&gt;Is it really that difficult a concept to grasp?<p>Yes.  Because you&#x27;re making the assumption that fewer jobs is a bad thing even though the number of people who actually need jobs is going down.<p>Is <i>that</i> such a difficult concept to grasp?<p>&gt;If a single big company fails then you have an instant drop in tax receipts and a rise in benefits.<p>Not true.  Again, Japan has a <i>3.1% unemployment rate</i>.  It&#x27;s a lot easier to find a job in Japan than it is to find a job in the US, where we&#x27;ve seen between a million and two million immigrants a year for decades.<p>In terms of tax receipts, again, tax receipts go down but you have less to spend money on.  Fewer schools, less road work, fewer prisons.  Particularly in a culture where the family takes care of aging relatives, I don&#x27;t see this as a big budgetary calamity.<p>&gt;And nobody is saying that problems associated Japan&#x27;s shrinking population of working adults are going to manifest immediately.<p>Why not?  Why wouldn&#x27;t we see at least some trending along these lines?<p>&gt;Every Western country e.g. UK, US, Australia, Europe all have quite sizeable immigration rates purely to cater for these risks.<p>The risks they&#x27;re trying to mitigate aren&#x27;t the ones you think they&#x27;re trying to mitigate.  If you&#x27;re running a large corporation a shrinking population scares you because it means rising labor costs and a smaller market for your goods.  So you use your influence to make sure the government allows a lot of immigration.<p>Since I&#x27;m not running a multinational corporation the national GDP doesn&#x27;t matter that much to me.  What matters is how much I get paid, how high my taxes are, and how much things cost.  I&#x27;d rather have fewer neighbors who share my culture than a higher GDP.