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Comment by crindy | Hacker News Reader

Since you asked for someone to steelman, I’ll chime in to say this graph looks great to me.

As Canada has grown rich, our fertility rate has gone down. I have no moral problem with that, but it does cause a problem: as the population ages, the ratio of workers (who pay tax) to retired people (who carry a tax burden) shrinks. The options are increasing the taxes on workers, cutting the benefits to the retired, or increasing the working age population via immigration.

As to grocery stores, housing prices, etc. I think these problems are more related to a lack of competition. A free market can handle an influx of consumers.

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> The options are increasing the taxes on workers, cutting the benefits to the retired, or increasing the working age population via immigration.

I think the third option could be further broken down: 3a) increase the working age population via a well planned immigration strategy that includes necessary infrastructure spending (medical residencies, housing, etc etc) to support that immigration 3b) open up the floodgates with absolutely no planning for the consequences whatsoever and then blame everyone else for the ensuing inflation and societal stress.

Unfortunately our current government chose 3b.

This is what also Merkel's Germany plan was, and the results are... so-and-so. I wonder how come nobody thought about said strategical planning? I know planning is hard but it's not nuclear science and they should have counted with the pushback as well. And by the way, did anybody learn any lesson?

> Since you asked for someone to steelman, I’ll chime in to say this graph looks great to me. As Canada has grown rich, our fertility rate has gone down. I have no moral problem with that, but it does cause a problem: as the population ages, the ratio of workers (who pay tax) to retired people (who carry a tax burden) shrinks.

This is not even close to the only problem. Our housing stock has not kept up with population growth, which is a big reason why housing prices have been so out of control here. It's not due to a lack of competition so much as regulation and population growth that has outpaced building capacity.

So I'm not sure I can agree that that graph looks fine. It's true that we need immigration to balance falling fertility rates, but this needs to be balanced by the available resources so the cost of living doesn't spiral out of control. Labour shortages can often be addressed in others ways, like automation.

Yeah, there are clearly other problems with the Canadian market. Didn’t mean to imply there weren’t!

Housing stock I really do think is down to regulation - it’s crazy hard to build here in Vancouver, even right near mass transit stations.

Should we have increased the ability to compete in housing and groceries before the influx of immigrants? Maybe. But I don’t think having them here makes these issues harder to address, and it might increase the pressure to actually take action. Every party is talking about cost of living now.

Regulation cannot be completely discounted, but the bigger issue is labour. If you can even find someone willing to build you a home, they won't even entertain doing it until years into the future. There is no capacity to build more homes.

At least not without paying construction workers a whole lot more in order to compel the software developers away from developing software and into building houses, but then that only drives the cost of housing even higher!

More labour is one way, but there are also orthogonal ways of retargeting the existing building capacity more effectively. For instance, financial discincentives against building low-density luxury housing and more incentives towards building higher density housing would alleviate demand pressure over the span of a few years. We also used to know how to build affordable housing.

Why is that disincentive not already present? Multiple people building a town home should be able to outbid one person building a single family home every single time, and the sky is the limit for a large condo building. Their combined capacity to pay more than outstrips the additional cost to build the structure. It is clear what is a better deal for the construction crew.

I expect the answer is because nobody actually wants to live in such dwellings. They might accept rent in a place like that if they see it as a stop-gap until they can move into their "dream home", but it is not the home they are willing to commit to and build (obviously there are exceptions).

Zoning regulations limits what you can construct in any given location, so it's not even about who has more financial capital, but political capital in many cases.

Not so much an issue anymore, though. Want to build a tiny house? No problem. Multiple houses on a single lot? Go for it! These would have been unthinkable 10-20 years ago, but have been given the green light in more recent times. Council knows that they can't get away with ignoring housing any longer. Of course, it's easy to accept because they also know almost nobody is going to do it.

The only long term option is to increase productivity with education and technology because you can't increase population (however you do it) forever. We should also stop emphasising the total GDP (which can be and is boosted by adding more people) and focus on the GDP per capita instead (which seems to be falling in Canada according to the various graphs posted here).

The claim that immigration is the only option is a fallacy peddled because it's the lazy short term option and "Après moi, le déluge" [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apr%C3%A8s_moi,_le_d%C3%A9luge

Yeah, I should have mentioned productivity growth - it is of course another solution to the problem. I think it’s harder for governments to implement policy that increases productivity growth than immigration, though.

I would be interested to have the person you replied to steelman why, specifically, they believe that the contents of that graph would lead to social decline and political turmoil.

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