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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

People love to freak out about this, but look how the Black Plague really kicked off the early modern world in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_deepening is, IMO, underrated. It's an easy way to understand how the post-plague years were so impactful.

If a few decades from now apartment towers in China are full of migrants from around the world, I will not complain.

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Yes, the black plague led to labor shortages, shifting power structures, and the accelerated rise of mercantilism, leading to colonialism and slavery.

The population had recovered long before Columbus. The new world labor shortage leading to slavery was a different phenomenon.

But yes labor shortage -> power structures change is good!

Not so much in our case, now that we have automation it'll be less "power to the worker" and more "nobody wants to work anymore, we'll make do with robots instead".

It still makes a difference. When workers are abundant, the "automation" we get is Uber / DoorDash, which is actually more labor intensive.

People then complaining about delivery fees going up when the labor tightens, that is unambiguously tied to power structures.

Back then, population was at capacity, so the plague opened up previously-used capacity to the survivors. Today is completely different. We're not at capacity and won't benefit from fewer (educated/productive) people, which are exactly the ones not reproducing.

We're not at capacity?

> We're not at capacity

By many accounts we're over. Got a source?

Global growth rate today about 1% per year which is 10x higher than it was in Europe in the middle ages. It would be hovering around 0 if we were at capacity. In Europe, it was 0 on average between 1300 and 1400 (black death), so they were still growing otherwise but just barely compared to now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...

You could speculate that our current population isn't sustainable because it depends on non-renewable resources, but that's on a longer time scale than we're talking about here.

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