Shinzo Abe saying "I have absolutely no worries about Japan's demography" should worry economists — none more so than Bank of Japan Gov. Haruhiko Kuroda. Far from seeing an aging and shrinking population as a crisis, the prime minister thinks it's a boon. The widely-held view his 127 million population will plunge below 100 million by 2050, Abe told Reuters, "paradoxically, is not an onus, but a bonus."
The real paradox is how the leader of the No. 3 economy reckons "robots, wireless sensors, and artificial intelligence" will "grow our productivity" so the size and quality of the workforce doesn't matter anytime soon.
We've seen this film before — it's called "Wall-E." The 2008 animated Pixar flick depicts a dystopian future of technology doing all the work, while humans become useless couch potatoes. Of course, this isn't Abe's vision for the decades ahead, but his remedies for a fast-graying nation are just as fanciful if he doesn't start revolutionizing Japan Inc. immediately.