Why does the economy need to continue to grow, especially in countries such as Japan where population is declining?
In: 56
The more people you have in your tribe, the more people you need to work in order to keep everything running smoothly.
As people are born, the tribe grows, so you always need more people doing work. This means more total work hours are being done. Look at that last part as economic growth.
Now, in a declining population, you may not need as many work hours to keep things running smoothly (this may not be true though because you may have made things while your population was at peak that your declining population struggles to maintain. Think of Rome in it’s decline as it’s people sort of let the ruins that we discover today fall to… ruin.)
But the problem with Japan is that in addition to theri declining population, they also have an *aging* population. This means that as people in the tribe get older, people retire, and there are less workers. But there is still the same amount of people, so the tribe still requires the same amount of work hours to be done, but there aren’t as mamy people of working age to do them.
Latest Answers