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Comment by Lord-Jobo | Hacker News Reader

This is slightly aside, but the concerns over fertility rates in the first world really seem REALLY misplaced to me. Population growth concerns are easily mitigated with immigration which will stay in demand until the rest of the worlds fertility rates catch up(40+ years), and the population growth concerns themselves are a reflection of an outdated (or soon to be outdated) economic model that we should probably focus on replacing or phasing out? Im not sure why THAT isnt the next step, and instead we have so many whackos in government trying to force pregnancies and other wild policies. Yeah, its a hard, big, complex problem and will probably require a decade of modeling/testing like what is happening with UBI testing in small cities. Maybe its just a reflection of the times when the people we elect reach for the most insane heavy handed solutions for every problem, and proceed to publicly fill their pants at the very concept of change.

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you're acting as though an immigrant from any of the dense population centers has the same impact as a native-born child on the culture and economy. that is false. sometimes it's for the better (in America, we have many well-educated immigrants from India and China). sometimes it's for the worse (see Europe's struggles with uneducated muslim immigrants from north Africa and the Middle East).

importing large groups of people sometimes works; we did it pretty well in America because we had so much room to grow. transportation and communication were also much harder, so it was less easy for people to maintain ties to their former country and family there; they adapted a little more, though ethnic ghettos were still a problem.

it's not an intractable problem but saying "just get immigrants bro" isn't really a good solution. we are sometimes biased in the US because we are selective (too much so, I think). we bring in the best from high-population areas like Africa and India and we see benefits for that. on the other hand, while migrant working and a moderate level of illegal immigration are fine and even economically beneficial, it would be silly to deny that the current levels are causing severe problems. when you lose that selectivity and control, things don't turn out so well. and to import enough people to make up for falling birthrates we would have to broaden our horizons beyond skilled workers.

>you're acting as though an immigrant from any of the dense population centers has the same impact as a native-born child on the culture and economy. that is false

I am not, i am acting like immigrating literally anybody is going to be massively better than a declining population. If they live in a country, they are paying for housing, food, and services, and almost certainly have a job. taxes on top of all of that. I think the attitude of being picky is fine and wise, right now, but eventually you are really going to just want anyone instead of going inverted.

This simply isn't true. They're not going to be paying for housing and services and having a job if they commit crimes and go to prison. Certain host countries have found that certain immigrant groups tend to have very high crime rates and cause a lot of social problems. And even if they avoid crime and have a job, extremely low-paid immigrants aren't going to be paying much in taxes under a highly progressive taxation scheme.

High-skill immigrants are almost always a big win for the host country because of the things you cite, and more (they bring innovation, start businesses, etc). Low-skill/low-education ones are a crapshoot. It's better to have an inverted population pyramid than deal with all the social ills that come from immigrants that cause too many problems.

You omit the masses of working poor immigrants that do a lot of the manual labour North Americans do not want to do -- predominantly in agriculture, construction, small manufacturing, and healthcare. They're the de-facto essential workers.

Europe's struggles seem to be caused more by a culture clash. Immigrants will always bring their way of life with them, and group together - it's a constant of human nature, this is how we preserve identity. Moving to a different country is a traumatic experience when done voluntarily; imagine having to permanently leave home under duress and on short notice.

As an immigrant myself, what always struck me as paradoxical is the nationalist / cultural pride that a lot of immigrants tend to display. I'd sum up my knee-jerk reaction to it as "Bro, if X is so great, why did you leave?" -- again, this is spoken as a person who left their homeland, with first-hand experience of some of the complex issues that surround all that. I still don't quite understand what drives that "flag-waving", but I hope to one day.

Having said all that, I would encourage my adoptive country to be proactive in their immigration policies. Putting it harshly, "get the good ones before they go somewhere else". The geopolitics of the world will only become more chaotic as the impacts of climate change cause hardship in the less habitable areas of the planet -- big migrations are inevitable. If you want your country to arrive in the 22nd century while preserving most of your way of life, you can't be clinging to outmoded ideas.

The idea that immigrants are a good idea because they do labour your existing population won't do is quite socially destructive and the cause of technological stagnation. It separates people into a de facto caste system where unpleasant jobs are also underpaid, prevents automation from becoming cost effective, and can block a country from reaping the benefits of skilled migration.

I didn't mean to assign a value judgement to this -- maybe I can phrase it better. It's not that the "local" people don't want to do certain jobs, it's that the capital owners are not willing to pay fair wages for labour, and then only people who are desperate enough (poor immigrants) end up doing do these jobs.

I'd love to hear some examples where this has caused technological stagnation and blocked skilled migration -- US and Canada provide solid counter-examples to these claims. Both countries take in immigrants at both ends of the economic spectrum, from coveted H1B high-paying tech jobs, to seasonal farm workers who exist in slavery-like circumstances. Both countries show significant, sustained technological innovation.

I agree this is destructive to the social fabric, and it separates us into strata. But I have a hard time believing that immigration is the cause; a simpler explanation would interpret it as one of the symptoms, with the underlying causes being closely related to the relentless transfer of wealth to an ever-shrinking "elite".

The one I was thinking of was slavery in the US, and the technological innovation in the south vs the north.

A better example might be the low price of labour-intensive hand-picked fruit (particularly berries) in the US and the correspondingly low agricultural automation. It's not that machines don't exist, or that berry picking is going to prevent the next Facebook, it's that they aren't cost effective in the short to mid term even when longer term investment would eventually improve the whole industry. This is really hard to measure and I don't have any good sources for either side of the argument right now.

I also want to make a distinction between skilled and unskilled migration. I don't think skilled migration is harmful to the social fabric in an enduring way, nor migration with the same proportion of skilled and unskilled labour as the host country.

> what always struck me as paradoxical is the nationalist / cultural pride that a lot of immigrants tend to display.

Also an immigrant, and I have observed that some immigrants tend to be become more conservative when they move. Or perhaps they have stopped evolving when their peers in the home country have moved on. I think this might be partly due to dealing with the trauma of displacement, and partly due to lack of diversity in thinking. I have mainly noticed this in a generation older than mine.

> This is slightly aside, but the concerns over fertility rates in the first world really seem REALLY misplaced to me.

Since the early days of humanity, we've relied on children taking care of us in our old age. I haven't seen a solution for that.

Nursing homes are not a solution. I listened to some grim statistics from my state recently. In many nursing homes, the ratio of staff to patients is 6:1. It takes 6 full time employees to take care of 1 patient. Now I'll grant that these numbers were outliers, because the population was challenging - many/most of these patients had dementia, etc. And they were handling rural areas - you'd get better scaling in the city. Still, I'm sure in a major metropolitan area it's at least 2:1.

And that doesn't account for the poor existence in those places (abuse by employees, abuse by fellow residents - you're screwed if you don't have family members advocating for you).

And that's for patients who get to go. Many elderly will have chronic conditions which are bad enough that you can't live alone, but generally not bad enough for Medicare or health insurance to pay for assisted living. Examples are things like mobility issues - only long term health care insurance covers this, and it's way too expensive. I don't own such a policy and likely won't ever be able to afford it.

Having children as a solution to wipe your ass in the future sounds selfish as hell...

Maybe we should invent more on robotics and healthcare so elderly people could live as independent as if they were in their 40's.

And until we do, we need more people, as bad as it may be for the environment.

It's not as if no one thought of what you're saying. I think you don't appreciate how unfeasible it is currently. First off you have economics. Can we make it cheaply enough so that it's available to everyone, and not just white collar folks?

Even putting aside the economics of it, once you start itemizing all the possible ways one would need help, you'll realize you're effectively asking for the equivalent of an intelligent android.

“We made it terrible for our own people to make families, but don’t worry! We can keep the party going by importing loads of people due to economic forces!” Sounds so incredibly shitty.

If an economic system works so poorly for people they have to be imported (I.e. locals who want to form families can’t) it should be dismantled.

I care about “global capital” far less than I care about my compatriots ability to form strong families. We should absolutely be worried by terrible birth rates.

> If an economic system works so poorly for people they have to be imported

Interesting thought. The notion that GDPpopulation has to grow comes comes from that economic system. The problem is that the economic system dictates policy to such a large extend that democracy is a farce.

> I care about “global capital” far less than I care about my compatriots ability to form strong families.

> We should absolutely be worried by terrible birth rates.

Why? What's the daily life/ human problem with becoming less humans? (I know the economic GDPpopulation reason, and I know why militarily that IS very important)

i meant "GDP x population"; messed with the formatting.

> If an economic system works so poorly for people they have to be imported (I.e. locals who want to form families can’t) it should be dismantled.

Most of developed countries have bad fertility rate, some developing and/or poor countries have good fertility rate. People in rich countries don't have children not because they can't afford to, but because they don't want to.

You’re right, it’s not that a standard wage can’t even get you an apartment, medical care is astronomical, and the capitalists are ruining everything.

It’s that people stopped wanting kids. How silly of me. We undid all the evolutionary programming of our species to play XBox and rent.

…or it’s that the system is broken and we should cease importing people because the only people that “win” in that situation are those connected to global capital.

> You’re right, it’s not that a standard wage can’t even get you an apartment, medical care is astronomical, and the capitalists are ruining everything.

Did you somehow miss word "Spain" in the title and immediately proceeded with US-specific rant?

Additional info from Wikipedia[0]:

> As of 2020, according to the World Economic Forum and to Bloomberg, Spain has the most efficient health system in Europe, and also ranks at the top worldwide along with Hong Kong, Japan and Singapore.

> Due to universal health care coverage, inequality is reduced substantially. Inequality in Spain is even further reduced in that co-payments do not usually apply, limited to special medicines and services that are not covered by the National Health System.

And yet socialist Spain has fertility rate of 1.3 compared to 1.7 of dystopian capitalist-driver privatized-healthcare-only US [1]. I'm sure everyone buying a house every year and enjoying even better health care in such countries as Niger, Chad and Somalia that somehow on top of the fertility list though.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Spain

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...

There are no nations that currently have a both modern living and population growth, i think there are definitely some fundamental failures to make having children an attractive option in many countries like the US, but even countries that give a billion hours parental leave, tax breaks, etc. have declining populations.

your solution requires a dismantling of the entire global system of governments and economies and the implementation of something new and poorly tested. which may be in our future regardless, and may be necessary at some point. but massive change on that scale only happens in response to horrifying levels of war or unpredictable changes in technology(changes on the scale of a power positive fusion revolution). You either dont want or cannot force those things.

the immigration solution is a stop-gap and still a big change for most, but one that buys nations 40+ years and is no harder than simply opening the door that millions are banging on right now, and billions will be banging on as climate disaster grows.

“your solution requires a dismantling of the entire global system of governments and economies and the implementation of something new and poorly tested.“

So the system we currently have, which we already agree is failing people here, but we’re worried changing the system is bad?

Why take 40 more years if it’s already failing?

Letting millions of people in is NOT GOOD for the people already here. I say we just don’t do that.

The only people benefitting are part of a global capital class and not regular workers. We were sold that it would bring worldwide peace and better living conditions. It was a lie and we know it - why continue?

Personally, I think the real solution, the ultimate solution, was detailed in the 1930s book "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley: reproduction and child-rearing needs to be outsourced to the government. It's the only way for the math to work. People just don't want to have 6 kids any more, and I don't think that's going to change. (And yes, people have to have 6 kids for population growth to work, because there's always going to be people who have 1 or none, so you need plenty of high-fertility couples to make up for them. People haven't stopped having kids these days, they've just stopped having so many.)

I agree that immigration is a quick fix for a low fertility rate. But the people worrying about fertility rates fear cultural displacement by immigrants. They want less immigration, not more, and instead see a return to family values as the answer to the fertility rate problem.

Anyway, the problem is not the current decline in population, it is a fertility rate that remains far below a replacement rate. That means there is no bottom to the population decline. The immigration solution would need to be applied again and again.

I want more immigration AND more fertility, personally.

People worrying about cultural displacement in europe need to crack open a history book and understand the movement of people is just how the world works. Its like the movement of air from different pressure areas. Most spanish people are actually a mix of moors and visigoths, other mediterranean people through history, and even celtic or germanic peoples who by and large displaced some earlier occupant of the iberian pennisula, who displaced some even earlier people, and so on and so forth until we get to whoever displaced the neanderthals. And all of this displacement involved assimilation too. Acting like migration should stop now would be like asking the wind to stop blowing or the tides to stop. Its like a natural law that people will go where theres better opportunities for them.

You're talking about the moors and visigoths in Spain, but did you forget those people integrated with the locals by invading? They weren't exactly welcomed with open arms, they just forced their way in and then took over. That's how the history of most of Europe looks, with all those examples of people displaced by newcomers. Why would any sane person want this? Just because it happened commonly in the past doesn't mean it's a good thing. In the modern world, we've mostly agreed that invading other places just because you want to live there, and want to marginalize or kill the people already living there, is no longer acceptable. Are you honestly saying you want to go back to those days?

I suspect a return to the family home values of the 90s and before, somewhere around 3x the average income, would be more effective than family values in the abstract.

> That means there is no bottom to the population decline.

The only reason I still don't have a kid is expensive housing (i.e. too many people for too little space). My partner is more or less tied to the capital because of her job and our apartment literally (and I mean literally) can't fit one more desk, much less one more person.

A population decline (with the society kept running by more automation) should make things a bit easier, shouldn't it?

> world really seem REALLY misplaced to me. Population growth concerns are easily mitigated with immigration which will stay in demand until the rest of the worlds fertility rates catch up(40+ years)

The population of prospective immigrants who completed 12 years of education or more is already largely gone, because the fertility rates in countries with this level of development are either already below replacement or on the way to it at a rapid pace.

And you need at least that to contribute to an advanced economy.

A government’s source of revenue is working age taxpayers. Its biggest cost is the social safety net for the elderly. It seems natural for them to care about population growth? Where would they get the money for UBI if their tax base is contracting every year?

Immigrants (at the scale Spain needs) don’t want to move to a shrinking economy. Spaniards themselves are leaving the country to look for work. As an example, Central American immigrants will immigrate through multiple low growth countries specifically to get to the U.S. for work.

To GP’s point though, I think Spain’s population problems aren’t all that related to dense apartments and more tied to economic opportunities.

Living in Spain it's far easier than in the US. We already speak Spanish, and knowing the jargon from Spain it's just a matter of literal weeks.

Also, the healthcare options, the lack of violence even at night (relatively, every city has its 'bad zones' but even with that it's far safer) and the welfare state makes their lives a paradise compared to, for instance, a hell zone in the Dominican Republic or narcozones in Mexico.

I'm curious to hear what sort of economic models you have in mind that works with a non-growing or declining population

We can look at "prosperous" (let's find some happiness index) countries that have seen declining population for a while. Japan comes to mind.

It's not like Japan deteriorated into some extreme poverty because of it, right?

So maybe it's not that bad, "to be in decline" (in population number, or related GDP), as we are meant to believe?

> Japan comes to mind.

I think it's a little too early to draw conclusions. Japan reached their peak population in about 2010, and the decline since has been mild.

give it time, they will have issues taking care of their aging population without a sufficient number of people of age that can provide economic output and care. It's a problem that eventually fixes itself but until we work through the "backlog" it will be pretty painful.

Do we have examples of this? I know these arguments, but I wonder if that will really happen. Maybe public care will shrink, but still many of the aging boom generation will afford private care, or not need much of it.

> ...pretty painful.

How will the subjected population notice that you reckon? Prices change, sure, but many of us on earth also live in a lot more luxury than 200 years ago: so we have some fat on our bones.

> population growth concerns themselves are a reflection of an outdated (or soon to be outdated) economic model that we should probably focus on replacing or phasing out?

I have the same sentiment. Though I take that "reflection" means that it was the economic model we live in/under is what gave rise to the "population growth concerns".

That's part of why it's so hard to think of alternatives from within this model.

> Population growth concerns are easily mitigated with immigration which will stay in demand until the rest of the worlds fertility rates catch up(40+ years), and the population growth concerns themselves are a reflection of an outdated (or soon to be outdated) economic model that we should probably focus on replacing or phasing out?

It's way way easier to deal with neutral/slight growth than shrinking. Like take teachers as an example. In an ideal world the demand for them is the same year in year out. Every year X of them will retire and Y new graduates will be hired. In a declining world you need 3% fewer teachers every year so when 3% retire you don't hire new ones. Multiply that across every industry and you have a youth unemployment crisis.

This concern over fertility vs immigration seems REALLY misplaced to me. The goal is not to maximise the tax revenue of an abstract entity called “country”. It’s about people, their values, their desires and their abilities to achieve them.

and the desires of a great many people is to vote themselves to a greater cut of other peoples money. So then it IS about maximizing "tax revenue"

I don’t think it’s so simple. Many people have other values beyond material wants.

i never said it was the only desire

It’s ideology. People living in religious communities often worship fertility, and try to make breeding as widespread as possible. Blood based nationalism is obsessed with the “race” (unscientific term) not dying out. For both, having children and raising them in the same ideology is crucial for preserving their existence.

For the global liberal capitalism, the only way it can maintain its egalitarian promise is for it to rely on infinite growth. You can promise to the exploited that they will have even more people to exploit in the future if they keep their head down and stick with the status quo for long enough. It’s starting to hit external limits given by the environment, and available space only recently.

Meanwhile, some societies are aging and doing fine. The economy can be fine tuned to prioritize basic needs, and sustainably supply the people regardless of their age. For example automation in agriculture means that we’ll need less and less people to produce food. UBI is just one tool that could be useful here.

Not positioning myself here but ideology is one of those partisan despective words that have another-side-of-the-coin words (“culture” in this case, but see religion vs. cult, indoctrination vs. education, etc.). Several spanish regions are very keen on maintaining their particular culture.

Ideology is just a system of ideas. Of course I don’t like religious fundamentalism and fascism, but feel free to s/ideology/neutral equivalent/g

Worked for Beirut, herzigovinah etc.

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