Granted, the US will not have an age distribution problem – yet – it will instead have a civil war problem once the economy has contracted sufficiently below the point of being able to support the growing load of a mostly unproductive immigrant population! No country can survive mass immigration – the US is merely an anomaly which will correct in time.

The Balkans will be your future.

Japans pension system has been in effect since 1961. Its called nenkin. The japanese wikipedia link is here: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%B9%B4%E9%87%91

Private companies here have maintained pension funds since roughly 1903.

go do some research.

While there are problems with the ’seishain’ (full employee) system, things are slowly changing, and there are even recruiting agencies who focus on getting freeters and inexperienced workers into full-time salaried positions, you can see their ads on every train in downtown tokyo.

I think an underlying aspect of this that goes under-reported is the gender aspect. Since the 1950’s america has fueled its economic expansion by bringing women into the workplace, while Japan has steadfastly resisted this. Part of the reason the full time employee system had to be cut back so hard is because the system is designed to provide for your wife and children. When you get married, your pay and benefits increase dramatically, when you have children they increase again. Eliminating these benefits would

Partly, the problem of removing these problems and working to minimize the gender gap is that this would not only be counter to custom but also to the government and industries attempts to raise the birth rate (companies give you reward money that gets progressively bigger for each succesive child for example).

What is interesting about the present problem is that the credit squeeze has, by contrast, been concentrated at the very top of the financial food chain due to severe (and justified) counterparty risk concerns. To me, this is one reason, and perhaps the major reason, why the present economic slow down has been surprisingly slow to phase in: small businesses who generate most hiring are still largely intact and haven’t yet been cut off by the banks. I have been waiting and watching for the last year for reports of credit rationing to small but game operators, but there hasn’t been much mention of this.

The losses at the top of the financial system spell severe recession. If we see the small and medium sized outfits who still have solid business contracts getting axed, we’ll know that we are months away from _depression_. That may not happen. But this is why I would be far happier if the Fed was working to keep the financial system as a whole going rather than coddling cancerous zombie plutocrats. We need the local banks to keep on funding small and medium sized businesses, who don’t do IPOs or sell bonds. And those local banks are going to have large commercial re losses, and will need close attention and support from the Fed and other regulators to make it through all this—but they are far down the list and off Bernanke’s screen. Too bad, for all of us. We can all live, and well, without Lehman’s and half the hedgies. Our lives will be far more straitened if local banks won’t fund basic business.

Yves, as someone who’s been servicing small business for more than 25 years, I couldn’t agree more. So things are more stressful at the individual level.

And wouldn’t this create an economy that is more fluid and efficient? IMHO, there’s more ground level migration of talents and skills towards those areas where they are most needed, since there are more opportunities(because of the ubiquity of small biz), and just as much moving away from areas that are over-supplied or are slowing down.

Yes, just about all job creation in the US for some time (at least the last 5 years) has been among smaller businesses.

Culturally, the Japanese tend not to be entrepreneurial, but my understanding is that more Japanese than before are trying to establish new businesses. I have no idea how significant that activity is in aggregate.

However, entrepreneurship is not all it is cracked up to be. 90% of new businesses in the US fail in the first five years. The line between self employment and unemployment is less clear than most realize. Many of the people I know who are self employed would rather be on a payroll (provided the work and income were decent).

Small businesses are likely to have a rough time this downturn. They are very dependent on credit cards for financing, and the bigger small businesses tend to rely on local banks. I have heard stories of banks yanking credit lines to solid businesses that have always paid on time.

Then agan, maybe the grass is always greener…

You’re correct, my statements were off given the context of the discussion. I was addressing issues related to aged distribution. Trying to say “it will be different here, than in Japan.”

I misread one of your points. Thanks for the correction.

Healthcare is socialized in Japan. Further, there never were pensions in Japan. Very poorly researched.

Um, with a baby bust, you’d expect robust demand for younger workers plus a need to have people work into what would normally be their retirement age to keep the ration of workers to total population in some reasonable range. Instead we are seeing young people having trouble finding work, even with low minimum wages/

Long winded way of saying this particular problem is not one of demographics.