https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/19/japan-asks-young-people-views-marriage-population-crisis
The economist Takashi Kadokura said on a Yahoo Japan news blog that local government efforts to promote marriage were not working and marriages were not increasing because of the growing number of non-regular workers who found it financially difficult to start a family.
It's super cool that capitalism has scraped things so close to the bone that workers in the core can no longer afford to reproduce.
They long for that sweet 1800 again, but there is no rural population to infinitely replace workers worked to death anymore.
I genuinely think USs game plan is to get the conditions bad enough that people are working factories and farms so they can compete with the rest of the world still
Or/also forever use illegal immigrants to replace the disillusioned citizens in this enshittification cycle
Parenti talked about this decades ago, the dream for the bourgeoisie is roll the calendar back to around 1900.
Theres some thread ive been pulling lately that in a developed society, only a generation or two is going to want to grind out of poverty and its unreasonable to think that society will want to do this forever, theres no point to living if you cant expect a good future or any fruit from your labor
The only thing a capitalist country can really do to combat this is to enshittify which i think is what the US has been doing and Japan is doing in their own way
When you have to start enshittifying your country i believe thats when you can instead move to the stages of socialism
Almost makes ya wonder if it’s an intentional Malthusian type beat of indirect population culling through economic repression. Literally force the poors into economic extinction since they’re demonstrably too dumb and/or unmotivated to abstractly contribute to human progress through capital accumulation
Nah, there's nothing intentional about the macroscopic cannibalism of capital. It's just what it does when it runs out of people to exploit elsewhere
Agreed. I wish it was a plan, because that would imply planner(s) who could be fought against. Instead, it's the logical outcome of the entire system.
Cue ten thousand articles that could be distilled down to: "We've tried changing everything except the raw material conditions. Dang, guess we'll never know."
I'm sure releasing a dating app will definitely fix the high cost of living in a patriarchal society that penalizes women for leaving the workforce to have kids.
could have told you that for $0
sadly there's nothing we can do material contidions so here's an app where people send you their dick pics and a buy 5 get 1 free voucher for diapers
I would have charged them 3 million yen to tell them that. Work smarter, not harder.
The only reason we were able to keep our happy little accident is that I make like 3x minimum wage and honestly it's barely enough. I presume it's not any easier in Japan
Encourage young people to immigrate and learn Japanese.
You know, I want to believe with massive exports of Japanese culture to Europe and USA, that this was their plan all along.
A regular drop in birth rate just before another world war episode
please address material conditions 
