Japan's demographic Armageddon made another entry in the history books this week when Japan's welfare ministry estimated that in 2019, Japan's population organically shrank by 512,000 people this year compared to 2018. That's a drop of more than the entire population of the city of Atlanta.

While Japan's demographic doom is well-known, its severity has taken on a breathless haste in recent years with births in the country — which are expected to drop below 900,000 this year — are at their lowest figure since 1874 according to the NYT, when the population was about 70% smaller than its current 124 million.

Meanwhile, as Japan's birthrate collapses, the total number of deaths is accelerating with every passing year, and in 2019 the figure is expected to reach almost 1.4 million, 60% more than the number of births, and the highest level since the end of World War II, a rise driven by the country's increasingly elderly population.

That gap between births and deaths, which has risen above half a million for the first time ever, has put Japan on the path to demographic destruction and deflationary doom, because in a country that shrinks by over half a million people each year, economic concepts such as resource scarcity become increasingly quaint.