Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eric4smith | Hacker News Reader

At one time I thought, along with the orthodoxy, that falling population rates would be a big problem in the future.

But now, it's just a way for humanity to rebalance itself.

30 years ago as we approached 7 billion humans on the planet, everyone was worrying about how we would feed ourselves and what would happen if the rate of growth kept going the same way. (Yes, I'm that old that I remember the news stories).

Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies.

These things go in cycles.

I think that as we get more advanced and men and particularly women, see participating and reaping the rewards of modern economies in pretty much every country -- more important than having children, it will drop even more.

But as covid shows, events will happen that cause people to rethink that from time to time. In a way, its "life" that re-balances itself without even our intervention.

It's a pendulum, and right now, it's swinging one way. It will swing back.

>Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies.

It's irrelevant how much they want us to make babies (Western Europe), as unless real estate prices plummet to levels affordable to young couples without rich parents, you won't see birthrates in the west go up without heavy immigration from developing nations.

They can't expect to have rising birthrates that would sustain the pyramid scheme of the welfare state while at the same time treating real estate as an investment vehicle that goes up faster than wages, squeezing the younger generations out.

Either the welfare state in the west will collapse or the real estate market will. You can't have both going up at the same time.

If the welfare state is a pyramid scheme, then so are all economic structures. Perhaps you're heard that productivity of individual workers increases over time...

If wages kept up with productivity increases, there would be more than enough tax money to fund national pensions. Thanks for the insight, I’d never thought about it that way

Looking at only the amounts of money will not capture the problem. You can fund retirements all you want, but you cannot spin up labor to change bed pans and catheters and build infrastructure.

Automation helps increase productivity per person and reduce the necessary working population to non working population ratio, but there is no natural law that automation can progress as quickly as it would need to in order to meet the expected quality of life in the face of declining proportions of working age populations.

What does an individual's productivity have to do with this?

And also, the individual productivity has stagnated over the last decade.

There's a limit to how many divs a front end dev can insert per hour and how many toilets a plumber can install per hour and this hasn't gone up lately.

Also, wages have not kept up with an individual's increase in productivity as all the gains have been skimmed by the top shareholders, not the workers.

So, please don't confuse the rise in stock prices of the bull run in US in the last decade with the rise in wages as a lot of workers haven't felt it.

There’s no straightforward way to convert div-inserts-per-hour to value-added-per-hour.

The value a plumber creates by installing a toilet depends on the context of the installation.

> Also, wages have not kept up with an individual's increase in productivity as all the gains have been skimmed by the top shareholders, not the workers.

Much of the gains have also been skimmed by land, many of whom happen to be workers.

I think that's part of the reason there hasn't been a strong push to for systemic change. You really have three main classes: capital, labour who happens to own some land (through homeownership), and labour without land. The second group is majority [0], and they've done mostly okay (at the expense of the third).

[0] - Or, if they're not the majority, they're still more active and involved in politics, which makes sense, as they've made a very large investment, and would like to see it grow (or at the very least, not lose its value).

> What does an individual's productivity have to do with this?

In regards to your comment about the welfare state being a pyrid scheme, everything. It's why a shrinking population can keep a welfare state solvent.

> how many toilets a plumber can install per hour and this hasn't gone up lately.

Not true. Modern installation systems like are now universal in new buildings in Europe mean toilet install rates have indeed gone up.

> please don't confuse the rise in stock prices of the bull run in US in the last decade with the rise in wages as a lot of workers

Who's doing that?

they are, except crypto

> productivity of individual workers increases over time

So do house prices and taxes. Actually house prices have gone up way more than wages, eg https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/05/how-uk-house-p...

both will

> unless real estate prices plummet to levels affordable to young couples without rich parents, you won't see birthrates in the west go up without heavy immigration from developing nations.

Ironically heavy immigration itself pushes up housing prices by increasing demand, and lowers wages by increasing supply:

https://www.independent.ie/business/jobs/not-enough-migrants...

Well that was my point exactly, but unfortunately, it's impossible to argue in European politics about the negative consequences of uncontrolled immigration without being branded right wing, or racist or a Nazi, so such debates aren't even discussed publicly in the first place.

This still surprises me. It’s clearly one of the reasons for the rise of the right. People aren’t oblivious to the fact that every decision has positives and negatives, and that on balance people try to choose what they think will be most positive. By ignoring or refusing to discuss the negatives, you intuitively grow resentment somewhere…

And yet Brexit happened anyway.

Right, maybe it's like an oscillating system where high real estate prices depress family formation, a generation or two passes, real estate becomes cheaper because a third of the population is gone, people can afford homes again, then they have more children, and so on. Obviously heavy immigration breaks this natural cycle. Financializing your country’s real estate and selling it all to foreigners and investors probably exacerbates the problem, assuming anyone who made these policies actually considers this a problem.

As unrelated as it may seem I consider this statement to be true. It's terrible that society is not creating a tax system that prevents real estate from being an investment vehicle. If real estate would be cheaper I would have probably settled down already several years ago. Now I am just thinking why should I work 40h+ just to afford an ugly, old & noisy 2-bed-room condo in suburbia if instead I can use that extra money to live like a king in an emerging economy, affording everything I desire from restaurants to cleaning services & at the same time afford the luxury to work less. Also many of my friends gave up on buying real estate & opt for working less/ more leisure instead. It feels like the boomer middle class society is breaking apart & I believe that to be a good thing because as more people change their views real estate will become affordable again. In the meantime I believe there are better investment opportunities anyways compared to current real estate prices in Western Europe.

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