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How to maintain the Japanese population?

This is a nice essay, by Alexandra Harney, on ways to address population decline in Japan. It goes a little sideways at the beginning-- it implies that the Japanese government could not focus on infrastructure projects and population maintenance at the same time, like they are mutually exclusive-- but makes standard and sound recommendations at the end.

Refreshingly, the author of the essay does not recommend reinforcing or returning to 'traditional family values'-- in other words, limited birth control and women out of the paid workforce-- as a means of addressing Japanese population decline. As the author and many others note, increased gender equity, supported through government policies, is good in and of itself and also tends to produce replacement-rate birth rates.

Links:

 Essay in The New York Times (December 15, 2012): Without Babies, Can Japan Survive? 
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