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Comment by nscalf | Hacker News Reader

More interesting that power and influence, which is an open question, is demographics. There is little to be done about shifting world demographics. Even if the us stays the premier world superpower, can that offset massive declines in the amount of people producing and consuming everywhere? While the us may actually be okay with shifting demographics (Zeihan has some interesting stuff on this), most major economies are facing rapidly declining populations over the next couple of decades.

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Underrated comment. You can’t print human capital, and if fertility rates are declining everywhere, every nation is competing for a shrinking young, productive talent pool.

The US is well suited to solve this problem with more immigration, we already have more incredibly talented people banging on the doors then our nightmarish naturalization system can take.

Convince the electorate. People are challenging.

Look at the most recent republican immigration bill - it was basically canada's or australia's immigration system. The electorate very much wants to keep skilled, legal immigration going.

There isn’t unified opposition to skilled labor. Look at the purported nurse shortage: we’re going to import our way to wage stability.

You’re right on the first part, but you don’t need unification to stop something. We’re in the 11th or 12th speaker of the house vote because of ~20 folks.

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/104vin7/discussio...

To assume logic will prevail in a system with a substantial emotional component is a dangerous assumption.

You’re correct. But that preserves the status quo. Immigration doesn’t require reauthorisation.

Convincing the electorate of most things is just a matter of marketing, for better or worse. You’d be surprised how many former PR and marketing execs now work in DC think tanks and as lobbyists and political consultants.

Coca Cola has made and kept its fortune by successfully associating a syrup that is bad for you with Pure Happiness.

Marketing, media exposure, and subliminal messaging both turned Americans completely against weed from the 70s-2000s and then also now completely in support of weed legalization in the past decade.

Similarly, as we’re seeing play out today, the right has found success marketing the “danger” of drag queens to turn political opinion against the LGBTQ community, which itself gained overwhelmingly acceptance in the face of once-overwhelming disapproval by powerful self-determination and taking control of how they were portrayed in the media.

The same forces that convince people en masse to buy a certain brand can just as easily be used to affect how we view any political issue.

Just lie about what’s in the bills and who supports them. The voters don’t check for themselves.

More importantly every nation is competing for a shrinking pile of consumers. Old people can be extremely productive, but they don't buy nearly as much on average, so all that productivity has nowhere to go if there are fewer young people to sell to.

> There is little to be done about shifting world demographics

Hmmmm immigration. That's how fast growing powers have always done it.

You can't add 20+ million imigrants to Germany (and that's what's they'd need over the course of the next decade or two in order to avoid demographic collapse) without massive social problems and/or Germany no longer being Germany.

> without massive social problems and/or Germany no longer being Germany

This is where America wins. There is no American ethnicity. There may be, historically. But mythologically: no.

You can if you force every immigrant to be educated. Germany's problem is that their immigrants are not. There are more than enough educated people that want to immigrate to America, start with allowing every international college graduate to stay and your most of the way to solving the demographic problem.

Even still, the US is much less homogenous than germany. A variety of cultures is not a problem.

Imagine if 80 million people immigrated to the US over the next decade or two, most of them from non-Christian cultures. I imagine this would lead to, at least, a major political crisis in US history - i.e. major rise of xenophobic far right, talks of secession or even civil war etc. AND, that is in a country that's very open to immigration, compared to Germany.

Saying 20m is meaningless unless you mention a time scale.

Demographic collapse won't cause "massive social problems and/or Germany no longer being Germany"?

Yes, of course. My point is that they're screwed either way. The time to fix this was 30 years ago.

That’s why I specified world demographic decline. It’s hard for everyone to get large amounts of immigration when there are just less people immigrating each year.

If population growth is the only way for our capitalist system to survive we're screwed.

Sad that nobody has been able to come up with something better that doesn't involve "infinite growth".

I’m actually not concerned about demographics. With coming automations and workforce becoming irrelevant societal changes are going to be so tremendous, that age of the population is not going to matter.

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