Japanese Cities Are Rapidly Shrinking: What Should They Do? - https://scitechdaily.com/japanese-cities-are-rapidly-shrinki... - October 21st, 2024

Multidimensional factors correlated with population changes according to city size in Japan - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23998083241274381 | https://doi.org/10.1177/23998083241274381

absolutely, search for the term "haikyo"

People aren't "choosing annihilation". There is no weekly meeting. One Japanese person having 10 kids does not change the headline. Birth rates are a textbook-perfect example of a tragedy of the commons coordination problem scenario. Furthermore, if we believe that social or institutional trust is an input to birth rates, the implication is that Sweden is a low trust civilization and South Sudan is high trust. It just doesn't pass the smell test.

People have fewer kids when the medium-term alternatives are better. This is why desperately poor people have tons of kids and why fabulously rich societies like Japan have fewer. An extremely poor person does not lose opportunity by having children. A rich person does. We fix it by inverting the cost and benefit. If being single and childless has fewer medium term rewards than being a parent, people will become parents.

And the "medium term" is I think an illuminating point to emphasize. Humans, I have noticed, tend to operate on 2-3 year time horizons. If humans operated on a 5 minute time horizon we'd have more kids because unprotected sex is fun. If we operated on a 50 year time horizons we'd have more kids because being 75 years old with no surviving family is for many a terribly lonely thought. I think it's also why so much of the birth rate conversation focuses on childcare, diaper changes, and sleep loss, in spite of the fact that the years involving those challenges are an extremely small portion of the life-long parenting experience.

There are plenty of $10k houses in Japan and all of them are overpriced.

Declining birth rates result in a retreat to city centers as rural and eventually suburban areas become unsustainable. Life in Tokyo (and Madrid, and Rome, and London, and Seoul...) is currently more expensive than it's ever been, while the countrysides are full of very inexpensive housing that can barely be given away for free.

Actually real estate in Japan has always been cheap, because they just build new houses, torn them down few decades later and build them new again. Nobody sits on a house like on an investment which is main reason why housing all over the Western world is expensive.

An observation is because women's unpaid labor is valued at zero people then assume the cost of raising children to adulthood is also zero.

Classic neoliberalism is to add 'without spending money' to questions like how can we reverse falling birthrates.