Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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> A study conducted by consulting firm Korn Ferry found that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people, roughly equivalent to the population of Germany. That talent shortage could slash $8.5 trillion from nations’ expected revenues, affecting highly educated sectors such as financial services and IT as well as manufacturing jobs, which are considered “lower skilled” and require less education.

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.

I suspect this is one of the toxic outcomes of broad stock ownership.

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'm a broken record, but I think the common calculations used to value financial assets look ugly when the extraction rate declines and blow up as it approaches zero.

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.

Would it be a conspiracy theory to suggest that this is the real driving force behind the push for 401k plans?

> Would it be a conspiracy theory to suggest that this is the real driving force behind the push for 401k plans?

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.

> 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

The Black Death didn't left a survivors cohort composed mostly of retirement-age people.

Right, the age differential is a huge problem and one we should spend time on.

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.

> There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death

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 worked then because the main source of wealth was land. Less people means more land per person.

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.

> That assumes that people actually owned the land that they were working and weren't renting it from a landlord.

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.

When landowners died of plague it was often the laborers that inherited the land.

Citation needed.

> 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.

That's very interesting, do you have any sources I could read more on that?

If all of these sound like lies to spin economists' narratives and scare everybody into playing into their hands, it's because that's exactly what they are.

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