Voluntary human extinction in one country

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Monday, January 3, 2011 - 9:12 AM

Back in the nineties, the Economist ran a very provocative end-of-year essay on voluntary human extinction, concluding with the notion that, "the tricky question is not whether to extinguish, but when."

While I don't think that this concept has gained much traction in most of the world, I'm beginning to wonder if the government of Japan is embracing it on the sly. I've blogged before about that country's stout resistance to immigration. Today the New York Times' Hiroko Tabuchi has another front-pager on the barriers to entry for even well-trained immigrants. Shorter Times: the situation is unchanged from 18 months ago:

Despite facing an imminent labor shortage as its population ages, Japan has done little to open itself up to immigration. In fact … the government is doing the opposite, actively encouraging both foreign workers and foreign graduates of its universities and professional schools to return home while protecting tiny interest groups.…

In 2009, the number of registered foreigners here fell for the first time since the government started to track annual records almost a half-century ago, shrinking 1.4 percent from a year earlier to 2.19 million people -- or just 1.71 percent of Japan's overall population of 127.5 million.

Experts say increased immigration provides one obvious remedy to Japan's two decades of lethargic economic growth. But instead of accepting young workers, however -- and along with them, fresh ideas -- Tokyo seems to have resigned itself to a demographic crisis that threatens to stunt the country's economic growth, hamper efforts to deal with its chronic budget deficits and bankrupt its social security system.…

Japan's demographic time clock is ticking: its population will fall by almost a third to 90 million within 50 years, according to government forecasts. By 2055, more than one in three Japanese will be over 65, as the working-age population falls by over a third to 52 million.

Still, when a heavyweight of the defeated Liberal Democratic Party unveiled a plan in 2008 calling for Japan to accept at least 10 million immigrants, opinion polls showed that a majority of Japanese were opposed. A survey of roughly 2,400 voters earlier this year by the daily Asahi Shimbun showed that 65 percent of respondents opposed a more open immigration policy.

If you talk to Japan-boosters about this issue, they'll usually respond with some equation of older workers + hi-tech robots = healthy Japan. OK, but it turns out that Japan has fewer old people than the government originally thought, and I'm worried that when the robots get too smart, Will Smith will be too old to stop them.

Seriously, this seems to fall into that set of problems, like, say, climate change, where most people recognize that there's a serious long-term problem but the short-term incentives to do something about it are close to nil.

Am I missing anything?

COMMENTS (8)

EXPLORE:INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, DEMOGRAPHY, JAPAN, MIGRATION

The trouble with Tel Aviv....

Posted By Daniel W. Drezner Sunday, August 1, 2010 - 9:05 PM

Tel Aviv is a charming, modern, cosmopolitan city with a thriving high-tech sector, powder-sand beaches and the most temperate of seas. Apparently, it is also the most insidious threat to the state of Israel.

You might think that Hamas or Hezbollah want to take out Tel Aviv. Well, maybe, but right now it's the Israelis who have a beef with the lovely city on the Mediterranean Sea. Simply put, the problem with Tel Aviv is that it's sucking up all of the young, secular Israelis from across the country. As well it should - it offers good jobs and an easygoing lifestyle, like the Bay Area in the U.S.

This migration within Israel creates a number of long-term policy headaches. First, residents of Tel Aviv simply don't care that much about making peace with the Palestinian Authority, Syria, or the rest of the Arab world. Tel Aviv is almost exclusively Jewish, it's too far south for Hezbollah to hit and too far north for Hamas to hit. You can live in Tel Aviv and not think about long-term security concerns - which is exactly what most Israelis do. This is the majority of the population, and they're politically apathetic.

This leaves other parts of the country - most obviously Jerusalem and the West Bank settlements - to the rapidly growing ultra-Orthodox and those Israeli nationalists who believe in Greater Israel. These are the people driving the Israeli government to expand settlement construction in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. The short-term political logic is to appease the settler and ultra-Orthodox movements. Both IDF officials and Israeli politicians know that at some point Israel will have to let go of most of this territory. The demographics are already getting ugly. One negotiator quoted Thomas Jefferson on this: "We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

Finally, because of the rush to Tel Aviv, Israel isn't populating more strategic parts of its country, like the Negev or the Galilee. Instead, they're expanding into the West Bank, which is pretty stupid because most (though not all) of that territory will be ceded to Palestine at some point. Officials kept talking about creating a high-speed rail network to encourage more population spread away from Tel Aviv, but that's a ways off. As the Palestinian population outpaces the growth of the Jewish population, there's going to be incentives to move to those areas. One demographer worries about an expanding, J-shaped mass of Palestinians that shrinks Israel down to Tel Aviv and its environs. That fear might be exaggerated, but it's similar to the Russian fear of Chinese expansion into Siberia.

The longer this trend continues, the more the cosmopolitans of Tel Aviv will cede power to the ultra-orthodox and the ultra-nationalists. That augurs badly for Israel's strategic situation.

So what do the Palestinians think about all of this? That will be the subject of my next post.

COMMENTS (18)

EXPLORE:DEMOGRAPHY, ISRAEL, MIDDLE EAST, PALESTINE