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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but this only works if one is willing to accept a changing racial profile/culture. It appears that many people do not accept this idea. Not just in the USA, but look at Japan or South Korea, for example.

To me, the really interesting question is how to stop what appears to have been inevitable for the last 40+ years: when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.

The reason that I find this important is that even though I personally have no problem with race/culture mixing, in-fact I love Korean BBQ tacos... eventually with the immigration solution, there is an end state where all societies and countries are economically advanced, and have negative birth rates. What then? As a Star Trek fan, I have ideas about post-scarcity.

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> when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels. I believe what could help here involves all kinds of non-market solutions which are hard to solve, and very not cool at the moment.

There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate: The first generation to become affluent enough to own property does so and then lobbies for policies that increase home prices. These policies create housing scarcity both for homes and rental units.

That saddles later generations with unreasonably high housing costs and makes them unable to afford to start a family, so the fertility rate drops. If you want more kids, build more housing.

As mentioned in this other comment [0], I find this to be one of the most interesting problems of our time.

> There is a huge factor in this which is well-documented to reduce the fertility rate:

If you have a moment, would you mind pointing me to this documentation? It sounds very correct to me, but I would love to have the receipts when I quote you in the future.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43699799

There are numerous studies showing that higher housing costs reduce the fertility rate, e.g.: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.labeco.2024.102572

Thank you. This is excellent. I am really curious how we fix this in the future.

My crank idea to fix both of the issues you mention is mandatory national service.

This would provide everyone a common ground, similar to how widespread military service in wwii did. It would promote civic virtue by exposing everyone to how they personally can make the government useful. And it could be made such that we have our national service corp just build useful things, like houses. Additionally we could provide similar benefits to folks that go through national service as the military - healthcare, payment for college, etc.

one possible answer is removing property taxes and replacing them with land value taxes. property taxes dicensentivize development while land value taxes incentive it.

The US was very good for a very long time at integrating immigrants. It should continue that tradition and work even harder at it.

I believe it was some Republican president who said something to the effect of “if you move to Germany you may be a citizen but you are not a German… But if you move to America and become a citizen you are an American”.

It’s worth noting that not all advanced societies have fared as badly as Korea and Japan. Scandinavia for instance is below replacement but not nearly as catastrophically as Korea. It’s possible that a bit more policy tweaking and more productivity=>leisure time could get them back to a replacement rate.

The US was historically rather hostile towards new waves of immigrants in practice, treating them very much like second class citizens (Irish, Italians, Latinos etc), effectively pressuring them to assimilate by becoming "more American than Americans" to avoid such attitudes. One can argue that the system kinda sorta worked in the long run, but I don't think it makes it worthy of emulation.

> when an economy becomes "advanced," the birth rates drop to tragic levels.

heck maybe that's what trump's doing - tank the American economy and hope it brings the birth rate back up...

I think you need to consider history if you think this is a new thing. People literally paid for indentured servants, even outside of the slave trade.

Importing cheap labor has been a constant throughout the countries history, look at camps of people building the railroads you’ll see lots of Chinese people etc.

But if we zoom out, there is an end to this. We run out of poor people to be migrants eventually, right? I don't just mean as the USA, or any country, but as the Earth.

How do we solve the issue of the end state, where all economies have reached our current level of advancement?

I assume we solve it, or we go extinct, and that would be an odd reason to do so after millions of years, wouldn't it?

Countries are just arbitrary here. What happens long term is there’s massive selective pressure because children of people that reproduce in wealthy economies are the only people to be around in 200+ years.

The USA as a whole has 1.7 births per woman which is really close to the ~2.1 needed. However that isn’t evenly distributed ethic Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander’s living in the US actually sit just above replacement rate. Give it 200 years and that may very well increase.

Really 3 kids needs to be seen as normal long term because some people just aren’t going to have any.

Why does less then replacement rate equal extinction? It just requires a reimagination of the economy it's not an extinction level threat. That's just scare mongering.

You know NYC is already minority white right?

My most controversial take, even though it is 100% true:

The entire planet is minority "white." I put that in scare quotes because even as the lightest skinned person in the land, I know that "white" is a made up in/out group term. As a Slav, I was not "white" according to US immigration law as recently as the 1950s. There is technically no such thing as being white, there is only passing for white. The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently. It's a silly word that really means nothing.

If one wants to slow down "white" people becoming the minority more and more due to their economic advancement, clearly the solution is carpet bombing poor countries with e-readers preloaded with Wikipedia. That is the only moral way to even things out!

> The definition of white entirety depends on the day, and who you ask. Slavs, Irish, Italians, Greeks, were not "white" until very recently.

Indeed, in some parts of Russia, white supremacists do not consider Caucasians to be white. It really does depend on who and when you ask.

I assume if it reaches dire levels the government will just mandate that you raise children. I dont see anything wrong with that, personally. Raising kids is a duty like paying taxes or registering for the draft. Previously, it was just assumed that people would do it on their own, but it seems like the government needs to add "sticks" to get people to do it.

This is such a cool topic. Homo sapiens are exactly evolved to reproduce. This is instruction #1, or else we wouldn't be here to discuss it. We might call this the super-not-weak anthropic principle?

We produce multiple hormones which control our behavior to reproduce, and then different ones to raise those kids. It's been nice for millions of years. Parents think that creating their children is the best thing they ever did, generally speaking.

Yet... we have recently created what is otherwise a really cool economic system, which somehow overrides all of that!

Aside from "are we alone in the universe," this is one of the most interesting problems in my mind.

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