[omot]

I think America/Europe would've gone through a similar phenomenon were it not for immigration. Immigration presents a significant challenge to the culture, but it's a necessity to keep evolving the economy and make sure your population/ideas don't stagnate.

I'm from Japan, and I think Japan would've potentially kept it's second place in GDP ranking if they were more aggressive with opening up the country to immigrants and creating a narrative for what it means to be Japanese outside of blood and heritage.

[trompetenaccoun]

Why care about nominal GDP though? More important how the economy does per capita and Japan seems to have held its wealth over time, there's almost no change¹ since the 90s. Economically and development wise, Japan has done remarkably well.

Mass immigration is a big gamble, with problems societies might not foresee and that only manifest many years later. It worked more or less well in a place like Canada, but for a counter example look at Western Europe, they messed it up.

¹ https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

[omot]

What do you mean? The EU is the third largest GDP and half of the GDP is just comprised of France, Germany, and Italy all of which has a dwindling native population, and its growth propelled by easy immigration within the EU.

[NovaDudely]

Australia's birth rate would have fallen below 2.1 back in 1976. Thanks to immigration our population is still growing.