrying capacity circa 1980 that chart would supporting evidence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan

It reminds me of western Ireland. Hiking around for hours through the country and not seeing a living soul. Expensive (holiday I assume) houses with slate roofs on a couple of hectares and empty.

Cycling shows: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/cycle/ Train: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/japanrailway/

The best series is Document 72 Hours: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/tv/72hours/

Some can be seen on demand, others, they’ll give a repeat date. These are fascinating, and be warned, they can swing from happy to gut wrenching. There’s one episode where they’re in a Home Center talking to kids about their projects and the next they’re talking to a guy about kitchen tiles. He talks about his wife always wanting a new kitchen, but he was always too busy... and now she’s dead. So he’s working on the kitchen in her memory.

It’s an introspection on a society that is fraying at the edges. The producers seem to be trying to communicate that. As Krugman says, if you want to know our future, look to Japan.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6yhndEdqrI

in the last decade japanees workforce grew despite overall population decline/getting old. mainly due to women participation increase. If there was not enough to do it wouldn't be possible.

almost all on-the-face-of-it arguments are oversimplification of largely complex issues. Sadly most(all of them?) government interventions are done by politicians on the basis of such arguments...

Japan's greatest problem is that they have a geriatric population, coupled with low fertility rates, and an extremely unhealthy work ethic/culture. But, as usual with demographic stuff, the nasty effects won't really appear visible for decades - and by then it may very well be too late.

E.g. random hit: small 3LDK house in Kashiwa built in 1981:

https://house.goo.ne.jp/buy/uh/detail/4/12217/37091100002300...

6000000 yen ~= $60K USD.

My assumption is that declining population is leading to surplus housing and declining real-estate prices in most of the country.

And even in the Tokyo area where demand is still strong, homes are still more affordable than in other large cities like New York and London.

You have causation exactly backwards.

If poor people had higher incomes they would spend them. (In the jargon: "marginal propensity to consume declines with income".) That spending would create jobs and sustain incomes for other people like them. I know in my own case, if I had more money I would hire a personal shopper to buy my clothes, a cleaner, a personal trainer,...

Wealth and income inequality lead to stagnant societies where nobody is happy and most people are miserable.

This was pretty bad with sub-minimum wage pay jobs (restaurant / bar industry, tipping culture) and people having to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, but it's gotten worse with the race-to-the-bottom gig economy, 0-hour contracts, prison labor/slavery, no changes in minimum wage or worker rights, de-unionization / union discouragement, etc.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kehnIQ41y2o

They just stand around doing nothing the whole day.

When Malthus lived, there were about 1 billion people. It's hard to estimate, but I'd guess at most 10% of those were living non-miserable lives, so about 100 million people at most.

Now the world middle class is 4 billion (40x) and the world upper class is probably around half a billion people (5x). I'm willing to bet that each and every one of those middle class individuals live better lives than the upper class of his time. We've been able to scale that 40x in 200 years. Despite wars, natural disasters, social strife, etc.

We're pretty resilient.

Where there is a debt, there might be a later bankruptcy.

Does it? A group of people who just know how to raise and care for nerfs may not be worth anything to me. But add a bunch more people who know how to turn nerf wool into a high-quality textile and I start to value the nerf herders a lot more.

It's just a fact. We're 8 billion and we'll probably be 11 billion when we reach peak population.

> I see no value in having more people on the planet.

I have to point out that you say this as a person on this planet :-)

More people means more potential consumers, surely? So the only way there could be “too many people” is if the market is dominated by goods which have a high one-off cost and trivial per-unit costs, such as software or other digital goods?

India, though...

On the 10-12 hours, the concept of "work" in Japan is a big different than in the West, in particular because there seems to have almost no notion of productivity. I often see 4 people on a task that would be allocated to one worker in Europe, or 12 person cleaning the same square meter. That combined with perfectionism (again, with no notion of productivity) that if 1% improvement can be done with 300% effort they try to do it, is a perfect cocktail to raise the total "worked" hours.

And finally there is the bureaucracy. Today I spoke with someone about implementing an idea, where the implementation of the idea is literally sending an email. I spend 10 minutes explaining it. But that could not be done directly! No, that person need to consult her boss. How long this will take? Probably at least half an hour... 2 or 3 times more if there is back and forth with me through the intermediate person. How many "worked" hours does this represent in total? I plan on a least one man/hour. In my country: doing the task directly, which represents at least a 120 times better productivity...

With that boost, people could work less and they could afford to pay them more. It's a win win situation, but it's hard to change views when it comes to work.

Folks want to believe that working more is better, but really it's about quality over quantity.

We'd see crazy economic benefits if we stopped being traditionalists about work and started following the science / data.

But that's just my econ 101 knowledge.

If you cut back hours from 60 to 30 and pay less then wages drop.

And if you don't pay less then the new employees aren't being paid for by the decrease in hours.

Just trying to understand the original idea here.

The idea that wages are driven by market forces is only half true. Someone has to pull the trigger on underpaying people who ought to be earning a piving wage.

The stats in the article are probably correct, but leaves out some very important context.

- Many Japanese adults live with their parents. Multi-generational households are quite common, especially outside of the big cites. This is not new. In fact, it is becoming less common, not more.

- Japan has an official unemployment rate of about 2%, but for almost all jobs there are more openings than applicants.

From the article: > For the class of 2021, the ratio is set to dip to 1.53 jobs per graduate, from 1.83 this year. “It’s like the employment ice age,” Kubo says. “It’s happening again.”

The situation for these people is not nearly as dire as many try to paint it.

Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/unemployment...

Lost decade https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Decade_(Japan)

Demographic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan

(I'm a third-year right now and I've had nothing to stress about and nothing to do. I just read HN and developer blogs all day. I'd definitely hesitate to say I'm an adult.)

That said college is much less stressful, success criteria are well defined (homework, tests, internships, graduate, job) and a lot of things are taken care of for you.

But it is a huge step up compared to high school.

[1] Assuming you don't live in a dorm and you are renting from some semi-shady place that is slow to respond to maintenance requests because they don't figure students will complain.

Too many people who seem to move from their parents to live with their SO and expect everything to be taken care of by said SO.

My friend wants her kids to stay in town. I've been reminding the kids there are several good college options less than 90 minutes away, which means if you really get into trouble your parents can bail you out, but you still get to figure your life out.

I mean, diffences were pretty minor and mostly in partner being with me all the time now.

What about being able to vote and drive and join the military, those are predicated on a legal value of "being an adult" which is a cutoff at age 18. Well we can guess that Saint_Genet really means something about independence and self-reliance, so exclude them. What about a trust-fund child who moves out but still gets money and support from their parents? Preumably the gate moves slightly to exclude those people because having to take responsibility is the REAL filter? And what about people who had awful parents and had to "grow up early" or take care of their parents? Shift the gate around them, too because they're respectable people who should be on the superior side of the gate. What about people who move out, have children, and rely on the grandparents for childcare and support - well they're adults because that's expected and an approved kind of parental support in US culture, no worries. People who moved out, had children, and want the state to fund childcare in some way? Adults? Not adults? Depends on how ruggedly independent and scared of socialism you are. Someone who lives with their parents but is self-employed and employs others whose income depends on the company being well-run, adult or not adult? Judge it based on where they sleep at night, because that makes sense. Someone who lives with their parents and compromises on a shared living situation vs someone who lives alone and has nobody to please or think about but themselves, and pays for a cleaner, and eats out every day? More or less adult?

Draw the gate wherever it makes you feel superior and able to look down on people you just put on the other side. Empty internet status-grab comment.

HR culture

I’ve worked in HR in the US. To say it is unbearably broken doesn’t begin to cover it.

Japan’s rigid hiring rituals are specific but I’ve encountered quite a bit of rigidity in HR culture in the US as well.

As we see nearly daily here on HN, the “filter process” HR uses is highly resistant to change and based on traditions that are objectively useless and horribly biased.

Somehow we seem to miss that economists are not the best experts to consult with here. Put another way - fix HR and suddenly economists wouldn’t need to “explain” so much when it comes to labor market dislocations.

So why haven’t we fixed these issues?

I know hundreds of people in HR trying to address these challenges. They invariably run into the fact that executives and hiring managers are the source of the misconceptions driving these systemic problems. That’s not a category of people who get overridden in companies.

I encountered this even in my own startups. Board members and company leaders believed they had near clairvoyance on how to hire - despite rarely being correct in practice.

tl;dr; The people (execs, hiring managers) who set the expectations around hiring have an unreasonable and inflexible dedication to their assumptions about how hiring should be done, leading those given the job of managing the hiring process (HR) to design woefully inefficient and biased hiring processes, leading to endemic dislocation in the job market that destroys the lives of people who didn’t pass the first check-point in their careers.

Checkout “DIY University” for more history on this issue. This is a problem that can, and has, destroyed nations.

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/mindsumo-the-x-prize-of-hiring/

It would not surprise me if a lot of decent candidates get turned down in the rush to hire star candidates, but I doubt many star candidates are actually being missed by the economy as a whole.

Still, its nearly a myth that companies hire based on merit.

Hiring through social networks is much more significant.

A simple example:

Most companies see applying for a job as the first step in connecting with a career opportunity.

Every career coach will tell you not to apply until you’ve networked into the company.

Having consulted with hundreds of startups and businesses, and a fair number of Fortune 500s, I’ve personally seen how universal the challenge is.

Here’s an experiment: name one employer that properly vets tech talent for the role and work they do once hired.

Edit: appeasing the autocorrect gods.

I agree, and think it should be a national concern. I don't know how building highways is a legitimate use of government power where matchmaking between workers and employers is not. It's the type of big government intervention that virtually no one would complain about. The amount of excess effort wasted in matching people to employment is entirely wasted. Minimizing it would be like giving everybody a raise.

I don't think so. I don't think the problem here is companies struggling to find the right people. It seems to me that companies have slashed hiring. There are too few regular job positions and too many people seeking them.

However, liquidity in the labor market is rarely well-understood.

This article specifically addresses people who are never able to enter the workforce.

In the US the data is stark - there are literally hundreds of thousands of positions that are never filled, despite millions of job seekers.

To oversimplify with one major hiring filter - most jobs require X years of experience in Y narrowly-defined industry/region/tool/skill.

Liquidity in the labor market is the only answer to this problem - to get experience you have to be able to get a position in the first place, often in a role unrelated to where you end up.

Economists see jobs as “widgets.”

Of course, we all know we spend most of our time doing none of the things listed on the job we originally applied for (or were tested for in interviews).

Supply/demand explanations mask the fact that most work today is fluid. Getting people into the workforce creates economic growth. The barrier to that growth is a broken HR system.

It doesn’t seem to be, at first, a root cause that is significant enough in size to hobble a whole economy.

Until you consider that nearly every employer has the same issue.

Meanwhile I speak English and can therefore work in dozens of countries if I so choose, though as a linguist I actually savor opportunities to study new languages).

Debt fueled by inflationary government money-printing drives wealth inequality between asset owners and salary earners. Newly printed currency boosts asset prices and inflates away salaries.

As Milton Friedman pointed out, it also increases the tax burden on citizens two-fold because inflation causes salary earners to be pushed into higher tax brackets over time as some of their salaries are eventually negotiated upwards to offset inflation.

My guess is that it has something to do with what happened in 1971 when the US dollar (and all currencies which were pegged to it) moved off of the gold standard. This was the time when asset values started inflating. This is why it only affected millennials and they could not afford their own house.

Japan took on more public debt than any other country which is why they felt this effect more strongly since they ended up having to print their national currency at a higher rate (thus resulting in worse asset-inflation) in order to pay off the interest on their debt.

1. Japan has low wealth inequality

2. Japan does NOT have high inflation

3. Japan has both low unemployment and high labor participation

[1] https://www.indexmundi.com/facts/indicators/SI.POV.GINI/rank...

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/inflation-cpi

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan

A lot of people here also base their thinking on visits to Japan, but that's sampling bias. Poverty is less obvious than in the US or even Europe, but Japan poverty rate is at ~15.5 %, much closer again to the US (~17.5 %) than to Western European countries, closer to 10 % or even below.

There are plenty of "dead" cities in Japan that are depopulating fast, but they are not on a typical tour when you visit the country. Some of them are < 1 hour of train from center Tokyo.

How does that even work? Inflation tends to decrease wealth inequality as basic salaries keep pace with inflation, and large hordes of wealth and assets slowly get whittled away. According to Piketty, the high inflation during the World Wars drastically increased income equality.

How? Any idea?

It is possible that there will be scientific development solving that, but so far, we do not have enough young fertile people to practice your obvious method, unless they were ready to have 4+ kids each.

For IVF to work, you need good ova (eggs). You can stimulate the woman to harvest eggs, but in women over 35, the share of ova that have unrecoverable genetic errors (aneuploidy) grows fast and women over 40 hardly have any good eggs.

This might be amenable to future therapies, given that old mice were currently medicated with NMN (a NAD+ precursor) and produced many more good eggs compared to the control group. But as of today, this is the hardest biological limit on IVF efficiency.

So, the simple act of having children in my part of the US is quite expensive.

"The West" taken in general predictably provides incentives when it sees effects of small or negative population growth.

Take for example stats for the year 2000 to see how the past shaped policy of today:

  - US 1.1%
  - France 0.7%
  - UK 0.4%
  - Germany 0.1%
  - Italy 0.0%

One common tactic is to have very cheap daycare, which solves a huge issue for many. Quebec is the most notable example: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/05/quebec-ch...

Western countries are incentivized by corporate interests. Corporate interests don't care for children because they get in the way of profits. You'd need someone who can rise above corporate interests to do things like health care, children, human rights, etc.

Baloney. People having more children is the dream scenario for all business--more children = more consumers = more economic growth.

This has nothing to do with some evil corporate boogeyman.

Just look at the data. There's a direct correlation between rising standards of living and having less children. This is because, if you give humans education and birth control, it turns out most of them don't actually want to have 8 kids.

As employers, having parents take care of children cuts into work and is a distraction.

"Those who successfully navigate the arduous corporate recruiting process will be rewarded with a secure place on the corporate ladder"

Those who do not see that (+ the 60-80-hour weeks) as rewarding will not be motivated to pursue it. Economic slavery is over-rated.

They may or may not be 'lost' to themselves, depending on what they're doing with all that time. Across Asia, many people found themselves meditating for decades. They weren't jacked into any perverse realities.

"The rest are largely condemned to flit from one low-paying job to the next, with little avenue for advancement and zero job security." Wow, judgemental much?

Many well-known authors, poets, artists, composers, DJs,even hackers found themselves in that position. It's a fair cop, but society's to blame.

That said, many First World economies have leaded on immigration to back fill the gap of low birth-rates.

For examples:

In the USA, that's been a noticeable growth in Spanish-speaking residents.

In Germany and France, there's been growth in the Middle Eastern (mainly Muslim) residents. Needless to say, these shifts - economically necessary - have sociopolitical implications. It's possible these disconnects amplify as robotics and AI take over more and more jobs.

Japan? What would be Japan's source of new immigrants? How easily or not can they assimilate into that culture? Or is a relative lack of diversity a positive as the socio-political fabric in the West gets more and more frayed, and not just at the edges.

Yet there seems to be a fairly constant negative economic narrative about Japan (and this narrative seems to be decades old). What's the deal? Are my observations superficial, or are economists just annoyed that Japan doesn't fit their world-view (low growth must equal disaster).

This isn't just LA. Development across the U.S. over the past 20 years has been largely stagnant, and this is reflective in our huge shortage of housing supply that has come to bite us in the rear in recent decades with homes increasingly out of reach for working people, not just in California, but increasingly in flyover places like Idaho and Ohio too.

Of course, maybe it's the U.S. that is 30 years behind the western world.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boise_metropolitan_area#Demogr...

I was extremely disappointed.

I understand that Japan has a reputation of being at the forefront of technology and, while the manufacturing sector may have had extreme advances in the 80's and 90's, those advances have fallen, with nothing really of note since. No longer is Sony the leader in electronic hardware. Toyota is no longer the leader of car manufacturing efficiency. When was the last time you've heard or read about anything innovative coming out of Japan? There's nothing "disruptive" coming out of here. They are riding on their long-past reputation of being fore-runners of tech. In my opinion, it's not so much a lack of intellectual availability here, but rather, deep-rooted cultural phenomena that has been holding this place hostage for so long.

Disclaimer: my experience is in computer graphics, so is limited to that industry. Please take my opinions with a grain of salt. But when I was jumping around different studios back home, before moving to Japan, there was always a dedicated technology team present, from small 10-person outfits, to huge 400-people studios. CG companies know that using software just out-of-the-box was not enough to produce animation profitably, so they invested in tech teams to create tools and production pipelines that would make the production process faster, reduce human error, and ultimately, make the company more money. I was blown away that this mindset was not present in most of the studios here. Most of the studios do not want to invest money into a tech team, as the benefits of technology are not exactly tangible or visible right away to the executives. There is also a deeper issue with taking pride in "doing it by hand". There are more issues, but both of the ones described above point to a pretty "old school" way of thinking.

Of course, not every person I have worked with agrees with any of the above, but the mindset is present enough to stifle innovation in my field. Where there IS innovation, it is created by non-Japanese folks. Much of this technology is quickly forgotten after being used briefly.

I live here, so I guess it can't be that bad. But I have to say that there is a particular naievety present. Even when proposed with new ideas that make sense, there is almost always push-back.

Holy cow, I could write a lot more, but I'll just leave it at this: Japan is absolutely not the technology utopia one may think it is.