A quick google suggests ~18% of their working age people do not have jobs, which naturally could be shifted by incentives like money or training.
(Edit, because people are confused, I'm not talking about unemployment rate, i'm talking about labor non-participation rate as a measure of people who could be enticed into the workforce with a living wage)
> It's a coveted job to be a New York City san man. When they last gave the qualifying test, 30,000 people took it. The General waited five years after passing the exam before a job came open, which is typical. And though the work is grueling, the pay-- if you're actually on a truck-- starts at $40,000 and can go to $60 after just five years. [note: this is in 2003 dollars!] A good winter, meaning one with lots of overtime for clearing snow-- they clear snow, too-- can make for a $90,000 year for a senior guy.
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/249/garbage
These guys are/were unionized, which certainly helps.
Now they have the trucks that dump the bins without getting out of the truck. The driver's make $18/hr.
The same argument applies to any job: in most scenarios, it pays what it's worth to society at the market clearing price. The government can interfere via licensing, minimum wages, quotas, etc; but broadly the job pays what it's worth.
> … the most effective way to distribute wealth?
Nobody said this is a template for every problem, opportunity or other situation in economics.
This includes early retirees, full time students, home makers and people unable to work for health related reasons.
Edit: btw I agree there's more to life than work. But when you're unemployed and hoping for work, competing against robots and LLMs is quite crushing.
Why would the students want to have to do two full-time tasks at once?
Why would the homemakers want to add another full-time task?
Why would the people with cancer want to have to work from their hospital bed?
There's more to life than work. Get a hobby! Hope and purpose doesn't have to come from menial labor.
I think having employment delivers some of the higher needs to a subset of people, but it is a privileged few. A huge number work just to provide the basic needs. Advocating using the advances in automation to raise everybody up is what we need. Instead we seem to be maintaining a system that gives a few what we want and the rest of us are too busy with the survival part to influence that change.
Allow me to translate into a language you can understand: The people who are all “unemployed” are actually performing valuable services like maintaining the future labor pool, learning how to become skilled workers, and so on. These people should not have a second job, they should be paid for the valuable services they’re providing.
If I was made to lamp street lamps 5 years after incandescent street lights were invented, while not working on any way forward, I'd probably fall into a deep existential crisis.
Ofc people dont want to become human fax machines (Morse decoders) nowadays, it would feel absurd.
But also if a role allows someone to feel satisfaction in accomplishment and in being an active member of a society it can be meaningful. For example tidying up streets/yards in low income neighborhoods can make the place look much better and you can feel like you're serving folks who are in need.
Only 2% of our efforts as a society go to getting food out of the ground.
The reason to have a job, to own property, to earn and spend money, to reproduce and fight in wars, it seems, is to maintain a valid stake in the whole game lest your masters designate you an undesireable.
For said master the more viable the alternatives to humans become, the more all those excess humans start to look like a liability.
Virtually all that don't work don't want to and don't need to or simply can't.
As the article we're commenting points out Japan has a labor shortage.
Instead, in Japan you can get someone from Vietnam, China, or Thailand to do that for a couple dollars a day with Gulf style guestworker rules.
Additionally, Asian societies don't have the same Luddite aversion to automation [0] that seems to have taken over Western mindshare as can be seen on HN.
They don't want Westerners nor are they opposed to Dirigiste style industrial policies that help build a public-private social safety net by commercializing and deploying automation.
Who do you think SoftBank and MUFG's largest LP's are lol.
Edit: can't reply
> I'd highly recommend watching Perfect Day by Wim Wenders. It's a really sweet film
It is! But for every Hirayama there are dozens of ASEAN and Chinese migrant workers doing menial work as part of the JETRO Trainee guest worker program.
> NYC sanitation dept...
Sanitation Engineers aren't janitors.
Janitors, fish cleaners, farmworkers, bricklayers, service staff, and other low and unskilled work is what is being supplemented by foreign workers and depending on the job by automation.
> So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there
What's with this kind of orientalism?!?
Japan's Labor Ministry literally has a strategy around hiring foreigners for cleaning and janitorial services [1] due to persistent labor shortages.
And if we want to go that route of shallow orientalist sterotypes, Japan is also a society where whether you or not you attended a Teidai/Sokei/Hitotsubashi/TokyoTech/Ivy/Stanford, whether you have a Government or big corporate job, and whether you will be able to afford a house and have kids by 35 matters.
There's a reason Japan's birth rate crisis is overwhelmingly impacting the lower tier of Japanese society [2].
[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/10/15/how-people-aro...
[1] - https://www.mhlw.go.jp/content/11130500/001567071.pdf
[2] - https://news.yahoo.co.jp/expert/articles/11d033af448e404c3f5...
"Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo, lives his life in simplicity and daily tranquility. Some encounters also lead him to reflect on himself." -- https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27503384/
https://www.reddit.com/r/DSNY/comments/1rwayil/what_was_the_...
People will clean garbage and shit for a DB pension, stability, not sitting at a desk, and avoiding corporate politics.
All of these things are easier to give to sanitation workers because human waste is a recession-proof good and it's less affected by boom-bust. Many people want these jobs.
If you're a tech worker that likes a clean office and new technology this is boring.
But I'm sure there's a sanitation worker going on a similar rant about how terrible the tech industry is.
So your argument might hold for other countries, but not for Japan. Cleaning is a pretty honorable thing to do there (and it's super-clean as people trash way less).
Status is ingrained in the culture. What you do, which neighbourhood you live in Tokyo, what school you went to and etc. matters a lot to a random person.
I wouldn't like doing it past the point of exhaustion for low wages and with poor treatment though.
2. Even if there was magically enough money and time to retrain people, they would still be short of workers.
As evidenced by the non arrival of across the board 10% rises in meal costs when tipping is banned.
TL;DR cost and price linkage is not amenable to simplistic claims about the impact on pricing.
Edit: can't reply
> I doubt many Chinese youths want to work for minimum wage in Japan
Chinese are the 2nd largest nationality of foreign agricultural and food workers in Japan [0].
As long as the median household income in China [1] remains below the minimum wage in Japan [2], members of the bottom half of Chinese society will continue to emigrate there, Korea, and other countries to work, that said not at the same rate as was seen a decade ago.
[0] - https://catalog.lib.kyushu-u.ac.jp/opac_download_md/4738336/...
[1] - https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202507/t202507...
[2] - https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%80%E4%BD%8E%E8%B3%83%E9...
This is what I did to reply to you.
You don’t have to say ‘ can’t reply’ then quote someone like that.
Context is preserved better the proper way but it’s not very discoverable.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...
This is basically the best in the world.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2...
Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.
You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories.
This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.
Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)
> ~18% of their working age people *do not have jobs*
Which is a correct interpretation of participation rate. His theory on the causes may be off, but his numbers weren't
Regarding immigration, Japan is actually making it a lot stricter now. Not sure how that will play out.
Specifically in this conversation, if Japan can use physical AI and robotics to create X goods and services, wouldn't it be better (for the Japanese) to divide X by the Y population of Japan, rather than Y + Z population of Somalia?
You're really overselling their capabilities.
See the "lost decades" or most recently, the hundreds of billions deployed for the failed hydrogen initiatives.
Of course that does make the issue more nuanced and harder to advocate for when we have all seen politicians don't usually push for long term solutions if their band-aid solution will outlast their term of office.
I said to myself to stop going, if there is no human staff left. On the other hand, small shops with good atmosphere are thriving.
Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35.
Who’s paying for your nursing home? Tax the robot’s income? Will your demographic replacements vote for that?
> Grunting out 2.6 babies before you’re 35.
–––
Someone called this a "belief."
There's a 10% to 4% probability that the average teenage girl will die from childbirth, given the cumulative risk of pregnancies in nations without modern medicine.
That's the default state of the human condition. Maternal mortality is frequent and 1 in 25 to 1 in 10 for women without modern medical interventions.
see: The probability that a 15 year old girl eventually dies from a pregnancy-related cause, assuming constant levels of maternal mortality and number of births per woman. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/lifetime-risk-of-maternal...
There's a reason why the more women become aware of the risks and downsides of pregnancy – the less likely they are to go through with it. Even when indoctrinated from the start. The only sane solution in an otherwise insane world is technological, external gestation / exowombs.
People used to die – frequently – from this "belief." And women still do.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/08/15/5-facts-a...
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fert...
> Dallin H. Oaks, the newly appointed prophet and president of the church, said that while birth rates within the church are higher than national numbers, they've still declined "significantly."
> Catholic University of America demographer Stephen Cranney crunched the numbers on the religion's families. In 2008, about 70% of Latter-day Saint women ages 18-45 had at least one child at home. In 2022, that number was 59%, a rate of decline mirrored in the American population at large.
Any uptick in birth rate in the US from first generation immigrants quickly reverts to the mean for subsequent generations.
The Fertility of Immigrants and Natives in the United States, 2023 - https://cis.org/Report/Fertility-Immigrants-and-Natives-Unit... - May 1st, 2025
Reproductive freedom (or rather, freedom from reproduction, and its costs and burdens) is culturally contagious.
That study has 7 to 12% error ranges for the LDS group. Even with that, the share of LDS women with a child at home is 50% more than non-LDS. Lastly, there's a huge difference in rate of decay when a group is at, above, or below replacement rate. If everyone's declining, but they're declining far slower, that still proves my point that the composition of these communities in 80 years could be far different if current rates hold.
Utah slides to No. 10 for fertility in U.S. - https://www.deseret.com/family/2025/04/07/utah-drop-fertilit... - April 7th, 2025
US Gen Zers and millennials are leaving the LDS church, data confirms - https://religionnews.com/2025/12/10/us-gen-zers-and-millenni... - December 10th, 2025
> In 2007, according to Pew, the LDS church retained 70% of childhood members in the U.S. (n = 581) In 2014, that was 64% (n = 661), and in 2023–24 it had declined still further to 54% (n = 525).
> That 54% current retention rate looks better than the GSS’ 38%, so that’s potentially good news for LDS leaders. But once again, we’re witnessing a clear drop from the fairly recent past. Both major U.S. surveys that track childhood affiliation are saying that more people are leaving than used to.
> What’s more, this is being driven by younger adults. In the general population, younger adults are noticeably more likely to have no religious affiliation than older adults — either because they’ve left religion or they grew up without one. It shouldn’t surprise us that it’s true in Mormonism as well.
So, the cohort leaving the church the fastest are the ones with fertility. What does this do to LDS fertility rate trends? It likely bends them downward.
For some people having kids crystallizes the importance of health, etc.
Japanese financial institutions massive capital positions across Asia, the US, and Europe which tend to be public-private ventures.
> Tax the robot’s income
Pretty much, in the sense that corporations and the Japanese government have spent decades working together to build a sovereign wealth model comparable to Singapore and the UAE's.
IIRC we don't have a sovereign wealth fund, but we should in order to provide a social safety net for our citizens, especially with all the uncertainties regarding the future right now.
From: https://x.com/AuthorJMac/status/1773679197631701238
As a species, we need to evaluate our attitudes to work. The quote above resonates at some level, but maybe there are some people who enjoy doing dishes and laundry, who knows.
Most people are just surviving. It is a constant battle between slaving away in jobs (and have healthcare tied to our jobs) we don't like and rest of our lives, including relationships, hobbies, even health. Most people do not have the time or energy to think about anything else other than just getting through the day.
Do we need a humaniform robot to move the clothes from the washer to the dryer? Maybe we just need smarter appliances.
This isn’t exactly a mystery problem, we’ve understood clearly how to educate humans well for quite a while. It’s just that doing it properly is “eXpEnSiVe” as if the alternative, isn’t quietly orders of magnitude worse, and more costly.
We're still basically warehousing those kids, and we can do better.
The robots? That's what we're discussing in this thread.
Some think of the kind of people who use Macintoshes for a living, and are therefore pretentious latte-sipping slackers who couldn't get a real job.
And various other negative stereotypes.
Additonally, Japan has spent decades thinking about this eventuality (at least since the 1970s), which is why Japan worked on the "Flying Geese" paradigm where Japanese public-private ventures would end up become major capital stake holders across Asia, the US, and Europe.
After entire generations are subsidized by ubi, the system will collapse on itself.
In the US, native tribes get ubi when they turn 18. The end result isn't happiness or prosperity.
Where developing countries have vendors on the streets, industrialized nations have vending machines instead, by pure economic and demographic necessity. The existence of an automation tool doesn't imply a human having to work harder somewhere else.
And why do you assume people would sit around doing nothing? I don't think that's a natural thing for most people to do.
How financial and social systems are set up seems to be very much a societal choice, unless it goes against some physical, basic economic or global trade limitation.
Interesting note on the native tribes though!
This is a myth; fact check please.
China is a deeper decline than Japan too, which will make their geopolitics volatile
The techno utopia we imagine is a world where nobody has to work. All our needs are taken care of and we live a life of leisure. But as long as there is ownership of the automated systems, those owners will hoard all the wealth generated by that automation.
Labor expenditures and taxes are the only times the wealthy have to share their wealth with the rest of us. If they succeed in disintermediating labor, and governments fail to tax them, the oligarchs will live a life of unlimited luxury while the rest of us die in poverty.
>while the rest of us die in poverty.
These can't be simultaneously true. If all of our needs are taken care of, that is the same thing as unlimited luxury. Someone hoarding wealth is not that important when everyone has everything they want. Society is already being helped by all of the needs they are fulfilling. We don't need to also take their wealth too.
combined with ridiculous cost of living, terrible work/life balance and incredibly xenophobic immigration policies.
Japanese people are, this is normal.
They look at what happens to people that aren't xenophobic and they don't want that.
Not all cultures are trigger happy with irreversible population replacement dynamics, and simply don't consider mass immigration as a viable option. This is completely normal too.
Unfortunately peoples lives are very short to see things play out in the long term, and in the long term cultures that are okay with population replacement dynamics are very likely anomalies.
They did sakoku before the technological means that would even allow them to see this was a thing. It's baked deep in the culture.
> japan is better than pussy thanks to it being strict on immigrants
pick whichever convenient
I'll pretend it's not sarcasm despite assuming it is.
Immigration changes the cultural profile of a region and increases cost of living, particular cost of housing.