Re the BBC report on Japan’s geriatrification, a reader writes:

Many of your birth-dearth arguments sound like you believe that these countries have birthrates of zero.And that’s obviously not the case. Just to take a look at countries whose demographics aren’t complicated by immigration (East Asia, Eastern Europe), they’re still making babies. They’ll just happen to have more old people around. How this will work out remains to be seen.

It doesn’t “remain to be seen”, it can be seen right now. That’s what that BBC report was about. In a society as skewed toward the elderly as Japan already is, why would a doctor go into obstetrics? In Japan, birthing is a dying business. And once that cycle begins it’s hard to stop. When disproportionate resources are devoted to the elderly, the shrinking pool of youth decides to go elsewhere. You mention eastern Europe: The young are already fleeing eastern Germany.

An ageing society would have problems all by itself, but an ageing welfare society is unsustainable. No pimply burger flipper wants to find himself trying to prop up entire retirement communities singlehanded, so young Japanese, like young Germans, will move to where the demographic odds are more favorable. In America, we talk all the time about doing this or that “for the children”. The best thing Europeans and Japanese could do for the children is shrink the state. But they won’t. And so the remains to be seen will not be a pretty sight.