flynn23 wrote:
That is absolutely correct and within 20 years, Japan won't even be a Top 10 economic concern. A lot of other countries are facing the same problem, France, Germany, etc. The baby boom followed by a huge bust in population growth is the root cause. There's simply not enough workers flowing into the system to even take care of the boomers, much less replace or supplant their economic output. Because of this, you're seeing radical changes and investment. Japan is bent on creating robots to offset the problem. Germany is embroiling itself with relaxing its immigration policy. Meanwhile, the US is still clueless.

True, but i believe our birth rate is still steady. There's obviously some question regarding wether those births are going to develop into well trained, educated, productive adults or not, but that's more a question of educational policy in my opinion.

Much of Europe and Japan aren't going to have the option. Good for me, as an american who might want to work in japan, but not great for them. In the US, we have the babies, but I'm not completely optimistic about our ability to turn them into anything useful.

-k

RE: Bloomberg.com: Japan