Look around you.

Every weekend there is one group or another on the steps of parliament here demanding, essentially, the government be given more money and power.

I tend to agree that governments should do more, or less dependening how you look at it, to encourage stronger families with more kids and better opportunities for them to live locally.

By less I mean something like: ban abortion, and stop financially rewarding women for having children, and then more children, out of wedlock.

By more I mean something like: the obvious thing: reduce income taxes on a per child basis, and stop all land taxes, for everyone, but especially families.

The country will either have to change or it will disappear soon.

Most European countries have the same issue, but it is less visible due to immigration, which Japan does not have.

Yes, and? What will those "missing" children do in a stagnant economy except contribute to watering down already low wages and increasing pressure on housing?

>The country will either have to change or it will disappear soon.

Massive doomerist over-exaggeration. Japan will be fine. Not an imperialist world super-power, but the Japanese people will be OK, better than 80% of the world's population.

>Most European countries have the same issue, but it is less visible due to immigration, which Japan does not have.

Yes and long term European countries will be worse off than Japan, due to the ethnic and cultural replacement and racial clashes and crime caused by their immigration policies. Japanese travel to Europe on vacation a lot, saw what imigration looks like, and don't want that. They'd rather stay a stagnant/shrinking but homogenous, safe and peaceful nation, rather than have a growing population of foreigners that replaces them and causes crime.

What Americans/westerners fail to understand is that a nation's success, stability and long term future is more than its GDP and population number that must grow to the moon at all cost just to enrich the top 10% of asset holders while everyone else fights for the scraps, but it's the people and culture that made it great to begin with, not a faceless, borderless economic zone of corporations and workers. Nations that decline economically/demographically can always rebounce back(see post-WW2), but economic zones not so much, as when they fail, the corporations and migrants that came purely for economic reason, just move to the next economic zone, like locusts, since they have no ancestral ethnic and cultural roots tying them to that land incentivizing them to stick around through thick and thin and rebuild it.

And what do you do when your geopolitical rival is not doing that and using that money instead for their economy and military to maybe one day destroy you as they grow big and you grow small?

Investments in humanity work when everyone is on the same page in good faith, not when you're rivals have imperialistic wishes and no democratic process or care for human rights to stop them.

The other domestic issue is that if you make care for old people a guarantee for the elderly financed by a mandatory burden over the working population, then people have little incentive to be responsible for the future with their finances during their working age, making sure to not have kids and to spend everything because "why bother, when the government will take care of me?".

>Some might call that a government.

Some might call this wreckless planning of an unsustainable welfare state that can bankrupt a country.

Minimizing shareholder value will flatten the economy.

Do you really want to live in a pre-industrial agrarian society? Not me. I like central heating, flush toilets, hot & cold running water, and Led Zeppelin music.

Will it though? I'm curious what the empirical basis is for this causal claim, especially given that it ignores the wealth of gray area in between these two extremes. (That goes notwithstanding that I have zero idea what is meant by either "minimizing shareholder value" or how a flattened economy could look as an operationalized outcome. Neither of these are accepted terms of art with precise definitions.)

There are some obvious counterexamples to look at, wherein a hypothetical firm doesn't intentionally maximize shareholder value or chooses explicitly not to:

- A firm can choose to pursue long-term productivity gains;

- A firm can pay higher wages or provide better working conditions and still generate substantial shareholder gains;

- A firm can keep its earnings rather than pay dividends to have cash on hand for capital improvements; or

- A firm can accept a haircut on its margins to expand along some axis, like manufacturing capacity or market share.

Shareholder value is usually taken to be a function of the firm's expected future cash on hand (or, more precisely, the equity claims on that expected future cash on hand) and its exposures to various risks to that cash on hand (optionally quantified by people like me!), and the idea of maximizing shareholder value needs to be understood as having some kind of time horizon. Commonly, in the post-Jack Welch era, this time horizon is three months.

On a much longer time horizon, however, sacrificing short-term shareholder gains for long-term productive capacity can very well be analyzed as shareholder value maximization.

> Do you really want to live in a pre-industrial agrarian society?

This seems to treat the grandparent post's social insurance and institutional design argument that shareholder primacy has contributed to the institutional arrangement that makes intergenerational care difficult as though it means, what, capitalism is bad, so we should return to farming.

I'm unsure that I can draw a comparison between these two arguments. They're very different, and the parent post's reply doesn't establish the premise it needs. Industrialization and shareholder primacy aren't binary choices, and the mere existence of modern industrial prosperity doesn't establish the fact that our particular institutional arrangement producing it is in fact necessary for that prosperity.