A steady stream of dismal reports have documented soup kitchens for the middle class, a surge in mental illness and suicide, a rise in abandoned children, a fall in the birthrate, and a healthcare collapse.
The burgeoning birthrate is just one of a number of reasons for worry.More recently, the country's harmony has been threatened by political strife.
The DPJ pledged to wrest control from Japan's powerful bureaucracy, rein in wasteful spending on public works and redirect about 10% of the national budget towards building a social safety net, including a children's allowance of roughly $250 per head, per family, which was intended to boost the nation's plummeting birthrate.
In arguing for a "libertarian approach" to fertility, Mr Quiggin seems to be implicitly assuming that Europe's birthrate is an exogenous variable, unaffected by the policies in question.
The party claims it has saved 400m births with the one-child policy; many demographers put the number at more like 100m, as the birthrate was beginning a sharp decline even before the policy went into effect in 1980.
They say it has prevented more than 400m births, saving the country from overpopulation; demographers dismiss this claim, and believe the birthrate would have declined significantly anyway as society grew richer.Now the policy is an unpopular relic of social control.
Only two countries are above the western European average: Slovenia, thanks to its wealth, and Turkey, because of its booming birthrate.
Eventually parents can decide for reasons of their own whether to take up the offer of childcare or to stay at home with their children.Christa Kirner Augsburg, Germany SIR —You report that Walter Mixa, a Catholic bishop, says that the proposed policy to encourage a higher birthrate in Germany "degrades women to birthing machines".
He has plotted the rate of increase in hundredth birthdays in Britain between 1910 and 1996, taking into account variations in the birthrate, and found that until 1946 the number of centenarians increased at a rate of just 1% per year.
"We see what's happening in the world," Mr Putin said cryptically on May 10th, in a speech otherwise focused heavily on the declining birthrate.
The collapsing birthrate means there are plenty of spare teachers too.Migration could, however, be made more efficient.
