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Sign up for a no-risk trial and a $110 bonus offer when you visit Stamps.com and use the promo code Slate Money. Hello and welcome

and welcome to the shrinkage edition of Slate Money, your guide to the business and finance news of the week.

I'm Felix Salmon of Fusion in New York. And on this show,

we're going to take a look at some recent downward trends. Birth rates are falling in Japan.

In fact, the entire population is shrinking. Apparently, this is related to fewer people having

sex. This is maybe the birds and the bees edition.

We need to teach the Japanese where babies come from. What does this mean? We will work out what this means for the Japanese and even for the global economy.

We're also going to look at Europe where it's prices that are going down. Last week we talked about inflation this week.

We're going to talk about deflation.

And finally, there's another thing going down, and that's cable viewership in the US.

There's a new on-demand thing called Sling TV.

Is that going to bring millennials back to television, or could it be cable TV's death

below?

We're going to talk about that with Kathy O'Neill, the data scientist and blogger at

mathbabe.org.

Hi, Felix.

Hello, Kathy, and Slate's Moneybox columnist Jordan Weissman is here as ever. Hi, Felix. Hello, Kathy, and Slate's Moneybox columnist, Jordan Weissman, is here as ever.

Hello, Felix.

Hello, Jordan.

Tell me what is going on in Japan.

...