April 21, 2015
Did someone in Japan call the Washington Post’s news reporting “crappy?” Usually newspapers refrain from name-calling, especially in the news section, but this is the Washington Post, there we find the paper telling us:
“With a rapidly aging society and miserable birth rate, Japan hasn’t been able to replace the people leaving outlying towns and cities as quickly as they’ve departed.”
“Miserable” in this context means “low.” Given that Japan is a densely populated country, it is not clear why anyone should see it as a bad thing that the country may be less densely populated in the future and contribute less to global warming, but obviously this prospect has the Post upset.
This story, about a school that has lost most of its pupils, could be written about thousands of towns across the United States over the last five decades and certainly many more in the decades ahead. These can be sad stories, but hardly amount to a national crisis. More generally, the demographic horror story that the Post and others like to tell about Japan cannot stand up to simple arithmetic. Even very modest rates of productivity growth will raise living standards by far more than demographic changes could possibly lower them.
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