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Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

What makes me somewhat mad are the (Western) countries "solving" their public pension problems through immigration. Not only do you then destroy the tax payer base in the country that loses the emigrant, but you're just pushing the problem down the line so that the immigrants that saved you tomorrow, are themselves screwed when/if they ever get to retire.

It's literally a legal Ponzi scheme and in many cases, you are legally obliged to play.

I'm looking at you Canada.

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Canada is known for a large amount of high skill immigration that benefits almost everybody. It’s nice having educated people around and we have access to the best food in the world because everyone brings it with them

I'm not sure about the whole data around it, there will certainly still be positive effects for the countries these people are migrating from. But generally, only accepting high skilled immigrants is very nice for Canada, but leads to pretty serious consequences for the emigration countries (brain drain).

The brain pools are much bigger than you imagine.

You need a high birth rate or high immigration rate to grow economies. You are right everybody should be screwed; you need more people.

That is ignoring real gdp growth rate per capita [0].

[0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA

Yeah the new push is to drive our population to 100M in 80 years from about 37M now. It costs $2300/mo in our biggest cities for a single bedroom apartment on average.

A lot of this is the rush of foreign investment and the government you elect caring more about the tax revenue from people who don't even live in your country over the welfare of their own constituents.

Agreed, however it's also a result of overly strict building and zoning codes that don't allow density to increase in exchange for a reasonable price.

The result, however, is tragic. People just live in "illegal" housing situations like stuffing 4 or 5 people into a 1 bedroom or 2 bedroom apartment, where people just create temporary walls to zone off part of the living room or use an extra large closet for extra "bedrooms".

Thus the city loses out on tax revenue AND preventing population increase in certain areas, which is the whole point of these restrictive zoning laws.

You are not the first person I have seen conflate those two things. I assume you’re assuming higher demand and fixed supply leading to rising prices, is that fair? If so, what is your mental model for the how/where/why of house construction?

It's more difficult to build a third floor than a first floor, to build a subway for three instead of a street for one, to install three sewer pipes instead of one, to police three rowdies instead of one. NIMBY laws redistribute those costs to commuter neighborhoods, but the crowding raises prices via simple increasing marginal costs. That's my model (I'm not the OP).

On the other hand, three cities cost three times as much as one city. Or have I missed something?

Yes, because it's not more difficult to build a third city than a first city. It's equally difficult. So there are not diminishing returns like the ones I described in my post. Although it's hard to get over the hump of the first city's network effects and get started.

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