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Comment by orolle | Hacker News Reader

Its a different discussion, quite off topic. When the boomers go into retirement, our current economic system with GDP growth focus has a big problem. Our system is based on produce more stuff and buy more stuff. But when the boomers retire, they will buy less stuff. Who will buy supply overhang? Nobody. Even worse, who will pay for the debt incurred to buy overly inflated asset prices, like housing and factories, when boomers start downsizing and start selling?

Look at Japan. They are 10 years ahead of us. It will be tough and depressing until the economic system adapted and prices normalized. On an opitmistic point, humanity will progress and when an economy cannot sell more stuff then it has to sell better stuff.

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Japan is not an apt demographic corollary for the USA. The census recently came out and found that the number of Asian and Hispanic residents of the USA has increased (~20-30%) hugely since 10 years ago. These are younger populations with higher birth-rates than "White" people, whose percentile share of the US is heading downwards.

Japan, on the other hand, is xenophobic and has discouraged immigration very heavily. Combine that xenophobia with historical matters: sneak-attacking an industrial powerhouse in 1941 in of the most ill-advised, terrible wars, losing repute by massacring hundreds of thousands of civilians. Meanwhile thousands upon thousands of their own best young men and civilians were killed by the vastly superior man-power and industrial might of the US. Japan was hobbled by WW2 and has never fully recovered, consider the greatest catastrophes of their history were only 80 years ago still, namely losing a generation of youth, their cities being fire-bombed, their savings being depleted for phony war bonds, and being the only country to ever be nuked. Japan is simply not a good demographic comparator for the USA.

You're trying to explain current Japanese demographics with a weird rant about WW2 without mentioning the subsequent economic miracle and population growth? The population of Japan was not far off doubling from 1945 to 2010, and in case you somehow haven't noticed, they became a major first-world economy, eclipsing many many nations which were not nuked.

80 years is really quite a long time. Germany also bounced back rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century to become a major industrial power.

I don't disagree it could definitely be a problem with the US, but so far, with immigration, it's not been a problem. As long as our immigration #'s stay up, the US should be fine.

So far it's been a steady state, but it's unknown if that will continue into the future.

In the not too distant future, competition for immigration is going to be tough. I wonder if the US has the political atmosphere to offer competitive packages to win over the immigrants we'll need.

Why do you think that? It feels that the mid-term (e.g. 20-40 years) outlook for migration would include a large increase of migrant supply due to e.g. climate change issues in the "global south", so instead of competition for immigration it seems likely that places like US would be able to pick whatever kind of migrants they'd prefer to allow.

Yes, supply of immigrants will increase because of climate change, but I think it's important to understand the current structure of age distributions in the world. The US had a pretty large Millenial generation. Most other countries did not. Which means, we're not REALLY going to be feeling the need to take on immigrants for a while. But as boomers retire, and millenials move to replace them, the countries that didn't have a sizable millenial generation are going to be in a position to have a much higher demand. Those countries are going to be more desperate than the US, and will likely start developing very sizable offers. The US is going to catch up though, the US does appear to be inverting it's demographic distribution as well, but we're 20 years behind. That's actually a pretty big advantage in a bunch of ways, but in terms of competing for immigrants, it's a disadvantage.

Thanks, good points!

The real question is: is are we interested in quantity or quality?

I agree with both you and the GP, and also see immigration as moving the hard problems from one field to another.

To solve the economic issue of maintaining growth, the US/EU moved to the issue of how to maintain a peaceful but diverse and divergent society.

I see Japan's partial bailing on immigration as a sign they don't see any good way to get through it, and we can see a lot of today's US internal fight as the result of not paying enough attention to how hard it is to adapt a society to the new challenges.

I wonder if there would be third ways, with economic powerhouse moving their "growth" to other countries without a stigma of stagnation or exploitation.

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