As China's workforce dwindles, the world scrambles for alternatives | Hacker News Reader

As China's workforce dwindles, the world scrambles for alternatives

wsj.com

54 pointsanigbrowl50 comments

Wow, I find it really bold that WSJ has so openly dug into the demographic issue. I've previously only heard about it so openly discussed in conservative circles (eg http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/the-return-of-patriarchy...). They pretty much hit all the major areas with fertility and women and all the other stuff lined up http://graphics.wsj.com/2050-demographic-destiny/. It'll be an interesting century with this unprecedented implosion.

Marxists and other leftists have identified the need for cheap labor as a major long-term weakness in capitalism for over a century. The question has always been how long technological advances and increased globalization can provide the growth necessary for social stability.

Liberals might not think about it in the same way, but they're unlikely to see a reduction in population growth as a bad thing on its own terms. Certainly, they're very unlikely to propose natalist policies as a solution.

Isn't it also an even major weakness in socialism? After all, if your society is committed to providing a minimum standard of living for the elderly and disabled, that depends upon labor.

How much labor do you think is needed to provide water, food, shelter, clothing, electricity, household machines (even a 3d printer), computation, and entertainment for everyone?

The hours I put into a CRUD app last week are wasted labor as far as I'm concerned, but I need to pay rent to a landlord and the only people with money are people who want me to make them even more money.

Well, given that you have just described the vast majority of my household expenses, I would say a lot of labor goes into providing that.

Also, you forgot healthcare.

This is called the dependency ratio.

never heard of natalism before, good formalism there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalism

George Friedman, Peter Zeihan, and numerous other astute forecasters/demographers/etc. have been talking about this for many, many years.

It isn't a partisan thing, it's a spreadsheet thing.

WSJ is actually pretty conservative. I mean, it is owned by Newscorp!

I've heard that their newsroom is very liberal, even though their editorial page is conservative. They're run separately.

I'm skeptical that home 3D printing is going to have much impact on manufacturing consumer goods. We've had inexpensive laser printers for a couple of decades now, yet there's not many people printing out books at home.

The printers would have to be very user friendly and very fast to compete with the convenience of buying finished goods.

As an owner and user of a 3D printer, I don't expect the scene to get to regular household users within the next 5 years.

Difference in material qualities can totally influence how you prepare the models for printing. For example, after I switched to a less brittle PLA filament, breakaway is totally different. The model may have less opportunities for failure during printing, but the plastic is less convenient to remove after the print is finished. Further sanding is needed for breakaway spots and arbitrary extrusion defects.

I also find that super glue is a bad idea for assembling what is larger than can be printed at once.

On a side note, if there were an automated solution for breaking apart a model, adding peg holes or woodwork inspired nailless/screwless mesh finger pegs would really fulfill a need for users with small economic 3D printers

> I don't expect the scene to get to regular household users within the next 5 years.

I don't expect any 3D modeling software get to regular household. Did anyone really install Google Earth or something?

What about commercial 3-D printing? A large scale facility that can afford to invest in the latest and greatest printers could turn a profit in just-in-time prototyping, small runs of specialized custom designs, etc. Email us your design and we'll have 100 units ready for you to pick up in the morning. Overseas manufacturers can't beat that.

They're using glass, metals, and fabrics now. It seems like only a matter of time before you can order up almost anything at the corner print shop. If I were China, I'd be trying to get upstream of this trend as soon as possible and become the main supplier of the printers in the world.

Good point. I remember thinking digital cameras were going to put photo printing shops out of business. Seems to be the opposite.

Well, they did become commoditized though.

That sounds like a fine business opportunity for someone trained in the use of a 3D printer: you run the thing, other people just pay you and pick up their new stuff. Such businesses could become as common as any other small convenience-retail outlet.

It's not worth it unless you treat it as a bonus or have a farm of 3D printers working all the time. The materials are cheap, but printing is very slow and the machines tend to break often. In other words, machine time is the most expensive part for a customer.

I have friends who tried making money that way; the only one who was remotely successful was a guy whose father is a respected automatic control engineer, who could forward requests for custom one-off parts to his son.

I should probably weigh out how much that actually costs in time and money, because there are additionally concerns of book binding and paper as it scales if you want to have equivalent quality to a bought book.

Which is the case with 3D printing as well (materials=paper, time and post processing is even worse than printing books ATM). Even right now digital printing is still less efficient than traditional printing machines up to small numbers where it comes down to cost of printing form and reseting the machine (cleaning/setup).

> replacing dozens of workers who scrub Levi’s blue jeans with sandpaper to give them the worn look that American consumers find stylish

This really made me laugh. Levi paying Chinese workers to quite labor-intensively lower the quality of their jeans because American consumers prefer it that way. I really wonder what they must think of us.

Let's hope it's an industrializing force for African nations...

It hasn't so far--even prior to the rise of Chinese manufacturing--not sure why it would now. Part of the problem is that although a lot of Chinese manufacturing is obviously driven by low labor costs, there's also a stable and investment-friendly (if hardly democratic) government, a well-developed ecosystem around manufacturing, and capital.

As the article says, I expect more automation and I'll probably bet more on further Pac Rim manufacturing than other areas.

Actually, the chinese are comfy bribing their way in african nations. And they are changing the continent quite fast. It's the unreported story of the decade.

Check out this lecture:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycHsaGOModU

I see Africa now like China in the late 80's or early 90's - the change is there, but the perceptions haven't shifted yet and anyone doing business there faces a situation of chaotic progress. A good place to be if you like extremes of risk/reward.

Except that "Africa" is way less coherent than China. There's not a lot in common for doing business in, say, Rwanda (notionally clean & business-friendly), Eritrea (autarchic dictatorship) and DR Congo (basically total chaos).

Bribing a corrupt government doesn't make that government better for business in general. It doesn't create permanent change away from the status quo that would lead to more sustainable development, rather, China gets some minerals for cheap while a despot can buy more BMWs.

Maybe the "alternative" is higher wages for unskilled labor.

That's one alternative, but it also skews the incentive of the workforce to become non-skilled e.g. why spend X years studying at university to be a lawyer, engineer, programmer, or whatever if you can do unskilled work for a similar/higher wage.

It's not a problem initially, but will become so once you have a generation or two of a largely unskilled workforce, especially if the work then dries up.

If society needs unskilled labor more, the wages for that should rise, so more people go into those careers. It's weird to call that "skew".

Extrapolating the current trend to decades is assuming a lot.

That's not really how economics works. If you raise the wages of unskilled laborers, then indeed the effect you describe happens. However, the marketplace still demands engineers, and so any drop in the supply will lead to an increase in wages until some equilibrium point is reached.

And within 20 years engineers will be building robots to replace most unskilled laborers anyway.

The real issue is, what happens when robots can replace engineers?

Yes, your first point is the true argument against raising unskilled laborer's wages. The higher their wages are, the more cost-effective it becomes to replace them with robots. I'd argue that this is probably ultimately a good thing, but many people see it as a reason to avoid raising minimum wages.

As for what happens when robots replace engineers, that is essentially the singularity you're talking about. And what happens then is presumably some form of post-scarcity economics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy), though its hard to say exactly what form that will take.

Freedom for all mankind, hopefully.

Or death and bloodshed as more and more people get excluded from the economy and are left to starve. It's up to us to pick a direction, and the time for it is starting now.

Yup, and it looks to be going the death and bloodshed route, but that's no surprise, it's what we do.

Because you can make MORE money. Some people actually ENJOY the challenge of work. I hate this constant demonization of paying people that just want "good enough" a living wage. If all they want is their new car every 10 years, a small house, and enough money to put food on the table every night, why not give it to them? Someone that REALLY wants to become a lawyer isn't going to go into stamping metal for a living just because it pays a decent wage...

Not only that, but say in Australia, you can skip college and go into mining (until the last bust happened), make a lot of money, and compete for housing (and other more limited resources) that normally only professionals would consider. This makes fields like IT a lot less appealing in those countries (and then making them even more natural resource dependent).

You're probably right. I remember hearing about how much manufacturing expertise was lost to rust belt cities when globalization shifted factories overseas. I remember a story on the PBS Newshour about how some cities were bringing some of that expertise back, especially with a lot of CAD modeling and what not to streamline things.

I'd rather build things as an engineer than be paid the same amount or higher for any sort of unskilled labor or customer facing job. The intellectual challenge just isn't there.

And the alternative result is even more manufacturing moving away from China.

I found the fact, that a labour shortage is driving advancements in technology, a big positive. The other way around would have been a catastrophe - with millions having left their farms and then to be left without a job in the city.

wife studies sweatshops. China already feel way behind India. and most china companies already outsource labour to south east Africa.

http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Ok, on whose behalf do you suspect this story was planted? Industrial robot manufacturers? One of China's manufacturing rivals? Levis?

I have no inside information; I can't say whether it was or it wasn't. But dropping a link like this and running is tantamount to writing "9/11 was an inside job".

Ever since News Corp. bought the WSJ in 2007, the nutjob conservatism of its Op-Ed page has permeated and corrupted its formerly excellent and fairly objective news reporting. A lot of the best journalists have left, and the rest know which drummer they march to.

One aspect of US conservative thought today is nationalist hostility toward China (cf. Trump), and schadenfreude over anything that takes China down a notch. Unfortunately, WSJ reporters facing those incentives will have a harder time being reality-based. They seek instead to flatter their readers' sensibilities and obey their editors' orders. This leads to sloppy arguments. Take this line, for example:

> By 2050, the working-age population will decline by 212 million, estimates the United Nations—> roughly as many people as live in Brazil, the world’s fifth most-populous nation.

I doubt that the UN report takes into account Beijing's decision, published three weeks ago, to transform its one-child policy into a two-child policy, which is just the latest in a series of moves intended to shift its demographic outlook.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/10/29/asia/china-one-child-policy/

China's rising wages are the inevitable, logical result of China getting richer; i.e. they are a sign of China's success in modernizing itself.

Could you give some examples of the journalists who have left? I've subscribed on and off to the Journal since the late 80s, and pretty much continuously to the online version since '99, and I have not detected a decline in quality. The paper has certainly changed over the years, and seems less stuffy and stodgy than it once was, reflecting the generational change in the readership and the staff. It's about as conservative as it always was, though.

Regarding the two child announcement, the article pointed out that it was unlikely to affect the population decline because not that many Chinese want more than one child, and in any event it would take at least 16 years for the policy to have an effect. I'm not convinced that people want just one child, however. It seems likely that many couples who already have a girl will want to try for a boy.

> Could you give some examples of the journalists who have left?

There have been successive waves of departures, many of whom have left for the WSJ's rivals in financial news: Reuters and Bloomberg. I was a journalist for years, and this exodus is well known in the industry. For example, Laurie Hayes, deputy managing editor at the WSJ, left for Bloomberg in 2008. The mass departures of WSJ staff is credited with transforming Bloomberg internally. Many more names are cited here:

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2011/04/25/exodus-former-wsj-st...

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/01/more-wsj-ve...

> in any event it would take at least 16 years for the policy to have an effect

I agree that it will take time for the policy to take effect, but the article made a lot of predictions beyond that time horizon, which I believe are overly, willfully pessimistic.

Thanks for those links; that Media Matters article in particular was quite informative. Sounds like there really has been a big turnover at the Journal; a shame. I wonder, though, how much of the old Journal's approach would work in this one-screen sound bite era that we live in?

Take this line, for example:

That's your evidence that WSJ is run by a bunch of conservative shills?

Not very convincing!

> That's your evidence that WSJ is run by a bunch of conservative shills?

No, that's my evidence that the article contained sloppy reporting which conveniently aligns with the WSJ's anti-China bias.

There is plenty of other evidence that the Journal is run by a bunch of conservative shills.

Climate Science Bias at the WSJ http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/27/remarkabl...

One example of that bias http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405274870393940457...

Under Murdoch, Tilting Rightward at the Journal http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/14/business/media/14carr.html

"Does Ownership Matter? The case of Rupert Murdoch's purchase of the Wall Street Journal" http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17512786.2014.882...

And for more examples, see here: http://mediamatters.org/tags/the-wall-street-journal

Reply on news.ycombinator.com