Global population is crashing, soaring and moving
nature.com
nature.com
Remittance money will boost the local economy and in time, as their education and middle class grows, the flow will stop and so will their higher birth-rate.
I've made variations of this post about 5 times in HN in the context of stories like this, or the problem of refugees in the UK and Europe.
Merkel accepted the 1.5m for sound economic reasons. Japan will be taking anyone it can soon, at their historically low birth rate. There's only so much robots can do for you.
The problem is that "we" need people to do the dirty jobs we don't want to; wait tables, mop floors, clean toilets, change diapers for the elderly, and so on. Most of those jobs come with a fair deal of risk of physical injury or verbal abuse and the pay is usually crap. What makes you think that migrants would be content with those jobs when we refuse to do them ourselves?
Besides, in large parts of Europe, Eastern Europeans have already grabbed most of the decent jobs available to foreigners. The millions of Ukrainians currently fleeing the war will grab what's left once they start settling in and become available on the job market. In that situation, importing a vast amount of African youth into several generations (at least) of low social status is both cruel and unneccesary.
There's definitely reason to revisit the way we look on migration, but flooding the market with cheap labour is not going to solve anything. We need to reform the labour market and automate the jobs that cannot be made into decent ways of making a living. Other shitty jobs will need to have working conditions improved until the jobs themselves are worth taking.
That’s how a market economy works. If there aren’t enough people willing to do a job, then wages for that job will go up until there are.
Or field work. Or nursing, in the sense of general nursing duties not necessarily high paying theatre and post operative recovery nursing, although Britain needs them too. No, I absolutely do mean the disgusting, dirty, low paid menial jobs that western working class poor people won't do.
That's the story of migration to the USA, the ubiquitous Mexican labour in hotels, cleaning, cafes and bars, meat works that keeps America working.
I absolutely agree "flooding" the market won't help. I'm talking about a 25 to 50 year problem here.
All migrants are exploited at some level, even H1B. They need unions as much as anyone else.
You're not wrong about the next five years. There's going to be a lot of racism at play, and right wingers like Orban and Le Pen will make much of it.
But the underlying economic truth I believe in remains: the west needs migration more than most people realise, and immigration and refugee law is regressive and unhelpful.
As for fixing the job market, we need to raise the status of the low-status jobs rather than consider people as commodities where you can just get another source rather than solving the supply issues. Importing people straight into the lower classes will just grow the lower classes, with all the downsides that has to offer; crime, prostitution, political or religious extremism, etc.
One thing at the time: Make working in a nursing home an acceptable occupation rather than something that's done by the most desperate. Service personel should be valued, rather than threatened or constantly pushed down. When the guy who pays someone else to mow his lawn stops looking down on the guy who mows it, that's when we can start considering attracting foreign labour to fill positions. If it's still a problem at that point.
Gone are the times when what was needed was raw work force = muscles. One of the reasons why we have fewer kids is that schooling and training for modern job now takes so long that it envelopes a lot of the most fertile years. And one of the reasons why Africa has as many kids as Europeans used to have in the 19th century is because a lot of African youth does not have access to higher education.
But that means that they won't be having good jobs in modern society.
Nah. Here in Italy, and in France too, there's a well integrated amount of north Africans since two or three generations. And we're glad they are here.
Throwing "information" like this is misleading.
Remittances are not some kind of economic cheat code or the basis of a national development policy, they’re basically a painkiller that might help prevent a complete collapse of the country.
Those regions could be in even worse shape were it not for remittances.
Or they could be in even better shape if the migrants had stayed at home and worked on improving their own countries instead of brain draining to the USA.
The lack of imagination that comes from forcing everyone to eat pop culture for breakfast in this Eurovision mentality also limits innovation.
Small minded belief in the boxes and categories and a refusal to consider new possibilities is a real limitation in much of Europe that money cannot help us get over.
We’ve become a weak inbred continent incapable of competing on the world class level that our grandparents did in so many fields.
Europe thirsts for new blood, even if some of its less clever locals think otherwise
That sounds really weird, like a rehashed mix of old style eugenics.
By the way, the worst problems with inbreeding are either in royal families, or in countries that condone cousin marriages. As you can see from this map, it is not Europe that takes the top spots in consanguinity.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-prevalence-consan...
Europe is one of the continent with the lowest actual inbreeding rate contrarily to Africa, the ‘new blood’ you seem to cherish. Could you, who is so clever compared to the stupid xenophobes, explain something to me? I am very curious about me how the crack dealing migrants from Mali and Niger that regularly vandalise my street will rejuvenate our economy?
Also it seems that in your indisputable intellectual superiority you seemed to forgot something rather… basic: that a country may not just be an economy?
Not at all.
Modern economies require huge amounts of people to do service jobs, and many b of these do not require advanced degrees. Here in Melbourne (not Europe, but we have a fairly sizeable African refugee population) you see plenty of black people working in aged/disability care, security and driving jobs.
Growth in security jobs is possible, though it spells a bad omen: if more security is needed per capita, there is something going wrong with law enforcement policies.
Human driving jobs will disappear one day, much like horse drivers did. Even though autonomous driving is proving to be a harder nut to crack than people expected, by 2050 it will be solved.
In the meantime, Africa will add about a billion people. They must be educated, there simply isn't enough muscle jobs for them in the developed world.
In 1960s, top researchers believed that scene understanding (one of the hardest computer vision problems) will be solved by an undergrad during summer internship. I feel that this prediction that we'll for sure autonomous driving in a couple decades is an example of similar hubris.
We have grown accustomed to the non-zero chance of a fellow human crashing into us, but being flattened by a robot gone wild is deeply repulsive, even if the actual rate of accidents sinks way under the current norm.
Possibly a cultural difference; "security" here basically means nightclub bouncers and the occasional guy at the supermarket/chemist.
You said it yourself, the western worker goes into school to work non physical jobs, that means there's a big gap in the physical job part of the labor force that can be filled by immigrants.
At the peak of the muscle era, steelworks in my city of birth employed 100 000 people. Now they are down to fewer than 10 000, even though their production has actually grown.
Automation took those jobs away. It is not dissimilar to the collapse of the rural areas: once, almost everybody was a subsistence farmer. Now, 1 % of the population can feed the rest.
Every western nation likes to think migration should be skilled labour only.
They're wrong. It's actually far better to get lots of young, healthy motivated untrained people and invest in them, than import skilled labour only.
The lack of labour to 'clean' or wait tables is not because locals don't want to do it. Is because locals don't want to do it in the exploitive conditions they have to work. Raise the conditions/pay and they will want to do it. 'Poor' immigrants take those jobs because it is better than what they have back home, but we shouldn't aim to exploit immigrants to keep our cheap shit.
Pretty much all over europe fruit picking companies/owners exploit this. No-one in their right mind want to work for less than minimum wage, temporary contracts, 12hour days under the sun skirting any kind of health and safety laws. So they go and pick poorer people from other countries where it is a step up from where they are from. Think the covid lockdowns proved pretty much that. In my country, owners complain they don't have people to work in turism/service industry and beg beg beg government for more open borders. And of course no-one wants to. Unpaid work hours, salaries paid under the table so owners don't pay employment taxes on that. No labour security because 'who needs a contract'. So now we have a bunch of pakistani people (nothing against them), that hardly speak the language working in shitty conditions, because owners don't want to pay the required legally mandated salaries + work conditions.
I am far in the income ladder compared to 'these jobs', but I want the people working them to have a decent standard of living, higher salaries and better work conditions, but that will never work if we keep exploiting 'poor' immigrants with open door policies.
The solution should be to offer a decent immigration path/track for these workers that balances all the interests of concerned stakeholders, and also make sense from an economic standpoint because sometimes you can't make a business case for paying high rates for low-skilled jobs as this might weigh negatively on profitability and drive some establishments out of business.
But we have laws like minimum wage, hours of work per week, social security contributions, health and safety etc. I don't care if it is a white or a black or a green man from mars that does a job, but I want him or her to have the protections we establish by law. The only reason there is these 'imports' of low skilled poor people is because business men know they can get around these laws and exploit them since most of them don't know better.
Wether is abiding by the law makes a business go out of business, then so be it. You may disagree with the minimum wage, the safety laws, and I encourage anyone to vote in accordance to that, but as soon as they are laws, either a business can work following them, or should not exist. We don't go and say 'well, loansharks can only exist by breaking some kneecaps, otherwise the business model wouldnt work' and let them do it.
And I am pissed because I saw these things first hand many times. Even called the respective government entities to expose the situation, and nothing was ever done, because as you said, governments benefit from this also.
For example (and I saw this happening more than once), minimum wage here is around 700 euros. Of this, the employee pays 70 to social security getting net 630 (minimum wage doesn't pay taxes basically). The employer has to pay around 200 euros on 'extras' to social security and other things. So it costs around 900 euros. I saw foreigners that didn't know better saying they wanted to get 500 at the end of the month. Employer paid them in cash 500 at the end of the month illegally, no contributions to social security or unemployment. Working more than 40 hours per week and id something happens to employee, he is fucked, and for this privilege, the owner saves 400 euros per month. So no, I don't want even more open borders to allow more and more exploitation.
edit: just today this comes up https://ionline.sapo.pt/artigo/769046/escravatura-de-200-mol...
200 moldovians in slave conditions, a quote: > When asked why he continued to work like this, the Moldovan migrant explained that his boss did not give him money because he withheld it and deducted it to Social Security to guarantee European citizenship.
The problem with your statements is they are so extreme on one side that even people like me who usually don't care about such topic have to weight in in the other direction to make another voice heard...
The intellectual efforts need not to be invested not in proving/disproving this theory but on why the Anglo countries in the New World get to absorb all the migrants from the Old World (excluding Europe) when Central and South America should at least theoretically attract migrants when in practice that this in not the case, and to make matters worse they export migrants to other countries outside of that bloc because let's face it, the New World will always be fluid when it comes to the legitimate claim to the lands since all the nation-states in that part of the world are byproducts of the Age of Exploration.
These are the questions that should be investigated and researched and not some lunatic conspiracy theories that do more hard than good for the concerned people.
Going from "we should make MASSIVE foreigners come cos it's so cool" to "they don't want to invest in black people" is disingenuous.
The debate is about 1) the quantity 2) the type (qualifications).
And if I wanted to be as disingenuous as you I would ask you : why don't black people invest in black people?
growth is growth, you have to stop thinking that immigrants are a threat.
People that engineer the future of countries they will never live at, happy to displace cultures for a fucking basis point, make me deeply sick.
Who in the bloody hell are you, or anyone at Davos for that matter, to dictate what my nation, my town, or my family needs? Have you even been asked? Or is this just the usual arrogance ingrained in all globalists of just "knowing better"?
Why do you assume this planet needs billions of people to function?
Immigration is a short term, economically lazy option, and on large scales leads to major political and social issues, and people do not want it. Politically it is either naive or a tool to advance an agenda.
Our societies need to face the issue of constant (even decreasing in the medium term) population and adapt to it economically and socially instead of trying to kick the ball down the road. The sooner we realise this the better.
> Remittance money will boost the local economy and in time
This pie in the sky thinking. All countries developed today or on their way have got there through their own development and industrialisation work. Countries that rely on remittance have an interest and need to keep sending people abroad as that is de facto their "export product" they rely on to survive.
So, making it sound like this wave of immigration is particularly different in essence doesn't hold water.
Europe is still grappling with the large wave of non-European immigration from the second half of the 20th century up to now, which has been and is still causing a lot of social and cultural problems.
The last thing Europe needs is to add more fuel to the fire, especially that, again, immigration is not a solution and is not needed.
IN ESSENCE, absorbing migrants is not an easy task, and this applies to ALL migrants, no exceptions made. IN PARTICULAR, some migrants might pose additional challenges to integrate but they are not necessarily to blame fully for this, sometimes the host population are biased against them making the process more arduous for them, while giving at the same time a preferential treatment to other migrant populations.
Of course, for instance when Italians migrated to France that did create some tensions at the time but a generation later there was no difference apart from the Italian family names, because French and Italian cultures are very similar and, yes let's be honest, they both look pretty much the same.
Europe can and should pick and choose who to let in. As things stand there is no benefit for Europe in mass immigration from outside of Europe.
Most couples eventually want to have a children, they just don't feel they can because the increasing cost of living and lack of support and preparedness from most developed societies, since more people move nowadays they lack family support which would make it easier
If population is reducing is because governments don't mind it and doesn't think they should incentivize it like other things
Birthing a and raising a person is not cheap or easy, but treating it the same as commodities seems wrong
And what is the problem with population shrinking? Some countrifies would well benefit from less population. Everyone complains about stained health services, lack of housing, climate activists "the world has too much population"... Is it just a economic problem that everything has to grow for ever? Change the economic model to allow for natural population oscillations
Comparisons:
- https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/
- https://www.populationpyramid.net/asia/2020/
- https://www.populationpyramid.net/europe/2020/
(Northern America is still growing: https://www.populationpyramid.net/northern-america/2020/)
https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/china-population
Focusing on Africa isn't arbitrary. They are where the majority of future human population growth will be coming from.
I would think that, in aging populations, many of the jobs most difficult to fulfill by count would be in service jobs (care homes, nursing, Uber eats cyclists, bus drivers, etc)
There likely will be millions of people in Africa willing to take on such a job and capable of doing so.
Also, chances will be higher that those people would want to emigrate than, say, Chinese nurses, as there will already be plenty of demand in China.
Why? They're already wealthy. How about just stop allocating the vast majority of that wealth to a handful of people and then focus on total well-being metrics rather than "growth" for its own sake.
> To soften the economic blow of ageing, Sciubba presents four options: raise retirement ages, cut benefits, push more people in the country to work or increase immigration.
Or just push the peasants harder, I guess.
This relies on endless growth. Reduced fertility rates and shrinking populations are where this strategy goes horribly wrong. If you borrow to stimulate growth and the population/economy instead shrink, debt spirals out of control.
This is why politicians of all stripes in countries like Canada are so happy to welcome (skilled and/or wealthy) immigrants. If you can't expand your population with native births, you do it with immigration so that endless growth can continue.
You might think that countries able to attract immigration are going to be able to continue expanding their economies and avoid the harsh realities of paying down their debts. However, the global economy is so tightly and complexly interwoven that a blow to one influential country's economy will be felt elsewhere. e.g. China is one country that, for obvious reasons, does not attract immigration. When their population starts to shrink, what will be the impact on the economies of countries like Canada?
Our world order is predicated on endless growth, but we're going to have to figure out how to adapt to long-term global recession.
Imagine two countries. One country puts itself into massive debt building old folks homes and training people to work in them. The other closes their old folks homes to pay down the debt.
Then a few years later, there is a massive need for old folks homes. Which country can afford to pay for them and which can't? The country with massive debt can keep printing money to pay for the old folks homes, but since supply and demand match, they don't have inflation and things are fine. The country with the balanced budget but no old folks homes sees massive inflation because you can't magic old folks homes out of thin air -- it takes time to build them and to train workers. In the mean time because supply and demand are imbalanced the price goes up.
To paraphrase a famous Keynes quote about WW2 -- if you can do something and are willing to prioritize it over everything else you can do, you can afford it no matter how expensive it is. If you don't have the capacity to do something then you can't afford it no matter how much money you have.
> The prevailing notion is to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP
This is all that is necessary to create a deflationary environment. It means that there are fewer dollars floating around per point of GDP.
Remember that a large portion of government debt in Western countries, particularly Japan, is owed to itself. That's right, the vast majority of the "massive debt" that Japan has, is held by the Bank of Japan. And a lot of their debt is at a rate of 0%. So most of it is essentially "fake debt", they could wipe it out at the stroke of a pen. The only consequence would be on inflation, and Japan is perhaps the only country in the world that doesn't have an inflation problem.
Also, in the event of China losing its preeminent rank in the global economy, another country/union will eventually fill its former role. Yeah, the transition might not be fast and smooth but the degree of built-in resilience in the global system will manage to get us through these unfavorable events.
As in, even "life as usual" is conditional on at least some economic growth continuing for decades; and even in wealthy countries most people does not consider themselves wealthy enough and will not be satisfied with the idea of things not getting better; they'll definitely throw out any politician who promises keeping status quo in favor of politicians who promise that economy will grow.
In other words, the positive economic growth mindset is a proactive strategy adopted for the rainy days not some sinister scheme to fleece the masses of their earnings.
It is a very common thought that we should just spread the wealth to everyone and focus on some total well-being metric to evaluate how "happy" people are and make decisions based on that metric for the greater good. This can easily seem like utopia but it sounds like a nightmare to me. It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society and not worry about our labour force decreasing cause we are already 'wealthy'. In a perfect society of course it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all.
These past 100 years have seen an amazing amount of progress in almost all areas of technology and standards of living. We have a lot more to go and stagnation or worse regression to what we see in places like Russia is not where we want to be. We have to keep innovating and moving forward and working hard to do it. I hope that we can solve the problems we have as a society and stop the gap from growing in the haves and have nots. I believe the solution is focusing on what has made this progress possible in the past; mainly the values of our culture - honesty, treating people fairly, working hard - all of these are important values that we have to work hard to preserve. In the US our society is dependent on three branches of government to exist - We have a lot of checks and balances, but if all three become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people we are screwed. Ultimately everything comes down to people and their decisions. Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not. This really depends on cultural values and education. All of this is not free and takes a ton of hard work to maintain. In this dynamic world if we aren't progressing, growing, getting better we will get left behind, stagnate and probably die as a country and society. This is how nature works. We always have to work hard and get better and keep progressing.
> it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all
> honesty, treating people fairly, working hard
> all three [branches of government] become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people
> Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not
This is a wild response to me. I don't see where I suggested (or suggested giving up) any of these things.
Growth is a moral imperative. Every human deserves a decent standard of living.
Healthiest, it depends. Obesity and metabolic diseases are at their record highs. That's not health. You can medicate those patients to survive, but that's not health. Go to any street and count all the people who would lose their breath after walking three flights of stairs. This is a major civilizational regression and we don't seem to be attacking it at all.
Freest, really? How do you measure this? Certainly there is more rules to comply with than ever before, you are unlikely to be aware of all of them [0].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
Even if you were very frugal and stuck your money in the bank you would lose that money to inflation. Even if you were smart and put it in real estate or Bitcoin or something else you still have to manage it and manage yourself to not make mistakes with it. Managing wealth is a very hard problem.
And we are actually talking about at a country level here - if a powerful country doesn't innovate and continue growing they become england. Then eventually a bigger more powerful country like china eats them if they don't have powerful friends.
I'm genuinely confused, who are the bandits in this analogy?
Because growth is what is required to make capitalism "sustainable". Without constant growth, capitalism eventually fails. Unless you're for abandoning capitalism, you can't abandon the focus on growth.
I am for abandoning the focus on growth, and therefore also abandoning capitalism, but there are lots of people who don't want to abandon capitalism, a lot of them the same people who hold a lot of power and connections already, so it's a uphill fight.
Of course, if you want the latest health care advances, new housing and other things, that costs more money, so growth helps pay for those things that otherwise would be unaffordable.
But are you arguing their lot has gotten worse in an absolute sense? Or just a relative sense?
And no, capitalism does not require constant growth. The very specific subset of capitalism we practice does. Imagine a small world, an isolated island with strictly limited resources. You could easily run that on a form of capitalism, just with some corrective controls against certain tipover states.
Perhaps some very "purity"-focused form of capitalism would inevitably be in the growth-requiring subset, but nobody really does pure capitalism. A lot of people like to pretend they do, but that's just that: pretension, or fooling themselves.
Also because there are lots of significant debts around (at country/state/corporate/personal levels) that for sure will not be ever repayed if there's not a growth (or jubilee) mecanism somewhere.
But indeed, "growth" depends on how you define it, on what you value, what equivalences you define.