THE earnest discussions of a forthcoming Malthusian doom have so receded into the background that even the most frenzied doom-mongering at the fringe has mostly vanished. The three biggest economies whose combined GDP exceeds those of 100 small countries are drying up, not on the resources and food side but on a sustainable population that can arrest the precarious graying. Japan, the third biggest, China, the second, and the US, the leader, now confront aging populations and either shrinking or stagnant birth rates, a toxic combination that leads to sclerotic societies. And emptied-out rural areas.

The 70-plus Japanese still at the workforce dramatizes a workers shortage that is borderline desperate. Baby steps to let fresh blood in without assaulting the society's homogeneity — we are familiar with this because all Japinos (Filipinos with Japanese blood) who are willing to work and are capable of working — have been granted the equivalent of permanent residencies. In very limited sectors like health care, foreign workers without Japanese blood are allowed entry on working visas. Development and demography experts now claim that the failure of Japan to sustain its bull run in the 1980s and topple the US as the dominant economy and innovator was partly due to one factor — the absence of skill, grit, brain power and tenacity that only overambitious immigrants/outsiders can offer. Instead, what followed was a so-called Lost Decade of stagnant growth.