quote:"the number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed. Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head,"
Oh my stars.
It makes me curious, though - is Japan worried about low population growth?
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posted
I wonder if "devices" and "machines" are an - odd (?) translation.
Obviously it was offensive in the original Japanese, so maybe not.
And Kat, yes I think so - I seem to recall Japan has a declining birth rate, and it's less than 2 per family.
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The CIA fact book has the birth rate at 9.37 births/1,000 population with a 9.16 deaths/1,000 population and overall 0.02% population growth. (0 immigrants, according to that source).
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Wow, imogen - that is miniscule. That's very interesting. I wouldn't know how to encourage women to have more kids, although I'm loving what I hear about Germany paying women 70% of their pre-baby salary to stay home for the first few years. I can't even imagine how wonderful that'd be.
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That is incredible. I wonder if Germany offers it to men as well (edit: if they were to be the primary caregivers).*
We have the "baby bonus" here in Australia - $4000 per baby (tax free) on birth. In some ways not much, but in others, very helpful.
Of course, there are current events report every few months of "16 year olds getting pregnant just to get the baby bonus!!!!" - while it is sensational, it is probably sadly true in some cases.
* I've been getting interested in maternity/paternity leave in Australia, which is why I query it.
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I am not sure about the Germany story, but that's what the science-fiction reading computer guy on the metro said.
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And going on from that - from what I understand, for a lot of companies here, a mother can have maternity leave (usually 3 months full pay) without question, but a father can only have the same paternity leave if he can show he is the primary caregiver to the baby.
I think this distinction is wrong. I do not question the fact the the norm is women take leave, and look after babies. I don't even question that this could be biologically hardwired. But I don't think a father should be punished because the mother of his child may also be at home, whereas she would be entitled to full leave regardless of his status.
quote:Originally posted by katharina: I am not sure about the Germany story, but that's what the science-fiction reading computer guy on the metro said.
That strikes me as a wonderful first line for a story.
**
(My last post was written to follow on from the other one.)
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Huh. I thought that Japan had fallen into negative population growth. I wonder if it's risen lately.
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m_p_h: the CIA data is an estimate from some time in 2006, so its both very approximate and slightly out of date.
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I think that the baby leave for fathers is up to the organization...there is a guy at an agency here who is taking two months leave to be with his new baby, and I'm pretty sure the mother is home with the baby as well. I think that's wonderful.
quote:That strikes me as a wonderful first line for a story.
I must admit it was an odd conversation.
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: m_p_h: the CIA data is an estimate from some time in 2006, so its both very approximate and slightly out of date.
Right. Three or four years ago I know that they were really worried about negative population growth. Now I wonder if they were worried because they had negative population growth, or that it looked like they were headed toward negative population growth.
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Isn't the reason the US has a strong growth curve immigration? The influx of immigrants are what keeps us with an acceptable ratio of workers to retirees.
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Germany is such a lovely country with its socialistic policies. Pity, though, that a man who gets prostate cancer there has a 50% chance of dying (because he can't get the specialist treatment due to socialized medicene) as opposed to 20% in the USA.
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Thinking about it, not only is the quote wildly offensive (women are not machines), but it's wrong. What does Japan think about immigration?
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They don't like it, generally. They are a very, very homogenous culture and are looking to remain so. A large influx of immigrants from a different culture would have a far more profound and (from their perspective) deleterious effect than it would on countries like the U.S.
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Immigration to Japan is so difficult that it's nearly impossible. As a culture, they are extrmely xenophobic and honestly, pretty racist.
They have a lot of guest workers come to Japan from Brazil to do the menial factory jobs that the Japanese don't want to do, but they only let people of Japanese descent come and work in their factories.
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I suspect the quote lost quite a bit in translation.
I don't know about Germany, but in Norway you can get paid paternity leave for quite a while. And as for the prostate cancer, why, we're quite rich enough to pay you hardworking Americans to fix it for us, thanks kindly.
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quote:Originally posted by Phanto: Germany is such a lovely country with its socialistic policies. Pity, though, that a man who gets prostate cancer there has a 50% chance of dying (because he can't get the specialist treatment due to socialized medicene) as opposed to 20% in the USA.
How does that difference between the countries compare to the difference in risk of death from more common causes ?
*interested in your opinion
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"Germany...a man who gets prostate cancer there has a 50% chance of dying (because he can't get the specialist treatment due to socialized medicene) as opposed to 20% in the USA."
Germany and the US have so nearly the same prostate cancer mortality rate, ~173deaths per million men, that the difference is statistically meaningless.
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I think Finland has been paying women up to 80% of their pre-baby salary to stay home for two years, and then subsidizes pre-school education for women who choose to go back to work; they also have fully-paid universal maternity and paternity leave (and I think that a father can get the same 80% as the mother if he is the one who chooses to stay home, although only one parent can do it.) At least, that's what my Finnish friend says.
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quote:Originally posted by Phanto: Germany is such a lovely country with its socialistic policies. Pity, though, that a man who gets prostate cancer there has a 50% chance of dying (because he can't get the specialist treatment due to socialized medicene) as opposed to 20% in the USA.
Germany doesn't have socialized medicine. At least not in the same sense that Canada, the UK and Australia have socialized medicine. Germany has a combination of National Health Insurance and private health insurance which cover essentially 100% of the population.
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I LOVE Germany's health care system. I was hit by a truck in Germany, and I recieved excellent care and spent a week in the hospital, and my bill was $2500 for the WEEK + the ambulance. The doctors spoke English and were very kind and answered my questions. I've never had cancer there, but my experiences with the German health care system were very positive.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: I think that the baby leave for fathers is up to the organization...
Only if it's paid leave. I took paternity leave, and I had to force my school to allow me to do it. According to the Family Leave Act, either/both parents can take unpaid leave for up to twelve weeks, and the job must be there waiting for them when they return.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: I LOVE Germany's health care system. I was hit by a truck in Germany, and I recieved excellent care and spent a week in the hospital, and my bill was $2500 for the WEEK + the ambulance.
I'm not quite clear on whether you are quoting this as a huge amount of money, or very cheap. Clarify? Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Germany and the US have so nearly the same prostate cancer mortality rate, ~173deaths per million men, that the difference is statistically meaningless.
I don't know, aspectre. Given that Germany has socialized medicine and thus all patients should receive the same treatment, and the United States does not, and thus those with less money/insurance receive worse treatment, it's something worth mentioning at least. There are many potential conclusions to draw from that, if it's true at all (I imagine cancer doesn't favor one socioeconomic group over another, or one group with insurance over another).
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"I LOVE Germany's health care system. I was hit by a truck in Germany, and I recieved excellent care and spent a week in the hospital, and my bill was $2500 for the WEEK + the ambulance."
"I'm not quite clear on whether you are quoting this as a huge amount of money, or very cheap."
Cracked a bicycling helmet : $2000 for an ambulance ride and an exam. Less than an hour between the blackout impact and leaving the hospital to collect my bike for the ride home.
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The native US population (not native americans, but americans who were born here) is barely stable at 2.14 births per woman. The accepted "break even" rate is 2.1 births per woman. We've had threads on this before. I could probably google up these stats but I'm lazy.
Were it not for immigration, we would be shrinking. Like Japan is.
In the old days, little girls dreamed of growing up and being mommies. I think that's been overshadowed by dreams of careers these days. So we wait to have kids... but then we wait too long or it's simply never "the right time"...
If I had a little girl I'd tell her to find someone to settle down with early... preferably in her early-mid 20s... and not to wait... like I did.
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And yes, we are very worried about declining population growth. Japan has a highly overrepresented older population, due to baby booms in the past, declining birth rates, and an unmatched life expectancy (except for males; we are behind Switzerland by a close margin). So there are more pensioners for every young working person.
The government projections put the population of Japan in 2050 at 100,593,000 as opposed to 127,756,000 in 2005.
quote:From the eighteenth century through the first half of the nineteenth century, Japan's population remained steady, at 30 million-plus citizens. However, following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, it began expanding in tandem with the drive to build a modern nation-state. In 1926, it reached 60 million, and in 1967, it surpassed the 100 million mark. However, Japan's population growth has slowed in more recent years, with the annual pace of population growth averaging about one percent from the 1960s through the 1970s. Since the 1980s, it has declined sharply. The population figure of 127.76 million released in the 2005 Population Census was below the 2004 population estimate (127.78 million). This marked the first time since World War II that the population has fallen compared to the previous year, and the beginning of a population decline in Japan.
And as a side note, while it might not be so important in this case, it's not always a good idea to use Xinhua as a news source on Japan. Xinhua is the PRC's state press service.
Some alternatives are the English Japan Times and the Asahi newspaper. Note for example that the Japan times article quotes the minister as:
quote:The number of women aged between 15 and 50 is fixed. Because the number of birth-giving machines and devices is fixed, all we can ask for is for them to do their best per head, although it may not be so appropriate to call them machines.
(my emphasis)
whereas the PRC version cuts that last bit out, as airmanfour has noted.
Not to say that the newspapers I listed are totally objective, but you can count on Xinhua to have a slightly anti-Japanese bias.
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Interestingly, Phanto, that statistic could be at least partially explained by the rate of diagnosis being higher in other countries.
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quote:But for millions in the United States, the news just got a little bit better. Death rates for those suffering from cancer are actually beginning to drop. In particular, death rates have declined for the four most common forms of cancer: lung, colorectal, prostate and female breast cancers. Overall, fewer U.S. citizens died of cancer than at anytime in the past 70 years.
Phanto, people are dying of other things than cancer now in the US. That is why the expected lifespan is getting shorter. People aren't living as long, and that's one big reason why they aren't living long enough to die of age-related cancers. They are also dying earlier of cardiovascular problems than before, in good part due to the epidemic of Type II diabetes -- and we expect this to just worsen in the near future. So they are getting extra sick from other things, extra faster.
Diabetes, by the way, is best treated by reliable access to a steady provider, as is cardiovascular disease in general. That's one of the reasons that our fragmented system doesn't do as well with the diseases that are the main cause of problems.
---
Edited to add:
Look, most men aren't going to die of prostate cancer. Most men are going to die of cardiovascular disease. If you had to pick one over the other, pick the system with better cardiovascular outcomes, as that will affect far far more people.
Otherwise, with the blanks filled in with what you imply above, it's like saying,
"Sure, hundreds of thousands of people are dying more quickly from strokes and heart attacks. But look at these hundreds of guys with prostate cancer -- they are living longer [debatable, BTW, but for argument's sake], so the people under this other system are doing better."
Top Ten list of causes of death: 1. Ischemic heart disease ......... 21% 2. Cerebrovascular disease ........ 7%
(i.e., heart attacks and strokes)
Prostate cancer doesn't even make the top ten list. I mean, not that having fewer men dying of it isn't a good thing (so long as they aren't dying sooner of something else, which they are, at least in part), but it isn't really a relevant way to judge national systems comparatively.
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