Japan's Social Depression

Beneath the surface wealth of bullet trains, cute robots and exuberant fashions, this is the Japan few outsiders understand: the one gripped by a deepening social depression.

This week I've highlighted the structural flaws of using GDP as a measure of "growth" and prosperity: GDP = Waste and What Metric Are We Optimizing For?

The conventional metrics of "growth" and prosperity have another fatal flaw: they do not recognize, much less measure, social depression, the social costs of economic stagnation and wealth inequality driven by financialization.

The term social recession has two distinct meanings: around 2000, the term was used to describe the erosion of social cohesion via the decline of institutions such as marriage and the rise of social problems such as teen pregnancy.

Many commentators pinned this erosion of social constraints and bonds on rampant individualism and overstimulated consumerism, while others pointed to urbanization, the commodification of child care, and women entering the workforce en masse to prop up household incomes. Poverty was explicitly rejected as a causal factor, hence the term "social recession."

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