Rich, western countries face a stark choice: 6-day workweeks or more immigration
fortune.com
fortune.com
I'm ready to believe that there could be harms associated with this, but it's notable that Fortune doesn't bother actually identifying the real, concrete, human harm caused by an 85-million-person talent shortage.
There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death—the decrease in population gave the working class more bargaining power, which led to higher standards of living for the survivors, which created an environment where there was more leisure time to spend creating and consuming arts and philosophy.
It doesn't particularly matter to me if this model is strictly accurate to the history, it's a plausible outcome from reduced workforces.
We only need to work more if companies need to continue to bring in large amounts of profit. I'll need to see some really persuasive evidence that companies having a smaller bottom line because they have to compete for workers in a shrinking workforce hurts the workers in any meaningful way.
Totally irrelevant. A common misunderstanding. That worked then because the main source of wealth was land. Less people means more land per person.
That's not been the case since the industrial revolution. Now the main source of wealth is capital, including human capital.
That's why New Jersey is so much wealthier than Montana.
That assumes that people actually owned the land that they were working and weren't renting it from a landlord. If you're renting it from a landlord (with whatever definition of "rent" used in a given time and place) then sure, there's more land available to rent so the rent prices are cheaper, but it's not obvious to me that that's substantially different than the current prospective scenario where the owners of capital have less human capital to go around and so need to pay more for it. It's just a different way of structuring the same scarcity problem—fewer people to work leads to less profit for the holders of capital (whether that capital is in land or abstract financial instruments).
> That's not been the case since the industrial revolution. Now the main source of wealth is capital, including human capital.
And any event that causes human capital to be more scarce causes it to cost more. Since for most of us our wealth resides almost entirely in the human capital associated with our own selves, if human capital costs go up then our individual wealth goes up.
The only exception is if you're in the small class of people who own substantial non-human capital.
No, it doesn't. Prices are influenced by elasticity of supply and elasticity of demand. Even without owning it, if suddenly there are not enough laborers to go around, the remaining laborers will be in higher demand and be able to command higher wages from the landlords, who would rather pay a higher wage than leave the land fallow and get nothing from it at all. As a software engineer you should be familiar with this phenomenon, even when you work without owning shares of your employer.
You are commenting on both medieval history and economics without benefit of so much as a freshman level introduction to either. The rest of your post is full of similar misunderstandings and disputing it point by point would be tiresome
The main point you're missing though is this: Yes, allocating the profits between capital and labor (as between land and labor in ancient times) is a perennial war. But unlike then, now the pie actually gets bigger. There was no way to make more land before, other than to conquer, discover, colonize someone else's. Fundamentally zero sum. But today, creating more capital actually creates more "fields that can be worked" thus increasing demand for labor.
In times of secular stagnation, it does seem, to the chagrin of myself and anyone else who isn't already independently wealthy, that labor always slowly loses gains in a relative sense. But any time things start changing or expanding again, the "Lord would rather have peasants at a high price than a fallow field" effect always starts helping again. And in either time, the vast amounts of capital created (by which I include physical plant, invented processes and technologies, and even acquired education and skills inside of the head and belonging to laborers) help everyone get richer. This is why the poorest in America often have access to air conditioning, antibiotics, and cell phones, unheard of luxuries at one time, even when they are unfortunate enough to live in a time when the big rentseekers slowly chip away at their percentage of the profits.
We could allow the real-world economy to approach a stable equilibrium and even modest contraction and it would probably have many positive outcomes. We do burn a lot of labour and resources on buillshit and bubbles.
But so much of the population is staked in the stock market now that any narrative aside from "perpetual 7% growth" is political suicide.
I don't know if it was intentional, but the 401k has turned out to be a masterstroke of propaganda for pro-business set. It's gotten voters to think like they're capitalists and screw themselves in the process.
That's why policy makers don't want to build more housing. And why passive investors are freaking out about the coming labor market where workers have better leverage.
The Black Death didn't left a survivors cohort composed mostly of retirement-age people.
But this article isn't about how we take care of the elderly during this time of adjustment (we all know that the age gap isn't permanent, it will stabilize as people die), it's about how we keep GDP growth high.
I'm not comfortable setting new, higher norms for what's expected of workers (or of how much immigration we should be driving) with the justification that we're going into a 20 to 30-year adjustment window. We should figure out how we ride this out with the full understanding that it's temporary and then separately figure out what a new developed world with fewer native-born people looks like.
That's very interesting, do you have any sources I could read more on that?
"Number must get bigger"
We waste an absolutely disgusting amount of absolutely everything that we produce. No one values anything, and everything is replaceable.
It's sad but I feel like a really and very hard depression would likely be the absolute best thing for this planet and our species in the long term. We are so fat and so lazy and so entitled. It's hard to imagine getting to a more efficient future without a hard cultural reset.
I hope I’m wrong but if not, we are on the path for shooting ourselves into oblivion in not so long. Planet will need a couple million years to recover, but I have good hope it will.
I live in Germany.
Wages never rise because everyone falls for the propaganda that immigration is a "net positive" (and it is only a net positive for the capital-owning class who sell out their countrymen in favor of lower employment costs.) Do non-western immigrants in Germany contribute more in taxes than they receive in benefits (on average?)
Problem 1 is, no one is willing to pay goods at the price that would result from paying the required wage to get “native” workers.
Problem 2 is, there isn’t enough workers in a lot of professions. Raising wages isn’t going to make workforce appear out of thin air.
Hours worked per employee, employee counts, employment rate, etc. are not as tightly coupled to productivity as they used to be.
This "analysis" is just a whole lotta chicken little bullshit.
That's not a problem, that's the purpose of the current economical and political order in industrialized nations, whether they are capitalist, communist or mixed.
After all the horrors of the 20th century, including both world wars, it is not as easy anymore to trick the youth of the world to die on the battlefields, so the rulers have to device other means to get rid of the younger generations.
But we can't count on migration on the long term anyway, as countries with current net positive population growth rates are on the way to go sub-replacement in 1-2 generations as well.
Housing unaffordability should be pinned on NIMBY, bias against high density housing, and the decades long push to optimize housing as a rent-seeking friendly investment vehicle instead of simple dwellings. Today if you intend to buy an apartment in a high cost city, odds are that you must not only outbid people wanting to live there as well, but also rich people overseas that invest in real state as a way to stash money offshore and/or evade taxes.
It would if you'd import actual builders (which is strictly regulated industry). Instead we (NZ) get IT specialists (like me, lol) and if you are lucky - occasional nurse.
In reality, this is what will happen: 6 days a week and immigration, because the ultimate goal is to benefit the corporations. More workforce supply means lower wages, essentially modern slavery.
The shareholders must get their dividends!
I wonder if there is anything in common between the people benefitting from the labour of others in this modern economy, hmmmm...
At the same time that article's title gives it too on their immigration coordinated effort: "6-day workweeks or more immigration".
You can read it any way you like, it's obvious they're putting both 6-days workweek and more immigration as something people do not want.
It’s ironic seeing news about that extra workday when layoffs are high. Just yesterday, I read about Intel laying off 10,000 employees.
The China problem however..thats 2 decades from now..
It's actually India, Brazil and many African countries that are growing hard.
By stable I think GP meant resistant to measures that governments take to purposely increase birthrates, like slightly better childcare benefits.
So this immigration solution gets us to maybe 2035 or so.
And even that is dependent on none of the South American and African countries actually improving. Living conditions in Mexico are rapidly approaching the level where immigration from Mexico will stop outright. Columbia is behind that, but not ridiculously so. Venezuela is an exception, but short of the current government starting a war ... and Brazil won't be providing the immigration numbers we need.
Okay ... and then? I won't even reach retirement age until 2045, and I do hope to enjoy retirement for 20-30 years. By the time I kick the bucket, if I calculate right, we'd need ~1.5 times the size of the human population to immigrate to the west.
I find this figure problematic. For one thing, that's more humans than the UN predicts will be alive at that time.
It's counterproductive to try to grow a workforce segment that's likely not be needed soon. If there indeed is a labor shortage for some years, the society will handle the increased wage cost (which also imply increased push for automation) much better than it can handle a large segment of angry unemployed people, so while the future is unclear, it's better (at least for the society - the billionaires definitely benefit from cheap desperate potential workforce) to err on the side of doing less to solve this "problem" rather than doing too much.
Yes, immigration can solve the demographic problems of some Western countries. However it is not sustainable and it will most likely deprive poor countries from the most talented people. This is colonialism in disguise. And the ticking bomb is global: we will see population peak everywhere already in this century, so what’s going to happen when Nigeria won’t produce more workers for America or Europe?
We need to focus on fixing demographic problems instead. Solving gender inequality, building parenting-friendly education system, building better safety net and reforming the work - not just for remote cases, but for the majority that still has to attend their workplace.
And any skilled Immigrants who did come all want to leave Canada because it is so expensive.
Immigration is just a way to keep wages down and drive Asset prices high.
Aren't birthrates declining pretty much everywhere (including Nigeria and Tanzania, per the graphs Google pulls up)? It seems foolish to just assume sub-Saharan Africa is going to buck that trend forever, and be a baby-factory needed to make the math on Western corporate growth targets work.
I propose we solve this problem by firing Lant Pritchett from whatever fake job he currently holds and have him work a 128 hour workweek doing something actually productive. If that's insufficient, we can do the same to all the other economists.