Look dispassionately at Japan’s economic performance over the past ten years, though, and “the second lost decade”, if not the first, is a misnomer. Much of what tarnishes Japan’s image is the result of demography—more than half its population is over 45—as well as its poor policy in dealing with it. Even so, most Japanese have grown richer over the decade.

In aggregate, Japan’s economy grew at half the pace of America’s between 2001 and 2010. Yet if judged by growth in GDP per person over the same period, then Japan has outperformed America and the euro zone (see chart 1). In part this is because its population has shrunk whereas America’s population has increased.

Though growth in labour productivity fell slightly short of America’s from 2000 to 2008, total factor productivity, a measure of how a country uses capital and labour, grew faster, according to the Tokyo-based Asian Productivity Organisation. Japan’s unemployment rate is higher than in 2000, yet it remains about half the level of America and Europe (see chart 2).

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The report says the top one per cent of households had emissions three times the average and almost six times those of households in the bottom 10 per cent.

Nov 18th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

AT 84, Masuyo Hirano happily describes herself as in “the spring of my life.” The sprightly woman lives in a nursing home with 50 other pensioners. But she is not idle. She votes. She does acupuncture. She and her friends sing karaoke, their delicate hands wrapped around the microphone. She dexterously weaves slippers from multicoloured ribbons that take days to finish, and hands them out to visitors like sweets.

There are two reasons for her happiness. The first is that she has made satisfactory arrangements for the remainder of her long life. In a country where 28m people are over 65 and many millions live alone, are bedridden or suffer from dementia, she has found herself a place that is a model of public-private care and will look after her until she dies. She has no children, and will not need to ask her relatives to do anything further for her.

The second reason she is happy is that she knows what will happen to her remains after her death. The Yashioen nursing home in Saitama, a district north of Tokyo, offers her a burial club in which she and her friends will be placed in the same tomb together, which the nursing home promises to tend. This sort of service is likely to become more popular in Japan as elderly people have fewer children to mourn them. Many Japanese in their later years are tormented by the prospect of lying in a lonely and forgotten tomb. “I’ve talked this over at length with my nephews and nieces,” she says. “I don’t want to be a burden on them.”

Nov 18th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

FOR several decades after the second world war it was boomtime for Japan’s economy as a new generation of workers entered the labour force. Brilliant entrepreneurs like Soichiro Honda and Akio Morita at Sony set about building the future. A pioneering baroness, Shidzue Kato, forced a male-dominated parliament to legislate for easier birth control. Condoms became so widely available that the birth rate halved in the decade from 1947-57.

That meant fewer young mouths to feed on rising salaries, thanks to a seniority-based system under which pay automatically increased with age. As the working-age population rose from 50m in 1950 to 75m in 1975, savings boomed and companies channelled them into breakneck growth. That was more or less the pattern of Japan’s economy into the 1990s, even beyond the bursting of the financial bubble in 1990. Growth did not peak until 1996.

Now turn this picture on its head. In 1995, just before the economy started to lose steam, the working-age population hit its high point, at 87m. Since then it has fallen sharply. If current trends continue, in 20 years’ time it will have dropped by 20m, according to the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. By 2050 it will have fallen below 50m, forming an almost perfect bell curve in one century. Among rich nations, only Germany will suffer a similar fall (see chart 3).

Labour is one of the two main sources of economic growth. If the number of workers drops, output per worker has to rise to maintain the same level of production. There are ways to ease the demographic strains, such as encouraging more women, foreigners and older people to join the labour force, or seeking out fast-growing markets abroad. But if productivity does not increase enough to counteract a shrinking workforce, output—and eventually living standards—will decline.

For now the fall in Japan’s labour force is still accelerating. At the same time cheaper competitors in the region are forcing Japanese exporters to cut labour costs. And Japan has yet to recover fully from the withering effects of the 2008 global financial crisis.

Nov 18th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION

IN 1979 Ezra Vogel, a Harvard academic, wrote a book entitled “Japan as Number One: Lessons for America” in which he portrayed Japan, with its strong economy and cohesive society, as the world’s most dynamic industrial nation. Three decades later, Japan holds lessons of a less encouraging sort. Economists in the stricken West have been poring over the data on the deflation that it has suffered since the bursting of the asset-price bubble in 1990. Yet deflation may be just one symptom of an even bigger problem that, as our special report this week argues, is squeezing the life out of the Japanese economy: ageing. Unless Japan takes dramatic steps to re-energise its shrinking, greying workforce, its economy will suffer.

Other countries face this dismal prospect too. Although Japanese society is growing older faster than anywhere else in the world, plenty of others are shuffling along behind it. Parts of Europe are ageing fast, and are unwilling to adapt, as recent protests against rising retirement ages in France and Greece attest. Other Confucian countries such as South Korea, China and Taiwan, have enjoyed a “demographic dividend”—a rapidly expanding workforce and falling birth rate—similar to Japan’s in the 1960s to 1980s. With fewer children and elderly to pay for, such countries could plough savings back into economic expansion. As in Japan, relatively few women work after becoming mothers and even fewer immigrants are let in. Such places will look to Japan for how to cope with the economic and social consequences when their manpower starts to dry up. So far, they will find, it is ducking the issue.

Climate hawks are floundering after this year’s election. A climate bill couldn’t get through Congress even when it was controlled by the Democrats, thanks to Senate dysfunction and general idiocy. Now, with the GOP and Tea Party ascendant, the chances of passing curbs on greenhouse gases anytime soon are zip to zilch.

So what now, the hawks are wondering?

For the moment, forget about carbon caps and start thinking about cervical caps — and the Pill, IUDs, and Depo-Provera.

Next week, a panel of experts will start meeting to determine whether health insurers should be required to cover the full cost of contraceptives. At issue is whether birth control is “preventive” medicine, which the new health-care law requires insurers to cover free of charge, without co-pays. The Department of Health and Human Services is supposed to make a final call on that question in August 2011.

Sounds like a no-brainer, but ultra-right-wing groups like the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Family Research Council are rallying in opposition, and they may have more allies in the newly conservatized Congress.

More women in the developed world are choosing not to have children. So why do friends, family, colleagues and even strangers think it’s OK to question their decision?

We’ve come a long way, baby. Until a few decades ago, it was widely assumed that a woman would marry and, soon after, the stork would arrive with a special delivery.

Today, there are many more choices – or more openness. To have a baby out of wedlock. To have a baby without a father. To have a baby and return to work. To have a baby and give up work. To have fertility treatment, and then a baby (or not).

But what about not becoming a mother at all? Studies in the UK, Europe and the United States show this is now the choice of significant numbers of women.

Once this was considered insane or unnatural. Even today, it is viewed with suspicion – women with no desire to procreate say they sometimes face awkward questions and disapproval.

“A woman at work was recently quite shocked by my saying I didn’t want children. She said: ‘You’re a woman, you were born with a womb, God gave a womb so we could procreate’,” Jenny Woolfson, aged 25, told BBC Radio 4′s Woman’s Hour.
In today’s Magazine

“My friends and I have occasionally likened coming out as child-free to coming out as a gay person 40 or 50 years ago. There’s the same sense of shock – perhaps that’s too strong a word. But it’s a lifestyle people don’t expect and it may challenge their world view,” says 31-year-old Rhona Sweeting.

Maybe it’s because I live in the famously child-friendly neighborhood of Park Slope, in Brooklyn, N.Y., where I’m forced to dodge 15 strollers every time I go to the grocery store. Or maybe it’s because I’m 32 and it seems every other woman I know is having a baby. Or maybe it’s because I grew up in rural Texas, surrounded by pregnant teenagers. No matter the reason, I was genuinely surprised to read the recent Pew Research Center study showing that the share of American women who are skipping out on motherhood has nearly doubled since 1976, rising from 10 percent of the population to 18 percent.

Personally, I was happy to see that more women feel free to forgo childbearing. But not everyone shares my enthusiasm. According to Pew, 38 percent of Americans now denounce childlessness as bad for society. That’s up from 29 percent just two years ago. So what’s behind the increase in women choosing the non-mom route? According to social conservatives, legal abortions are to blame for declining birth rates. Mike Huckabee told reporter Max Blumenthal that if it weren’t for abortion, there would be no need for immigrants to come work in the United States. Some anti-choicers are issuing dire warnings about a “demographic winter” bringing an end to Western civilization.

Conservative histrionics aside, women who have abortions aren’t the ones causing the uptick in childlessness. After all, 61 percent of women who have abortions already have one child. And according to a 2004 survey by the Guttmacher Institute, most childless women who have abortions say they are open to the possibility of having kids under different circumstances. However, that doesn’t mean that the passage of Roe v. Wade had no impact on the upturn in childless women. After all, defense of legal abortion led feminists to create a national discourse around the concept of “choice,” which helped legitimize the decision to remain childless. This created a space for women who never wanted children to embrace their true desires.

Mar 25th 2010 | DETROIT | From The Economist print edition

Mr Bing did describe his vision, but for now it remains hazy. The most urgent tasks are to create jobs, cut crime and clean up a fiscal mess. His long-term plan is less clear. The city, he said, would demolish 3,000 homes this year and 7,000 more by the end of his term. This would be only the first step toward re-imagining Detroit. Already, however, local groups are working on plans for broad change. Their premise was once politically unthinkable: before Detroit can thrive, it must shrink. Mr Bing supports this. But executing it will be difficult.

We’re on track to hit a global population of 7 billion people next year or the year after—3 billion more than when Mills got all riled up four decades ago. We’ve spewed enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere to push it past the safe point, which many climate scientists agree is 350 parts carbon dioxide per million; we’re already at about 390 and rising fast. And Americans are among the most carbon-intensive people on earth. The average American generates about 66 times more CO2 each year than the average Bangladeshi—20 tons versus 0.3 tons.

If you consider not just the carbon impact of your own kids but of your kids’ kids and so on, the numbers get even starker. According to a 2009 study in Global Environmental Change [PDF] that took into account the long-term impact of Americans’ descendants, each child adds an estimated 9,441 metric tons of CO2 to a parent’s carbon legacy—that’s about 5.7 times his or her direct lifetime emissions.

“Many people are unaware of the power of exponential population growth,” said study coauthor Paul Murtaugh, a professor of statistics at Oregon State University. “Future growth amplifies the consequences of people’s reproductive choices today, the same way that compound interest amplifies a bank balance.” (To take an extreme example, compare childfree me with Yitta Schwartz of Monroe, N.Y., who died this year at the age of 93, leaving behind an estimated 2,000 descendants.)

A person who cares about preserving a livable environment has lots of options for doing her bit, and you’ve heard all about them: live in an energy-efficient home in a walkable neighborhood; bike or walk or take public transit when possible; drive an efficient car if you drive one at all; fly less; go veg; buy organic and local; limit purchases of consumer goods; switch to CFLs or LEDs; slay your vampires; offset carbon emissions; vote for climate-concerned candidates, and hold them accountable for their campaign promises.

But even in aggregate, all of these moves don’t come close to the impact of not bringing new human beings—particularly new Americans—into the world. “