Moeka Iida

speaker

193 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 4d ago

Moeka Iida’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Economist Podcasts · Elbows up, again: a US-Canada trade flare-up · 24 Aug 2026 podcast

Of job openings to college applicants fell significantly from a peak of nearly three to less than one by the year two thousand.

So because they couldn't land into stable jobs offered by companies, many of them ended up in so-called irregular work.

So Japan's labor market has a very polarized system.

On one hand, you have regular workers who enjoy a lot of labor protection or labor rights, and they enjoy seniority based pay rises as they age.

And then on the other hand, you have people.

People in the irregular track, who are in fact often performing the same kind of work as their regular peers, but they're just working on more precarious contracts, so they are the first to be cut in economic downturns, and they also receive much lower pay.

So a lot of the Ice Agers ended up being recruited as irregular workers.

And around this time the term free to became popular, so that refers to young people who are bouncing between casual jobs.

And there was also growing discussion about parasite singles or young people who continue to live with their parents and rely on them economically.

Some of the narrative around this generation is a bit overblown.

So I spoke to some analysts who walked me through the data.

And if you look at the share of the Ice Age generation in regular employment, that has actually caught up with older cohorts.

But a lot of them have actually landed in stable jobs.

But even there, the damage is very visible when it comes to their earnings.

So the Ice Age generation, if you look at their earnings, it tends to be much lower than the older generation.

And in terms of why, if some of them were in irregular work for long stretches, even if you managed to transition to the regular track, your salary is likely to be lower than your peers.

And also when the ISA generation entered these companies, a lot of the upper ranks of these organizations were filled with bubble era workers who are occupying the higher managerial roles.

Exactly.

So there is a big question that people are asking about what happens, say, ten years down the road, twenty years down the road, when these ice agers hit retirement age, their earnings are low.

And Japan's pension scheme is tied to lifetime earnings.

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