December 13, 2004

Commoditization of populations

By Noel Sheppard
Twenty years from now, what might the world's most precious, depleting, natural resource be? Oil? Steel? Lumber? How about working—age adults who are still contributing to a nation's entitlement programs rather than receiving benefits from them?  Want to know how short the future supply of such people is?  Well, across the globe, nations like Japan, Australia, and Singapore are actually begging their child rearing—age population to procreate.  For instance, according to the Tokyo correspondent for the BBC: Japan currently has one of the lowest birth rates in the world. [And] the government says that unless the trend is reversed quickly, the shortage of children risks doing damage to the economy.  The decline in Japan's birth rate is so severe they have invented a word for it — 'shoshika', meaning a society without children.   Unless women here start having more babies, the population in Japan is expected to shrink more than 20% by the middle of this century. Nearly...(Read Full Article)