We know the effects of Corona on mortality and GDP. As data trickles in, we are now getting an increasingly clear idea of its effects on fertility rates.
(via Twitter demographer @BirthGauge)
We generally see no large-scale effects from Corona. There were usually fertility shocks as the lockdowns first went into effect, but they were quickly smoothed over subsequent months.
That said, there are important regional differences, with Northern Europe actually seeing a substantial increase in fertility. The effects were most striking in Germany:
Covid baby boom in Germany: Births in March 2021 were 65,903, the highest number recorded in a March since 1998.
In Q1 2021, births so far are up 5.2% compared to Q1 2020.
— Birth Gauge (@BirthGauge) June 15, 2021
If this holds until the end of the year, total TFR for 2021 could be 1.61, the highest value since 1973. (And no, the increase was not driven by refugees). This year may in fact see German total number of births exceed Japan’s. And Iran’s.
Births in Iran in Jan-Apr 2021 around 8.4% down to the same period in 2020. If this holds until the end of the year, Iran's TFR will be 1.54 this year, down from 1.66 in 2020.
— Birth Gauge (@BirthGauge) June 7, 2021
There are two possible causes here. The proximate one is that generous social welfare policies and moderate lockdowns blunted the impact of the fertility fall in Northern Europe and soon it was outright reversed. However, another possible, longer-term cause that I would propose, and which is suggested by the fact that Germany is the only developed country (with the exception of the few city-states like Qatar) which had a higher TFR in 2020 than in 2021*, is that Germany’s now close to 50 years of low fertility have “pruned away” many of its genotypic anti-natalists while increasing the “breeder” proportion of the population:
If this is accurate, we may expect German TFR to continue climbing up. While French selection for breeders lasted much longer, the German one was more intense, given the extent of its fertility collapse from the 1970s (while France always remained reasonably close to replacement level rates).
In other news, Czechia this year might have the highest TFR in the developed world after Israel:
Births in Czechia in Q1 2021 were 27,200, that is 3.8% higher than in Q1 2020. If that Covid baby boomlet continues through the rest of the year, Czechia's TFR will be 1.80, the second highest among all developed countries after Israel.
— Birth Gauge (@BirthGauge) June 14, 2021
Czechia is a socially liberal country with the highest percentage of porn stars in Europe. This happens to have no bearing on fertility rates, to the consternation of right-wingers. It’s almost as if this doesn’t matter.
4.7% births fall in Japan this year so far.
Then again, Japan is steadily becoming the fertility “powerhouse” of East Asia – bearing in mind the steep declines observed in South Korea, Taiwan, China, and even Thailand, which is now down to a mere 1.15. (Reminder that everything in life is relative).
As the first East Asian country to undergo the demographic transition, it will also probably be the first one to emerge from it.
I have raised this issue in passing before. But demographic statistics from Central Asia, especially Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan – which have seemingly defied trends towards fertility decrease in almost all the rest of the world – should at this point be treated with extreme skepticism (just like data from Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Chechnya in Russia).
A couple of resources on this topic.
- Kazakhstan: Казахстан: миллион «мертвых душ»? + stranger233 commentary
- Kyrgyzstan: Чудеса киргизской статистики
I might write up some of this in English sometime. But the gist of it is that births data are not tallying with population data and some cities are generating crazy and implausibly high TFR figures (e.g. Osh supposed had a TFR of 5.1 by 2019).
The Uzbek figures might ironically be more accurate, but the country is probably on the cusp of an Azeri-like sharp decline, as explained here.
The main socio-political consequence of this is that Russian nationalist trepidations about an unending reservoir of labor pouring in from Central Asia is increasingly divorced from reality. In actuality, large parts of Northern Kazakhstan seem set to remain majority ethnic Russian in perpetuity.
- h/t Annatar for this observation.
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So, we finally have the “rough timeline” – a fertility fall lasts about 50 years before slowly reversing.
I checked the demographics of Serbia – and indeed it lines up well. There was a sharp decline in the mid 50s – and slowly but steadily rising since slightly before 2010.
I wonder when the fertility will really start kicking up.
Ah, how exciting!
It’s nice to see this change in fertility and birthrates finally coming to term.
Also, Japanese Manga and Anime are certainly pushing the “having children as a happy and natural ending” storyline. Not that I think this is really influential on the society, but more a reflection of where thought is progressively going again.
Having children is a sign of optimism about the future, looks like Germans and Czechs are feeling fine. It is the strong everlasting infrastructure – everything from education to trains, from plumbing to theatre is solidly designed and works.
Is that actually a metric? How do they know? My suspicion is that the Czechs, who can be quite mischievous, have less of an issue with self-identifying as porn stars. The fertility increase is also in the provincial areas and Moravia that can be very conservative. The porn stars in Prague remain as infertile and absurdist as ever. Some now also work as journalists, politicians and opinion-makers. You ought to visit sometimes…
Aren’t the Czechs massive atheists too? On the other hand, if you read Kundera’s work their women seem quite lusty. Perhaps that explains it.
Its been suggested that Work From Home policies and people moving from urban cores to suburban or even rural areas will make raising children easier. Even if the WFH policy is reduced from everyday to say just two or three days a week at the office this will still make child rearing easier as commute time and expense will be reduced and give parents more time to actually care for their children and, for those who move from the urban core to the suburbs, a larger home to put additional children in.
We should hope we gain something from the covid experience and more children would be a happy side effect.
I don’t think you believe those “conspiracy theories” of COVID (or COVID vaccines) being an anti-natal bioweapon.
It’s a fact that COVID infections adversely affect pregnancy and increases the risk of miscarriages to some extent (not sure relative to annual flu outbreaks), which can be more sharply seen in some COVID vaccines (predominantly mRNA but also possible with other more established types), which is why it is not suggested for currently pregnant mothers. We’ll see this playing out or not in 5-10 years, which is the duration of normal vaccines’ long-term trials.
Watching Americans get Triggered by Trigger(lol!)’s Darling in the Franxx plotline that implied that having children was wonderful and that homosexuals are deviants who can honorably end their lives in service of families was pretty epic.
I was semi-surprised, but pleasantly, that Trigger survived the outrage without apology and then managed to continue onward(though they definitely suffered financially). Hard to imagine anything in the else surviving that, or even accepting a meaningful loss of fanbase without apology.
Correct, I privilege scientific literature reviews over Internet conspiracy people.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/06/covid-vaccine-and-fertility-no-need-to-worry/
If you think these small decimal changes are significant or reflect a societal improvement, please get in the toilet and flush thyself. They’re all still well below replacement, an after 50 years of infertility, it’s going to take a TFR of 3.5 to regain that lost momentum in time for any breeding fo be consequential to anything.
It’s over. Your group failed and now they are going to die quickly. You know deep inside that a permanent barrier has been erected between the sexes in your population. Perhaps if your every waking thought and action had been motivated by the intent to forcibly change this, things could have been different. But you failed to subdue and repeatedly impregnate the female while she was putting the final remnants of your society in to a crackpipe and smoking it. Can you really hope for an afterlife in which your ancient ancestors wait to judge you?
I said “anti-natal” in decreasing virility, not total sterilization, tho most talk online veer towards sterilization after what happened in Gates-sponsored vaccination programs.
We really need 5-10 years to evaluate that comprehensively – which is one of the points “soft” antivaxxers make. How can the miscarriages be explained away, if they want to?
(Schwab or Gates will more likely get his depopulation plan thru more conventional means, like artificial famines or birth quotas)
if we’re sure the increase in births wasn’t due to third worlders, then yeah, north europeans used the time off to have sex and have kids. they would be the only high intelligence people in the world to do that.
it’s possible. a eugenic trend might actually be happening. a related finding was in the latest round of international school student testing. it showed that german german intelligence is…going up. german german teenagers are now averaging about 103 converted equivalent on a wechsler. maybe it was even 104. another few rounds of international testing will tell whether this was a blip or a trend.
why am i saying german germans? because german germans are only 75% of the population of germany today. so there really aren’t 83 million germans . that’s just the total number of citizens. 15% of the people are other europeans, and 10% are third worlders.
Again empty talkings. First, France dropped, which wasn’t supposed to happen, and second, 1,61 in Germany means about 1,5 for german natives, which is pretty weak. And these are just Q1 results, i would wait for the year.
An insrease in 0,09 in TFR is striking? Lol lol lol Someone sounds desperate to prove something: )
Not in immigration sense. Not too much woke stuff there either. Far cry from western countries.
i volunteer to help South Korea raise their fertility rate. it’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.
i don’t think the breeder population idea is completely wrong, but i don’t think we’re there yet in most nations, and definitely don’t think this will ‘save’ european peoples. for every extra kid they have above replacement, they will be swamped with 10 more third worlders by their own governments, which hate them and want to replace them. there’s no way for european people to reproduce their way out of this.
indeed. there’s no way out for europeans other than war. they’ll defend their borders with violence or they’ll cease to have countries, and become outnumbered minorities who can’t AFFORD to keep having 3 or 4 kids. the social net which european people have extended to third worlders, helping them support those 4 or 5 kids they otherwise couldn’t provide for on their own, won’t be extended to the european peoples themselves in 2050 or whenever, when things start going south in earnest economically, and governments can’t afford these lavish social states.
“Czechia is a socially liberal country with the highest percentage of porn stars in Europe.”
this is because Czech women are the best looking women in the world, on average. it has nothing to do with social attitudes. i think like 4 or 5 cover models of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue were Czech. of course there are more good looking women in total in other nations, because they have more people. but central europe has the best looking women on average.
it has no bearing on fertility rates because it has nothing to do with how much the people there are into sex. it would be like trying to analyze aborigine fertility rates based on the fact that there are zero aborigine models or porn stars. there are zero aborigine models or porn stars because the women are ugly as heck, not because of any social attitudes.
Oh, btw Czechia is number 78 in the WEF Gender Equality Index. One of the worst offenders in the EU.
That is reaaaly “muh socially liberal” of them : )
There aren’t 100 pretty Czech girls for every pretty Polish girl.
https://i.redd.it/r5pkyjomo2h21.jpg
Good for them. We do want that TFR climbing up. An important question, I think, will be – are the children of breeders also breeders?
It agree that as “good news” goes this is pretty weak. If it was sustained for a few years it would be something, but seems rather meaningless as a single quarter phenomena. The “improved” TFR numbers are still atrocious.
Do you mean in “higher TFR in 2020 than in 2019”?
1.54 in both years according to Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Statistics_since_1900
As I understand it Czechia hasn’t been very religious for hundreds of years, perhaps they’re particularly well-adapted to it.
Cope. They aren’t pretty, just slutty, and desperate for cash.
East Asian women are obiectively the most attractive in the world, according to multiple studies. But not slutty and smart enough to get money by more moral, legitimate means.
The porn and modelling stuff just speaks to the low moral status of Czechs.
Czech fitness model and former adult actress Zuzka Light makes all ratios irrelevant:
https://www.instagram.com/zuzkalight/
Get this low-key homo shit off of here. She looks like a bodybuilder dyke.
But I also don’t think that Polish girls are a 100 times more chaste than Czech girls.
I have criticized this in the past, and I have not yet received any answers to my points. It’s a bit suspicious to me, because I can’t name more than a handful of Hungarian porn stars (Michelle Wild, Aleska Diamond, Maya Gold, and I’m aware of the existence of a few more), probably none of them active any longer, and apparently there must be 750 of them. Yes, in Hungary it’s an oft repeated factoid that Hungary has a lot of porn stars, and it may very well be so, but this ratio just doesn’t sound very realistic. I have met Polish girls, and they didn’t strike me as 100 times more chaste than Hungarian girls. In fact, I didn’t notice much of a difference at all.
Who did the counting? Was it the same people, or they just gathered whatever source was available for a given country?
What is the definition of a porn star? Is it only women, or both women and men? Anyone who ever participated in a pornographic movie, or only active ones? (Like a new movie in the past 12 months.)
Are OnlyFans girls counted? If yes, how? If not, why not?
A considerable amount of work had to go into this map, but it’s usually shared without much explanation about the methods. Also I’ve seen it with the same numbers several years ago. So was there one big Porn Star Survey, which has not yet been repeated? Or is there an up-to-date version of it? I mean, Croatia only has three porn stars, according to this map, so it’s not impossible that each of them just retire one year. Or, more likely, a few more girls join their ranks, doubling or quintupling their numbers in a few years.
So I don’t know how reliable this picture is.
Sorry, Croatia only has two porn stars, according to the map. I’m not sure about Croatian girls, they might be more chaste than Hungarian girls, but over a 100 times more so seems a bit difficult to believe. I’d certainly need more evidence than this map to believe it.
Truly, it was beautiful on levels both animated and metaphysical. It may even tap into the upcoming Zeitgeist, or the goals of some of those alien tyrants or asexual human turned wannabes (if true.)
Was there a fanbase backlash? That pleases me greatly. I knew I loved the show for good reason, ha ha.
I think that this statement is probably false. It’s not likely that only 26k births can be attributed to the refugee/migrant population in 2019.
Many of these refugees may be “Citizens” by now, so there may be a classification error here. That is to say, there’s a huge foreign-born population fraction in Germany that is, at least on paper, “German.”
The 2010-2018 “refugees” were overwhelmingly male, and may have taken local (or Germanoturkish) brides.
TFR in Germany was boosted in 2015-2016, and this boost has since persisted. This coincides with the peak migration period.
The wikipedia page notes:
“In 2019, 588,401 (75.6%) children were born to mothers with German citizenship, while 189,689 (24.4%) children were born to mothers with foreign citizenship.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Germany#Statistics_since_1900
…This isn’t indicative of a growing ethnic German population. Foreign nationals are less than 12% of the population of Germany, but account for nearly 25% of all births.
I think that, overall, the German TFR boost is driven entirely by (presumably naturalized) migrants and resident foreigners. I’d bet that native/ethnic German TFR — where both parents are German — is still well under 1.5.
Prague and Budapest are capitals of European porn production. Studios are using local actors which means highest numbers in this profession for these 2 countries.
Though, a good chunk of that stuff in anime and manga is cope because they can’t have that irl.
Polish girls are not vastly more chaste than Hungarian girls, it is true. OTOH, my impression is that being a porn star is not socially accepted as it is in Czechia.
Our Czech friend Insomniac Resurrected has an entire tag on his blog on just that specific topic: https://insomniacresurrected.com/category/czech-public-figures-that-did-porn/
The baby boomlet might just be a pulling forward of the fertility curve.
Many people wait until some milestone is reached before having kids – a promotion, home ownership, a trip to Disneyworld, whatever. Lockdowns would’ve scotched those plans. Some would be able to put their plans back a few years, but not women in the thirties: hence, a pulling forward. We’ll see.
Certainly. Most stories are fiction for just that reason, though. Even cope values are still values. Ideally, the cope is a “you could be a knight who saves a lady, peasant.” Rather than, “you could be ultra decadent, peasant.”
Even heroic action without romance is still a win as far as inspirational narrative goes.
I’m pretty familiar with NE Asia and especially Japan. It’s definitely correct that Japan if anything has a high birthrate by NE Asian standards these days, but this is almost entirely a function of other countries TFRs dropping below Japan’s level, rather than Japan TFR increasing. In fact Japan’s TFR has been bumping along at 1.3-1.4 since around 2000 I think. No significant increases or decreases.
On the ground, one huge difference between Japan and say S Korea is the cost of housing. Japan is quite cheap these days, for housing and just generally, at least by my personal standards (living in NY). Housing in Seoul is quite expensive relative to local incomes, as is the cram school and tutoring which are considered necessary there. This might be due to Japan being further along in its demographic collapse, with a lot less demand on housing and a lot less competition to enter decent universities.
Japan is also more culturally cut off than S Korea, Taiwan, just about anywhere. I think this is a function of Japan having had an enormous, self-confident, self-contained domestic market until very recently, which allowed them not to bother learning English, not to follow American trends except very superficially. And the culture is actually quite conservative and old-fashioned compared to the rest of developed Asia at this point, which makes it a bit more robust from a family formation and expectations point of view.
So I’m not buying Karlin’s “breeder” argument in relation to East Asia, although it is interesting.
Japan is also the most willing, on a state level, to sacrifice economic growth for other policy aims. That’s essentially a nonstarter anywhere else in Asia.
East Asian women are indeed very attractive, especially to anyone who doesn’t feel like banging transvestites (which is what white and black women start looking like around 30 and onward).
https://i.imgflip.com/5dxt9b.jpg
That being said, the Japs have the highest percentage of women who have been at one point an “AV idol”, and not infrequently that’s just a moment within a larger career or life-story. Back around 2010 it was estimated that 1 in 200 Jap women had starred in porn.
https://www.tokyoreporter.com/entertainment/adult-video/av-producer-one-in-200-japanese-women-performed-in-porn/
I think it’s more like 1 in a 100 by now, and in the bigger cities it shrinks to 1 in 50.
Likewise, the practice of “enjo kōsai” which is older men being temporary sugar daddies for younger girls in return for this and that and a bit of the other. In 1998 20% of Jap high school girls did this, and today I would think it’s more like 50-60% https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/231191
https://hadibeh.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/5-1-1024×952.jpg
Sometimes I think that every girl should do a porn vid upon graduation, just to get it out of her system, and then move on and have a family with someone twice her age. But that’s beside the point.
The point is that if you see 10 good looking Jap women on the street of a Jap city, it is not unlikely that half of them either did porn at some point, or dated older men for perks back in high school.
https://tokyofashion.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Tokyo-Girls-Collection-Street-Snaps-2012-10-066.jpg
enjo kōsai has also spread to an extent into Taiwan, Hong Kong, and even South Korea. So in this sense East Asian females are “moral” only within existing social frameworks. Once the frameworks are loosened, so are the vaginas.
That being said, all of that stuff of course happens with some basic courtesy and without meth and crack and seedy bullshit like this, so there’s that. It’s not trailer/ghetto stuff, but rather “normal” city stuff.
In summary, a girl from mainland China, or Singapore, will likely be “pure”. A shrill wife that will drive you and the kids insane with “motivational nagging”, but “pure”.
The South Korean one–also, but slightly less likely. The Taiwanese and Hong Kong one–less likely still. And the Japanese girl–a coin toss. Maybe she’s “normal”, and maybe she’s got twenty fisting flicks on her resume and has entertained 50 sugar daddies from puberty to graduation.
Only “godless communist” EA attractive girls are likely to not be in the 50-50 portion of “maybe there’s a BDSM rope video of her around” or “maybe a bunch of older dudes dated her back in high school”.
And, of course, once an East Asian girl grows up in the West, and absorbs the slut culture, all bets are off.
The Japanese elite was blindsided by East Asian and especially Korean competition in the period 2000-2010. I met Japanese executives who scoffed at Samsung as just an assembler of Japanese components as late as the early 2000s. It’s not that the Japanese state didn’t care about economic development, it’s that it didn’t buy American arguments about deregulation and thought of themselves as a great economic and technological pole until they were dismantled in record speed by rest of Asia. They didn’t know what hit them and by the time they realized it was too late.
Asians have a wonderful system that perhaps the French had in the 18th century, and that is very sane, human, abd wise – perhaps the most accepting of human nature in it’s needs, weaknesses, and reality.
On one level, the human need for security in the form of an official social script that everyone understands and follows is catered to by an “official” culture of strict conservative decorum.
Right beneath this, there is the “floating world”, where human nature as it actually is, is catered to, and one achieves freedom from the stuffy confines of conservative decorum, provided one is discreet.
Many strict Westerners consider this “hypocrisy” and criticize the Asian culture of “face” for allowing a wide gap between appearance and reality – but it is a deeply wise and humane approach that respects human nature.
Because human needs are conflicting, society has a deep need of “hypocrisy” – and one should cultivate the ability to be comfortable with contradiction, hold conflicting ideas in ones mind, and operate on multiple levels.
But a certain kind of “elastic” mentality is needed for this, and perhaps it can only really flourish in a sophisticated intellectual framework that is non-“positivist”, and more playful with notions of “reality” – as existed in 18th century France – and all the great ages of European intellectual discovery – and in East Asia.
Also, a wise and pragmatic acceptance of human nature as it “is”, without ideological “shoulds”.
How impoverished our culture has become.
i never said the numbers were in a direct 1:1 proportion. only that average hotness levels per woman explain most of what is going on. i even qualified up front about total number of hot women by total population.
also, where does this map come from? what’s the data on this stuff. what counts as a porn star? do models count? what about instagram stars? cam girls? streamers? do the women at busty.pl count? or are they not porn stars, so we don’t count huge boob Polish women showing their boobs on the internet, because they don’t have sex. Polish women and British women have the biggest boobs in the world, and make millions just showing their boobs. especially in those British big boob magazines, which, i assume, would also make them not count as porn stars in this survey. what if women in different countries make tons of money doing adult stuff in different ways.
measuring in a more comprehensive way, a Czech representation ratio in all forms of adult modeling might actually get up to a 50:1 overrepresentation number, like Jamaican track sprinters or Icelandic strength athletes. it gets hard to explain internet phenomenons like Denise Milani without that, and dominating the SI swimsuit issue. there aren’t even that many Czechs in the US, so Sports Illustrated had to deliberately go to europe to find them, passing up the 150 million women in America so they could put foreigners on the cover from a country with like 5 million women, 4 or 5 times.
i deliberately didn’t talk about the Japan porn industry, because i don’t know what the numbers are. but i’m sure the participation numbers are high, woman for woman, relative to other nations. they even have specific words for level of involvement. jav is for actual sex, gravure for adult models who don’t have sex, and there’s probably more. agree that per woman participation is probably something crazy now, your estimates of 1 in 50 for younger women is likely not far off. japanese women also have the biggest boobs in asia.
porn is illegal in korea (and china for that matter), so strictly speaking the numbers would be zero, but korean women leave to go have sex with guys in other countries, so the accurate numbers are harder to say. kpop is their surrogate for adult material which is why the women are so hot and why it’s so sexualized.
i think that map AK posted about porn star numbers is just made up BS, like many internet memes. or maybe it’s some partially accurate map from a survey somebody did 20 years ago, but it’s not current or accurate information.
A lot of Japanese adult work are things like voice actressing for a hentai, which isn’t really the same thing as porn per se. It’s not seen as something too unrespectable.
Exactly. Cope or not, that these values of family and children are still very important, are often celebrated, are even allowed in a mainstream media like manga tells us good things about Japan. As I keep pointing out to people who denigrate anime, manga, and now light novels, these are one of the very few major and accessible in the West types of popular entertainment that are not controlled by Jews. And it really shows to someone who’s just old enough to have witnessed and remembered the decisive inflection point of the Rural Purge in the US.
imo their entire system is organized around a kind of accepted corruption blending around government/businesses that it’s really difficult for them to optimize for economic considerations. The same reason why widespread female participation in the workforce was not heavily promoted ultimately is the same driving force behind much of the overall regulations: until it starts to affect the elite, they have no motivation to change anything.
As we see, there are some upsides to thus but the total slippage of gdp and the average decreasing wage is always fun.
Trigger had entire organizations created to protest them. They survived but you can see the budget cuts in SSSS Gridman, etc – which they were lucky enough to have get the IP for and bounced back with.
There’s still a lot of people who seek to make their brand toxic to this day: the gay mafia is strong and it remembers.
Here’s a theoretical basis for why the syncytin-1 concern was not just breathtakingly stupid when the alternative was getting the wild type disease with a very similar potential for antibodies against it, but very unlikely to happen except of course when human bodies occasionally make autoimmune mistakes. Repurposing my most recent posting on this:
I’ve come to believe this won’t happen from first principles. The theory is that there’s a bit of the spike protein that looks like a bit of a natural protein that’s involved in fertility. But ask yourself why your body hasn’t already generated antibodies against this small bit of the natural protein. Why hasn’t it generated ones against all your proteins and turned you into a literal puddle of goo?
That’s because our adaptive immune system isn’t stupid. For antibodies, haven’t tried finding out how the independent recognition system of CD8+ cytotoxic T cells is developed etc. (among other things more insurance against variants), the cells that make antibodies go through a weeding out process where those that recognize “like,” that is your normal proteins, are removed.
Thus its uncanny ability to only pick out and attack “not like,” such as a virus, or a chemical which has never ever been seen on earth before it was synthesized in a lab. Learning about the latter in the mid 1970s convinced me the immune system was too complex, we were and are still discovering a lot about it, that it should be learned on a an as needed basis.
Of course this weeding out mechanism is not perfect, that’s how we get autoimmune diseases like how one day, for no reason at all, my Silent Generation father’s immune system attacked his red blood cells. For which we fortunately have a fairly good toolbox to address.
My Czech co-worker is a nice guy but one of the most self-centered and least contributive people I know. May have something to do with it.
Poland and India seem to have a dearth of pornstars. Must be cultural, not economic.
At first this seemed ridiculous to me, but upon reflection it appears to be true.
Let’s make a few assumptions.
Let’s assume that this is accurate: https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/2020/
(It’s not going to be perfectly accurate, the population of Tokyo skews a bit younger than the rest of Japan, but for convenience’s sake…)
Let’s restrict ourselves to women between the ages of 20 and 40. This accounts for fully 10.3% of the Tokyo metro region’s population. 3.81M women. That’s nearly as many people as live in the entire city of Los Angeles, and substantially more people than live in any other US city, save New York.
If 1 in 200 of those women, or 0.5%, are in — or have ever done — porn, that’s 19,000 women. If 1 in 50 are in porn, that’s around 75k. These are not crazy numbers, considering something like 6,000 debuts are made each year nationwide. (But, doubtless, with epicenters in Tokyo and Osaka.)
https://japantoday.com/category/features/japan-sees-surge-in-aspiring-adult-film-actresses-6000-said-to-debut-each-year
If anything, your 1-in-50 number might be too low, at least insofar as Tokyo is concerned. Could even be as high as 1-in-25.
Are there any studies on the correlation between attractiveness and TFR? For men, it’s probably positive, but possibly not for women. Attractive women have better things to do then raise children and more worried about destroying their bodies in pregnancy. Maybe we’re not only getting dumber but also uglier.
People forget just how big a deal Japan was in the recent past. Their nominal GDP peaked at 75% of America’s in 1995, with less than half the population and a tiny fraction of the resource base. And I’m talking about total GDP, not per capita. Their per capita GDP levels were over 50% higher than American levels at their peak, and even higher relative to Germany, the U.K. etc. The peak was 5 years after the bubble burst, and well into the early 2000s Japan was considered one of the 3 great economic poles on earth, along with the USA and E.U. Now it’s an afterthought, it’s amazing how fast things changed. But whatever else you say, their system was certainly optimized for economic development.
I think what happens in Asia is like the story of a bucket of crabs, where as soon as one is about to climb out, the other crabs pull it back in. This is happening to S Korea now, their growth is lower than the USA or Canada or Australia with nominal GDP per capita still not much better than half of those countries. There is a niche that East Asia occupies, it’s more than big enough to have made Japan an economic superpower, but it’s a niche that’s has become heavily fought over, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, S Korea, Japan, SE Asia to an extent.
No one can continue that kind of intense effort forever.
After the war Japan needed to “prove” itself, and now it’s more chilled out and relaxed, and a more enjoyable place.
The Japanese I meet these days are some of the happiest and most chilled out people there are. The “Satori generation”.
China is the “latest” to go through the “prove myself” phase – they’ll get pretty high than chill out too and learn to live again.
Everyone goes through these up and down cycles.
America is partly emerging into a chilled out phase too.
I have real world experience with Japan and with Japanese women, along with women from other parts of Asia, so I kind of can’t let this conversation go. Japanese women are more easy, kinky and generally more casual than other Asian women, but they are not easier than Americans or Western Europeans. If anything, a bit harder. The culture has become noticeably more conservative and risk-averse compared to the late 90s and early 00s. Not even close to 1% of women were ever involved in porn. In fact S Korea became a notable exporter of prostitutes to the USA, Australia and elsewhere in the 21st century, while for example in Japan these days most prostitutes are not even Japanese, they tend to be mainland Chinese or SE Asian.
What is true is Japanese lack a lot of the sexual hang ups you find in the West or rest of Asia. They don’t have the monotheist “sex is dirty/bad” thing, and don’t have the 3rd world cultural residue that you find even in the rest of developed Asia.
The planet is already massively over-populated with people, to the detriment of all other species, save rats, bed-bugs and cockroaches. How many do you want?
Naturalization in Germany is pretty difficult for people who are on social welfare. I think it also requires that you renounce your original citizenship. There is also no birthright citizenship. Which is why afaik over half the Turks there are not yet German citizens.
So do you have a source on masses of these refugees being naturalized citizens?
What causes the recent explosion in auto-immune diseases?
There is a discussion about the possible effects of the covid spike protein in this podcast with Bret Weinstein, Robert Malone (a pioneer of mRNA vaccines) and Steve Kirsch. ( ie not internet crazies)
Skip to 2 hours 18 mins
https://odysee.com/@BretWeinstein:f/how-to-save-the-world,-in-three-easy:0
I think the const/benefit for young people of the vaccine is looking questionable. And especially so if ivermectin proves to be effective, which is discussed earlier in the rather long podcast (3hrs at normal playback speed).
There was one famous Hungarian porn producer who went bankrupt maybe a decade ago, he blamed internet piracy. I also suspect that he was unwilling to move from “vanilla” porn to more extreme fetish/pervert porn like BDSM and similar. I don’t know if there are other local studios (this one guy probably was unique in looking for media attention), but probably I’m not an expert here. However I’d imagine that girls would now benefit from EU free movement, so are you sure it’s not a decade old obsolete map? Why wouldn’t a Slovak or Croatian slut not just move to Hungary, or even better, just drive there for the shooting and then go back home in between two movies?
Anyway, then this measure says nothing about the chastity of girls in these countries. OnlyFans girls don’t need studios or any similar infrastructure, but they are apparently not captured here. Then there’s regular prostitution.
Yes, I think that’s basically accurate. Japan was able to be the “quality manufacturing powerhouse”(and according Perrin’s Giving Up the Gun, was able to manage to mimic a vision of this even in the Renaissance era). However, that niche is easily contested by other Asian countries and some of strengths of their society work against them for adaptability.
But I disagree that it was ever optimized by the fact that they had such low female employment and entrepreneurship was so difficult, with extensive backroom deals and zombie corporations; I’ve had a lot of experience as well, and there’s clear feudal underpinnings which do not contribute to capitalism, and of course, the entire setup of the job market is still weird even to this day, with a huge amount of emphasis placed on job placement after college.
I worked pretty extensively with Japan and Japanese companies – put in several years in two megacorporations, plus online hobby work, etc, and its just not really designed around capital maximization, and feels like it never really was. There’s not even that much business transparency to permit that, so it has a hard time competing against nations with similar niche-filling capacities.
Ah, your usual nonsensical ramblings independent of any useful evidence or engagement with reality.
Okay, that’s possible.
You’re right that Japan is not a classic capitalist country. But from memory, their female labor force participation rate has now exceeded that of the USA. And there was a big entrepreneurial explosion after WW2, and although my knowledge of this is more limited, in the Mieji (late 19C) period as well.
My knowledge of Asia is skewed toward Japan and S Korea, and comparing these two, S Korea has plenty of business and cultural dysfunctions as well. Ironically China today seems more purely capitalist, but I’m just not very familiar with greater China (including Taiwan and HK). I do notice that Taiwan and HK are not very high up when it comes to median salaries, even by the low standards of developed Asia. From a NY American perspective, current nominal Japanese salaries verge on 3rd world, and S Korea is a developed country only as a sort of affirmative action charity case. I mean clearly a lot of things are made in S Korea (and certainly in mainland China), but when I go to S Korea, I see shitty rundown concrete buildings outside of a few central districts and white collar salaries on par with what illegal immigrants make in NY.
Good post, we do have some data on these trends, in terms of naturalisation, Germany averaged 114,700 in the years 2016-20, of these 37,100 on average were citizens of the EU or the UK, so in terms of non EU and non UK citizens being naturalised, Germany is running an average of around 77,600 a year, or around 0.93/1000.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/auslaenderstatistik-stichtag.html;jsessionid=525CBDFBEECE66A1BD2A5EAB3D4D4424.live731
We also know what Germany’s ethnic makeup is because fortunately unlike many countries, the German stats office does keep data on ethnicity by age, among the 0-5 age cohort, this is the cohort that will be the core of the population many decades from now and tells us about the future demographic makeup of Germany in the middle of the century, 13.6% of 0-5 year olds were of Bosnian, Kosovo, Turkish, African and Asian descent in total as of 2019, you have to subtract Kazakhstan as most Germans of Kazak origin are actually ethnic German. The German stats office includes Bosnia, Turkey and Kosovo in Europe so you have to break out those groups separately.
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoelkerung/Migration-Integration/Publikationen/Downloads-Migration/migrationshintergrund-2010220197004.pdf;jsessionid=525CBDFBEECE66A1BD2A5EAB3D4D4424.live731?__blob=publicationFile
A further 7.7% of 0-5 year olds had no determined ethnic origin but that is normal, you see this in census data as well, these 7.7% likely reflect the existing known ethnic composition of the population, some of these 7.7% are mixed ethnicity, German-Italian etc so they cannot be determined.
Nonetheless, among the youngest cohort, 0-5 year olds, Germany is at the very least 79% European if we assume all 7.7% undetermined are non-Europeans, more likely it is around 82-84% European, although only 60% ethnic German, Germany is not getting much less European but the ethnic Germans are being increasingly displaced by Romanians, Poles, Italians etc.
Among 20-25 year olds, the share on Non-Europeans is actually higher at 16.6%, the reason their share is lower among younger cohorts is because many of these immigrants in their 20’s are men and men cannot have children as is generally acknowledged, at least outside the SJWsphere.
Kami-sama bless them.
Well, the nice thing is, existence remembers too, and it pays everyone back for their sins, somewhere, at some point (especially the sins of apathy and inhibiting others advancement.)
The charm of Japan for me is that for a long while, they didn’t give a shit about what Americans and westerners thought about them. Of course they wouldn’t put it in such a vulgar way. But they genuinely didn’t care, not as a defensive nationalism, but from a position of strength. They always felt a bit inferior person-to-person, but there was an unquestioned confidence in Japanese high-tech, competence, hard work, educational levels. And after all bank accounts didn’t lie. They made more money at current exchange rates, their companies were very strong for quite a while, Made in Japan was a byword for quality and technology. This has faded to the point of being a history lesson, but it’s recent enough that I am not so old yet have personal experience with this world.
You enjoy your striving phase, and I – and the Japanese – will enjoy our chilled out contentment phase 🙂
It’s a big beautiful world, and there is room for everyone doing their own thing according to where they individually are at.
The rest of the world sorta exist to them, but its not very important. Its pretty funny. Every time something of theirs is successful in the rest of the world, I remember, the writers often seem amazed that there’s a world outside that exists.
But I think one thing I discovered is that its not just “nationalism.” Even internally, their worlds are so wrapped up in cliques and small groups that their attention span is primarily focused on such rivalries. There’s a general feel that they live in intensely personal bubbles, compartmentalized in rivalries between doujin circles, or rivalries between directors and their corporate fiefdoms, etc. Even Japan-wide considerations are sort of secondary.
I’ve felt some of that in Korea as well, with existence very much focused on very personal details and rivalries, but the Korean government seems to be more involved and sympathetic to small business. One of my side projects is a Korean indie game which has government funding(including the unwritten hilarious requirement that it “cannot have a sympathetic or positive portrayal of Japan”).
Yes absolutely, the rest of the world might as well not exist in Japan. It reminds me of some
Star Wars movie, I forgot which one, where one character mentioned that the Empire was declining, but the other said something along the lines of “it’s still warm in the heart of the empire”, in reference to the city planet capital. If you are outside of Japan and reading about it, it’s declining and irrelevant. But if you’re a regular or even elite Japanese person living in Japan, you hardly ever even notice the existence of a world outside of Japan. This was stronger 20 years ago, but it still exists today.
My main impression about S Korea is that it is very very status oriented. Confucian, much more so than China. They want to succeed on a personal level, become rich, but as a status thing. This extends to international relations where it is a question of what is Korea’s position? Has it finally overtaken Japan for real? SE Asia is so shitty compared to us. Are we one of the great peoples of the world? Only Germany can compare to us? That sort of thing.
Japanese on the other hand don’t acknowledge the rest of the world’s existence. And they are much more ok with being regular people. There is no shame to being a regular person. It’s preferable. Strivers are untrustworthy, (often physically) disgusting (kimochi warui) even if they succeed.
Koreans have their own different dysfunctions. It’s a smallish country dominated by a handful of large companies that squeeze out all opportunity for anyone else. There’s an entrepreneurial streak that always seems on the verge of breaking out but ends up getting crushed most of the time. Success and life trajectory are dictated by what university you go to even more so than in Japan.
That was after an agreement to depreciate the dollar to the yen. Not a good thing for Japan. Japan’s high growth period ended in the 80s. So while Japan’s nominal GDP might have topped in 1995 that doesn’t properly represent the economical situation as that was already half a decade past Japan’s prime.
Yeah Japan was overall more prosperous and important in 1989 than in 1995, but the fact that a small island chain off the coast of Asia made up 18% of global GDP in 1995 is quite impressive. And this was 10 years after the Plaza accord of 1985 which you are referring to. The high yen took on a life of its own after that accord and remained high for reasons beyond American pressure for a long time.
Incidentally there are all sorts of other stats that show just how crazy Japan was at its peak. In 1990, the Tokyo stock exchange represented 50% of global market capitalization, and the Osaka stock exchange pushed London to 4th place. 9 of the worlds 10 largest banks were Japanese that same year. The Tokyo imperial palace (sitting on a bit more than 1 sq km of land) was estimated to be worth more than all the real estate in the entire state of California. Sure it was a bubble, but what a bubble it was!
Should have been less believing of any “evidence” provided by both sides. Let me retract my seeming belief in what Karlin gave me in the reply.
Final verdict – any effect on fertility by vaccines will be seen in 5-10 years, and will be heavily masked by the effects of systemic failure (not just lockdowns), post-Soviet style.
Its been suggested that Work From Home policies and people moving from urban cores to suburban or even rural areas will make raising children easier.
Possibly, however the massive economic damage that working from home causes will create such fear and uncertainty that people won’t want to have children even if child-rearing becomes easier.
I agree that the Japanese corporate and governmental elite which I met (often socially, so I don’t know all the work details) came across as very unimpressive. Set in its ways, complacent, closed minded. The clique thing you mention, isn’t that true of all office politics though? In the USA just as much as in Japan?
I think an American admiral in WW2 said something like “Japanese soldiers are some of the best in the world, but Japanese generals are the worst.” I deeply agree with this. The average Japanese is just about the best average person in the world, hard working, sincere, honest. But the Japanese elite, the Tokyo University grads, pale in comparison to American elite, and are a lot more closed minded and inflexible than their Korean counterparts.
We don’t even have to limit ourselves to the 40 years ceiling.
Firstly, as the age pyramid shifts, there are corresponding growths in certain AV subgenres.
https://imgpile.com/images/NCyACc.png
https://imgpile.com/images/NCyLVN.png
Also, if a woman only did a couple of flicks in the 1990s or early 2000s when she was way younger, then today she’s also just another inconspicuous milf.
http://minsan.ru/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Yukata-Fashion-Harajuku-13-007-600×900.jpg
It is quite credibly claimed that Japan has the largest porn industry in the world on a per capita basis. The link I previously posted said 20,000 videos per year, and 6000 new “actress” debuts per year. There’s nothing about these numbers to provoke suspicion. They seem reasonable, given the infamy of the Japanese pornography market, and given the fact that a video can feature more than one “actress.”
…And those numbers are from 2012, nearly 10 years ago. Things may have gotten worse since.
Those numbers also doesn’t take into account magazines, which are very popular in Japan. Every convenience store has a sizable print pornography rack, right next to the manga rack — and you know that you can’t walk a single city block without stumbling across one, nor is there any rural town so deserted that it lacks a convenience store. It also doesn’t take into account amateur stuff, e-whoring a la OnlyFans, etc.
So if those numbers are true, the notion that 1% of appropriately-aged Japanese women have ever been involved in pornography may still be a high estimate, but it’s clearly not ridiculous. The real number isn’t that much lower, and is probably higher than 0.1% — so we’re not off by an order of magnitude. I’d bet it’s between 0.4% and 0.8%.
It is still difficult for me to let go of the world in which Sega Megadrive was the epitome of smooth futuristic cool, and just saying names like “Toshiba”, “Toyota”, “Panasonic”, “Sony”, “Yamaha”, “Fuji”, “Suzuki”, “Mitsubishi”, “Nikon”, god they’re burned in my generation’s brains forever. “Sharp”, “Canon”, “Nintendo”, “Casio”, “Daihatsu”, “Hitachi”, “Kawaski”, “Kenwood”, “Seiko”.
What I did not realize at the time, and almost nobody did, that the late-1990s sudden stop of Japan was in fact a visible manifestation of a sudden stop and stagnation across the whole Western system. Only Western Europe and the Anglosphere could camouflage it with fiscal b.s. and immigration.
What we see in Japan is a “pure” reflection “in vacuum” of what is happening with say America, England, and Germany, if you take away the masking effect of relentless importation of foreigners and constant clamor of a cultural revolution. You stop paying attention to the bullshit and only look at the basics, you see that “everyone is Japan”. Everyone stopped around 1998. Even pop culture stopped.
The question is who simply held on to their achievements, and who began an ugly regression.
???
Merryn Somerset-Webb says the only difference between Japan now and in the eighties, when she lived there, is they have much better construction, houses aren’t cheaply and rapidly put together. Japan deliberately keeps a low profile after the Japan bashing in the early nineties in the US, they are still wealthy enough to drop a small fortune on strawberries and other produce.
He’s being facetious. Most white women look tranny from the day they are born.
In my nation, 1998 is also close where culture took a turn for the worse which manifested itself in 2008/2009 and one of the worst economic crises in history. It was around 1998 where the low hanging fruit of economic and social reform of the previous 20 years was picked. From 1998, government debt began its inexorable rise to disaster resulting in an enormous property bubble. Of course, everyone was blissfully unaware of the rot sinking in. Fertility continued its downward spiral and Greek women even starting dating foreigners. Worst of all, Anglos. Men increasingly became neutered and effeminate. Geopolitically, the second Simitis government made some inexplicable concessions to the Turks which we are paying for today. Culturally, all the more artistic icons of the past, Elytis, Ritsos, Theodorakis, Plessas, Spanos, Nikolopoulos, Mousafiris had either died or were to old to contribute and new ones were just not coming through. The ones that were coming through continued the trend to the internal world of feelings rather than the fate of the ethnos. Popular music (laiki) went full throttle to Westernisation to the point where the bouzouki and associated instruments are today just for show rather than front and centre of composition and execution. I could go on but what is the point.
The best sex I ever had was in my homeland. But many women here are rather timid and chaste, and really good mother material. Although, a libertine like me attracts the former sort.
This is a character trait born out of centuries of being ruled by shitty regimes. Recatholisation, rule by the Germans, the Schwarzenbergers and Lichtensteins. Pushing Catholicism by force, repressing freedom, the Nazis, the Bolsheviks. Also education that is more about obedience to the ruling regime rather than about creativity. Education that persists since the Habsburg times. The Czechs are taught to shut up and listen rather than to think for themselves. This breeds a culture of individualism. The society does not care, and I do not care either. The point of life is to create your own universe, where you can feel personally free. Go fishing, spend time in the woods, play with your children and grandchildren, build a huge wall around your house, mine looks like a small castle, like I am preparing for the Mongols to invade. A row of trees blankets my place from onlookers. Mind your own business, and everything will be fine…
I do not think it is socially unacceptable. Yeah, the people will talk about it, and criticise it but it will not destroy your career, and ultimately nobody gives a fuck if you were featured in couple of flicks to pay rent during studies or after. And the pornstars do not become less desirable because of that among the male population.
Half a year back I stumbled on some Pakistani online magazine, where a columnist was lamenting how the robust 1980s and 1990s Pakistani pop culture has disappeared.
He gave various opinions on the hows and whys, but was like most sensitive people with taste–aware that in their country something has happened, but not yet aware that this is in fact a global phenomenon.
Unfortunately I can’t find the article or magazine (forgot the name, for one) but here what the Internet tells me right now this minute about Paki pop culture:
https://www.desiblitz.com/content/20-top-pakistani-pop-singers-and-their-music
https://www.dawn.com/news/1093337
The quoted years are different, but the diagnosis is the same. And I think that anywhere in the world people (adults) will say the same about their national pop culture, with the exception of the Anglosphere, where they cling to the delusion that their films, TV, and music are not complete shit. In this sense they are the most dishonest ones. Everyone else more or less freely admits that especially over the last decade talent was sucked out on a planetary scale, and any meaningful evolution of pop culture stopped another decade before that.
Truly a mystery. And of course this affects all spheres, not just pop culture. Economy, politics, science, infrastructure, etc.
Once the last generation of competent men and women who are now between 60 and 80 step down across the world, whatever will happen?
I kind of blame plastic and fast food. It’ll turn out the endocrine disruptors actually made everyone into emotionally stunted retards with barely functioning gut flora and nervous systems. Also the Internet and mobile phones, in some way. The timeline fits. The moment the Internet and mobile phones appear, pop culture stops evolving. Ten years later, and the Internet and smartphones become what they are today, even the stagnating situation starts to unravel fast.
No, there’s office politics everywhere but in the US and elsewhere, the effort usually is to attempt to reduce the amount of intra-office rivalry and try to maintain transparency in say, data or documentation. And the ultimate mission state is the fiduciary responsibility to the stakeholders, so things that get in the way of that are at least seen as morally disapprovable.
Japan has a strange degree of respect for “rivalry” and since there’s also the notion that one’s coworkers are also supposed to be friends, this ends up building literal fiefdoms(usually headed by a director, often from an old family, so it slips into a kind of feudalism) where people “protect each other” by hiding data, or by not cooperating with other departments. A lot of work thus gets duplicated, and there’s no strong sense of ultimate fiduciary responsibility, which is why layoffs get seen as some sort of social abrogation.
I mentioned this before, but a literal example of this is that codebases don’t get shared: people build their own libraries and either make no effort to cooperate with others for code libraries or occasionally actively sabotage others. Reinventing the wheel is the name of the game.
Its a kind of systemic issue built into the values of it, where hard effort is innately a kind of morality but striving individually is bad(so direct accountability to success is muddled), so people are always putting in a lot of effort, often kind of ritualized rather than measured for their clique, even when the ultimate results are really quite a bit less efficient than possible.
https://twitter.com/TrentTelenko/status/1403756495024668676
I’ve heard from friends that its less “mind your own business” but “become a small boss in your little department and then abuse the people below you, the way that the people above abuse you”, complete with widespread, extremely weird petty corruption: “I want a dam built, I can use the run off water to irrigate my vineyard.”
4D chess corruption!
High priced Japanese produce is not really a feature; it hits their own population just as hard and is driven in part by the high level of political power that rural Japanese areas hold.
Basically East Asia ate into their cake sufficiently. Even their aerospace industry is declining and there’s evidence that they’re losing capabilities in it.
https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/economics/article/3114486/mitsubishis-spacejet-fail-leaves-japans-aviation-dreams-tatters
Perrin’s book suggests that after Japan stopped needing guns as much and the government began a suppression campaign, the same high skilled artisans switched to making swords because it was much more profitable and in demand. The entire nation then promptly lost the capability of building guns, as workers died and lost their skills: something like that might be happening now.
No idea among the many hypotheses, although beware the effects of looking more and better for them, advocacy groups with agendas, and also social contagion. Even the old enemy of type I diabetes could be subject to more refined testing, looking for autoantibodies to distinguish it almost for sure from type II, but that diagnostic should have been developed decades ago based on what it requires and the available technology of say, the 1970s.
But I will note that like cancer, for the elderly something will get you sooner or later even as we suppress other causes of death and disease. Took my Silent Generation father until he was in his early 80s to get one although it’s been controlled, and I note rheumatoid arthritis is also one.
I’ve heard about what you are referring to, and the fact that it goes back at least to the pre-war period, when the Japanese Army and Navy were famously uncooperative. I don’t think this is a deal breaker so to speak in terms of economic or societal success. It just reduces very large corporations or groups into what are effectively a larger number of smaller units. Taiwan has a lot more small companies relative to S Korea, which is dominated by a few large conglomerates, but I wouldn’t say that that a priori makes Taiwan less successful. There’s more duplication in Taiwan, because after all each of those small companies have their own HR, R&D, whatever, but Taiwan is doing ok relative to S Korea. What I’m trying to say is duplication of effort by itself need not lead to failure, it can lead to more experiments being run so to speak, more chance of something somewhere working out.
The area where I think Japanese corporate (and state) governance fails more is in its insularity and risk-aversion. This is a newer development, Japanese companies took huge (stupid in hindsight) bets for example in the late 1980s, that burned the companies, burned banks, and put off the entire corporate sector from the sort of investment in new technologies (which they themselves had often invented) that the S Koreans ended up making, and rolling the Japanese consumer electronics sector.
Insularity is also relatively new, in the sense that the Japanese economy was very export focused from the 1950s through the 1980s. Starting after the Plaza Accords, Japan found itself with a suddenly enormous domestic market and non-stop harassment from the USA and Europe about trade surpluses. OK, let’s just focus more on our domestic market. And for a little while the Japanese domestic market by itself was able to provide Japanese multinationals with a global scale. Over time the market size shrank and shrank, a little, not a lot, every year, and you had the frog slowly boiling in the pot, until eventually Japanese companies became subscale and afterthoughts in sectors they dominated 15 years before.
It was the perfect storm for Japan. It’s still prosperous, in fact their nominal per capita GDP is still considerably more than S Korea’s or Taiwan’s, but where once they made 50% more than Americans, now they make 50% less, and even slipped behind Germany, heck even the UK and France. It went from seemingly on the cusp of world domination to not much richer than Spain in 30 years. This is all nominal, but nominal makes a difference. You don’t get PPP dollars or yen when you want to buy a foreign product, take a foreign trip, make a foreign investment if you are a company.
Pretty much accurate but only applicable to factories and department stores. My friend is a small boss in department store and abuses boyfriend.
I guess my overall take on Japanese petty corruption, facetime work culture, small inefficiencies, is that every developed country, certainly my own the USA, as well as Japanese competitors like S Korea, Taiwan, mainland China, have their own inefficiencies and corruption. My impression is that corruption is even worse in S Korea, it is certainly worse in China, and is very arguably worse in the USA, where we have the somewhat unique case of myriad perfectly legal forms of corruption, (and widespread asset stripping too!) – you don’t even have to break the law for your trouble.
From my personal experiences, the things that really struck me as uniquely and powerfully bad about Japan (from an economic or business point of view) are insularity, lack of knowledge or even interest in the rest of the world, perhaps the worst English proficiency on earth if you consider that even the Japanese elite feels almost no pressure to learn any foreign language, a deep risk and change aversion, and an arrogance in relation to the rest of Asia (with that arrogance having to a large extent faded now, but not before having done a lot of damage).
Not sharing codebases for example strikes me as certainly sub-optimal, but nuisance level in the grand scheme of things. Siloed departments that don’t get along – that’s bad, but not as bad as other things.
Taiwan had a higher per capita GDP than SK in the late 90s, but now SK’s per capita GDP is more than 50 percent higher.
Japanese GDP figures do not look so bad vs. the West when you compare them based to per working age capita.
I know I have been talking about nominal figures in all my posts, but Taiwan does have a very significantly higher per capita income at PPP than does S Korea. And there has been somewhat of a reversal of fortune recently with Samsung being Samsunged by the Chinese, it’s not the same world dominant company it was 10 years ago, while TSMC has taken the global lead in chips to the point where it is considered geopolitically key to Chinese / American rivalry. In my mind at least Taiwan and S Korea have a similar level of development – a step below Japan, which is itself economically a shadow of its former self.
Eh, the USA is also a shadow of its former self, perhaps more so than Japan.
My view in terms of development and civilian tech capability in Asia is as follows:
1) What Japan can do, SK can do
2) What SK can do, Taiwan can do
3) What Taiwan can do, China can do
4) What China can do, India can do
5) What India can do, Turkey, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines can do, and that’s the cutoff point.
However, as you go down that line, you start with “quality variation of X sold profitably”, which gradually morphs into “crappier variation of X sold profitably”, and then toward the end becomes “crappy clunky vanity project that’s a generation behind and makes no money unless you can bully someone to use it”.
I don’t know why he’s so stuck on this one data point of a “socially liberal” country (that also has extremely illiberal immigration policy, and probably many others, though I’m far from an expert) that is also somewhat irreligious having higher than usual first world fertility.
Everywhere else higher fertility among natives tends to track strongly with religiosity and broadly right wing values (and Czechia itself arguably conforms somewhat to the latter indicator anyway). Why should I be convinced that this outlier disproves observable trends everywhere else? Especially when Israel is an even greater outlier and fits these trends to a “T”? Israel has the highest TFR in the developed world, and also happens to have very mainstream movements of explicit religious and ethnic chauvinism.
At least this outlier could be looked at more granularly, can we be sure that a particularly stubborn right wing breeding segment isn’t driving a lot of their TFR advantage?
It’s interesting that France saw a moderate China Virus fertility drop, when the French are, I thinking convincingly argued by Karlin, to be the furthest along in adapting to modernity.
It’s like the German fertility is so low…that what little they have, is really solid. Like even a blown up, mild pandemic isn’t enough to scare the German mother out of having an additional kid, conditional on the fact that she is inclined to have an additional kid. The meek shall inherit the earth!
???
https://youtu.be/R4BTQCGLMnk
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Lee_Teng-hui_younger.jpg
https://imagesvc.meredithcorp.io/v3/mm/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.onecms.io%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Fsites%2F6%2F2019%2F11%2F000240283hr-2000.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Shui-bian
https://whatsonsukhumvit.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/thai-atm-meme-2-girls.jpg
Apparently I was wrong to an extent, it’s not that difficult to get German passports for residents. Still the vast majority of the recent Syrian etc. migrants have not yet been naturalized.
“East Asian women are obiectively the most attractive in the world”
Until they hit the wall and look like Chairman Mao with long hair. Yellow fever can make for dumb online comments.
The concept of a porn “star” is ridiculous. There is huge turnover in that business with many making just one or a few films so what qualifies them as a “star”? So anyone who has posted their photos or videos on Facebook, etc. is a ” Facebook star”, You tube star, Instagram star. There should be some specific definition as a “star” implies that someone is popular and successful. So maybe let’s say anyone who has made more than a million dollars out of porn in a “star”, and I’d think there are far fewer such in Czechia, Hungary, Japan or wherever than those statistics show.
It’s widespread common knowledge that Asians age the slowest of all the races (whites, the fastest). Your comment reflects the general stupidity and tendency to self-pwn that characterizes “anti-yellow fever” people.
This is a common enough misconception.
Extensive peer-reviewed research conclusively illustrates that when EA women hit the wall they in fact start looking like Steven Seagal.
https://content4.promiflash.de/article-images/video_1080/steven-seagal-in-lederjacke.jpg
https://flxt.tmsimg.com/v9/AllPhotos/1579/1579_v9_ba.jpg
But that’s not the issue. Every woman sooner or later starts looking either like Boris Yeltsin, or like Rod Stewart, or like Steven Seagal, or like Meat Loaf. The issue is WHEN does this transition happen–between 28 and 32, or between 38 and 42, or at menopause. With about half of EA women it’s menopause.
https://wanna-joke.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/funny-picture-asians-aging.jpg
Thus, if you don’t follow the current year degenerate life norms and “date age appropriately”, but instead do the reasonable thing and marry a 20 year old when you’re 40, when she hits menopause you won’t care.
But until then you’ll have been for decades and decades with a woman who looks, feels, talks, and smells like a woman. As opposed to turning into Phil Anselmo on the third year of marriage.