John Burn-Murdoch

Things are stagnated.

The size of their economy, their living standards have not really moved since like the 90s.

And...

Some people sort of think, oh, did they just become less innovative, less productive?

When you actually look at what the Japanese economy is producing per worker, it's kept going up.

It's right up there with America, with the richest countries in the world.

It's just that...

workers as a share of the population are way lower.

So they're still working hard, producing as much as ever, but that is now being shared out.

Less is being shared out over a much larger, older population.

So when you don't have enough young people, you don't have enough workers, and it puts downward pressure on everyone's living standards.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So a number and a term that people might be familiar with is the idea that 2.1 kids per woman is roughly speaking what we call the replacement rate, which is to say that if everyone has an average of 2.1 kids, then absent anything else at all, population will be stable.

of course we're not in a world where nothing else happens so you have immigration and that means that you can get down to sort of 1.7 1.8 maybe and with a steady inflow of immigration again things stay fairly manageable the problem is a we're now in the sort of 1.6 1.5 or as i said in some countries significantly lower than that

And when you get to that, the amount of immigration you would need, not just in total, not just as a stock, as a flow every single year, just becomes absolutely enormous.

Like, you know, you're talking about in some cases having 10% of your population every year.

coming in from overseas to keep it that way.

Yeah, and again, that's not in total, that's every year.

You get to the point where the population, yeah.