combined with ridiculous cost of living, terrible work/life balance and incredibly xenophobic immigration policies.
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.
This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
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 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.
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.
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.
2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
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.
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 that seems to have taken over Western mindshare.
They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirgiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net.
I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.
"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/
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'll pretend it's not sarcasm despite assuming it is.
Immigration changes the cultural profile of a region and increases cost of living, particular cost of housing.
TiaMane•1h ago
paulryanrogers•55m ago
iknowSFR•52m ago