Despite today’s date, this is not an April Fool’s prank. At a press conference in Tokyo last weekend, professor Hiroshi Yoshida from the Tohoku University Research Center for Aged Economy and Society, sounded the alarm bell for a looming crisis. By the year 2531, e
No, because the paper is nonsense and the scientist is probably releasing it for political reasons. Wives being forced to take their husband’s surnames do not directly contribute to a single surname taking over, since there’s a proportionally equal chance that they’re moving away from the Sato surname. The main issue that affects the odds is how many male kids the non-Satos have as well as societal pressures (like this one).
The math is also wrong.
You can’t apply exponential growth to the proportion of a total.
Growing from 1% to 2% (a 100% gain) is equally a reduction from 99% to 98%, a 1.01% drop.
Going from 99% to 100% (a 1.01% gain) is equally a reduction from 1% to 0%, an infinite drop.
Simple exponential modeling is the wrong tool.
Oh… he’s just doing an exponential growth model?? I have trouble understanding how this got traction at all then, he should be embarrassed. Maybe the delivery was tongue-in-cheek?
I assumed there was more interesting happening in that paper. How disappointing.
I assumed there was more behind that graph (I assumed he calculated the coefficient from something more interesting and just slapped it on a graph with like y = exp(\beta_0 x) for his news article)