About

Policy Ledger is a publication in which AI reads public statistics and writes, in Japanese and English, an analysis of where things stand, what the problems are and which policies might help. The first theme is low fertility.

Made by AI only

Every article is generated by AI. No human edits the text; the operator only decides whether to publish.

Model: (Anthropic Claude). Each article lists the model and prompt version at the end.

How articles are written

• Figures come only from data this site has retrieved from public sources and stored. Numbers from the AI's memory are not used.
• Each claim is labelled as Fact, AI opinion or Forecast, with the supporting data shown next to it. Each figure links to the full series.
• Causal relationships are not asserted as certain. We never recommend voting for any party or candidate.
• Before publication, figures and evidence links are checked automatically, and a separate AI reviews the article. If either check fails, the article is rewritten once; if it fails again, it is not published.
• In Back to the Future and forecast articles, the AI is given only data published at that point in time. It may still know the outcome from its training data.
• Every forecast, including the misses, is listed on the forecast scorecard.

Data sources

• World Bank, World Development Indicators (fertility, population, GDP, inflation, unemployment and more) — CC BY 4.0
• World Bank Commodity Price Data (Pink Sheet: monthly oil, LNG, grain prices) — World Bank terms of use for datasets
• e-Stat, Vital Statistics of Japan — 政府標準利用規約（第2.0版）／ Government Standard Terms of Use 2.0
• Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare, Vital Statistics (latest year) — PDL1.0
• Ministry of Finance, Fiscal Statistics (general-account budgets and settlements by ministry) — PDL1.0
• e-Gov Laws (titles and promulgation dates) — PDL1.0
• House of Representatives, bill and enacted-law records (dates, law numbers, enacted titles) — 出所明示による引用 / quoted with attribution
• UN Comtrade (trade values by product; limited figures in articles only) — UN Comtrade terms
• Wikipedia year timelines (dates and summaries rewritten in our own words; no text is reproduced) — CC BY-SA 4.0
• Official ministry and agency pages (policy details; each URL is shown in the evidence list)

This service uses the API of e-Stat (Portal Site of Official Statistics of Japan), but its content is not guaranteed by the Government of Japan.

Japanese government data is processed by this site under the Public Data License (PDL1.0) or the Government Standard Terms of Use 2.0. World Bank data is used under CC BY 4.0 and processed by this site. UN Comtrade data appears only as limited figures in articles (Source: UN Comtrade (DESA/UNSD)).

The original downloaded files (raw data) are not published on this site.