America’s population decline is decently bad, but it isn’t so bad that you’d notice anything drastically different in our society. We’re all still groaning with impatience when full school buses make our morning commute a good 20 minutes longer, our playgrounds are still used, and, depending on where you live, it’s not all that rare to see moms at the grocery store with kids in tow.
In short, it doesn’t yet feel like we live in a childless dystopian world. That’s not at all the case in Japan.
Japan has a bit of a population problem. Not only is its fertility rate incredibly low (at 1.37 births per woman) but last year government data revealed that for every one person born in Japan, two people died. Those kinds of numbers are a problem for social flourishing, and it’s starting to show.
