The global trend in the First World is population decline. The sustainable birth rate is 2.1 children per woman, but in the United States, the 2024 birth rate was only 1.6, and in Japan, 1.15; both were record lows. In Taiwan it was 0.89 children per woman, and in South Korea was as low as 0.75 children. In countries without significant immigration such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, this entails a dwindling workforce and a rapidly aging population who overwhelm the healthcare system.

The United States has been able to mask a declining birth rate through immigration, but the way this works is that a desparate immigrant underclass develops to perform the cheap labor that the rest of the population is unwilling to do. This is especially the case when it comes to illegal immigrants, who lack any real legal protection and are therefore particularly susceptible to exploitation.

Nevertheless, the U.S. has another advantage that is distinctly lacking in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan (and many, many other countries in the world): a massive supply of natural resources. What this means is that the United States is uniquely unreliant on a native working population to sustain its GDP, whereas the GDPs of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are almost entirely dependent on the amount of manpower available to produce profitable exports. With all three of these countries experiencing rapidly declining and aging demographics, their economic output will only continue to shrink, meaning that the GDPs of these countries can only be expected to fall, and with that, so too will the salaries of the younger generations dry up while they will have to pay more and more to sustain medical systems overfilling with elderly patients.

This is the inevitable future of East Asia (and many other countries in the world). Nothing can be done to stop it. To understand why, it is important to know how places like Japan and South Korea became so wealthy to begin with.

In 1960, 15 years after losing the Pacific War to the United States, Japan had a total GDP equal to approximately 47 billion USD. By 1990, that number rose to over 3.1 billion USD ^source, an increase of about 6700%. This is despite the fact that in the same year that Japan surrendered, the Soviet Union took the Sakhalin Islands from Japan, which today produces almost as much oil as Japan itself (approx. 11,300,000 metric tons ^source vs. approx. 12,900,000 metric tons ^source), granting that both regions pale in comparison to the U.S.' over 670,000,000 metric tons of oil per year ^source.

The reason for this "Economic Miracle" was that Japan decided to hyperfocus on creating a lucrative export-based industrial economy, specializing in the production of ships, cars and electronics; South Korea took a similar path, with a particular emphasis on ships. These two countries took on their own economic niches at the same time that industrial global trade was rapidly advancing in part due to the relative global peace after World War II known as "Pax Americana" and in part due to the significant advancements in technology that brought about new areas of economic focus such as small-scale consumer-grade electronics. At the same time, global competition was relatively unchallenging since major contemporary players like China had not begun participating until decades later. Furthermore, both Japan and South Korea took the approach of significantly inflating their own local currencies, which, while reducing spending power domestically, made it more economically viable for foreign countries to import their products, resulting in an overall increase in GDP despite the impact that inflation had on individual people.

In order to specialize in particular areas of economic production, the Japanese and Korean education systems (and those of all other modern First-World countries) had to adapt to a new era of professionalization, where the masses (rather than a select elite) were to spend many years advancing in their academic careers before graduating with degrees in specific fields. In South Korea and Taiwan, the newly-emerging industries were for several decades supported by extreme totalitarian governments who cracked down on labor protests and other kinds of political dissent.

Today, there is no technological innovation comparable to that which was seen in the second half of the 20th century in terms of scope (and there is no reason to suspect that there will be a revolutionary new discovery that will change this fact), and, therefore, the opportunities for adopting new export niches are comparably scarce. This is compounded with the fact that competition is much more extreme now than it was at the beginning of the Economic Miracle. Therefore, the economic growth seen in the 20th century cannot be recreated in Japan, South Korea, or Taiwan, and the economic decline that is either currently occuring or expected to occur in the near future is unavoidable.

The official end of the Economic Miracle for Japan was the 1973 oil crisis, which led to a significant increase in the cost of oil (a major import for Japan and fundamental for industry) and a major decrease in production in Japan. However, despite this setback Japan's economy continued to grow significantly until the asset price bubble burst in 1992, caused in large part by risky speculation by major banks in the country. After this point began a period of economic stagnation that was first called the "Lost Decade," which soon became the "Lost Twenty Years" and is now passed the thirty year mark with no end in sight.

The continued renaming of the "lost" years implies an optimism that at some point, economic growth will return, but with a declining population overburdened by an encreasingly elderly population, only the opposite could possibly be expected to happen. This is the fundamental fallacy of the Neoliberal world: that economic growth is inevitable. It is not.

The United States is allowed to be more optimistic as several of the factors plaguing Japan's economy do not apply to America, but the same presumptions are still no less false when made by people living in the U.S.