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Comment by foxyv | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile the world population has reached 8.2 billion and is still rising. There are plenty of people out there. Just not the kind of people that those in power want.

This is why immigration is so important to the economy of a developed nation. You bring in families from around the world, give them amazing opportunities, then hire them to take care of the elderly and keep the lights on. Instead, our nation is trying to shut the door like a lone hoarder living in a pile of rotting trash.

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The downward trend of birth rates applies to both developing and developed countries:

https://www.gapminder.org/answers/how-did-babies-per-woman-c...

This just delays coming up to a solution for what to do when population is declining everywhere. It only works as long as those other countries are poor.

No solution is needed. People are empowered to make the fertility choices they're making. Stop issuing debt that will never be paid back for tax cuts today. Stop building infrastructure that no one will be around to maintain. Stop stealing from the future today. The population decline is not the problem; the socioeconomic systems that exploited a global population boom are. They will be forced to change, they have no other option.

Agreed. It will be a looming problem until we can come up with an economic system that doesn't exploit young workers to prop up the older generation. Once we solve that I imagine that we'll see things stabilize population wise.

Bear in mind that the lingering mass and inertia of big things in a process of slowing down can easily make it seem as if they're still doing fine along a certain path, until they're suddenly not.. I doubt we're going to literally drive ourselves to extinction via ceasing to have children at all, but a diminishing birth rate that goes below replacement levels, and an eventual gigantic demographic shift in age averages and total population are going to possibly be worse for us than having more people.

funny, I thought those in power tend to get what they want?

We often want things that are bad for us. We eat terrible food, smoke, pollute, litter, and generally act like fools. Those in power are no different.

So sounds you are supporting legal immigration like Musk and Trump?

On a global level, fertility is negatively correlated with national IQ, and on a national level it is negatively correlated with individual IQ. Which strongly contradicts what you wrote.

Cite a source for that? There are, in particular, no such thing as "national IQ" numbers.

"National IQ" refers to the average IQ of a country.

Yes, that is a statistic that does not in fact exist. It may exist in theory, but there is no mechanism in place anywhere to collect it, and there never has been.

Americans should know this intuitively by dint of most of us never having been "officially" IQ tested. Somehow, the notion of reliable national IQ statistics persists.

I was IQ tested by my school in Massachusetts more than once in the 1960s.

Ok? Almost nobody is.

Whether anybody in the US is is irrelevant to whether data exists or used to exist from previous decades that was used to get an estimate of the average IQ of the US at that time in the past.

I was tested by the public school system of the second-largest city in Massachusetts and have no reason to believe that my experience was atypical.

About the same time as I was being tested, in Diana v. State Board of Education (1970) a court ruled that a school could not place students in a class for mild mental retardation because of a low score on the Stanford Benet IQ test, which of course implies that she was tested by her school.

There were other lawsuits like this in other US states.

I don't know what point you're trying to make. There isn't a national survey of IQ in the United States. There also aren't representative data sets from which you could model a national IQ of the United States (unless you think "people volunteering for the military" make up a strongly representative sample of Americans). And the United States is a gigantic industrialized country, exactly the kind of country where cross-sectional research projects like this sometimes do happen --- unlike most of the world, where the only reason people get IQ tests is because doctors suspect them of having cognitive abnormalities.

There is no such thing as "national IQ". That's all I came here to say. I didn't raise my hand and ask to litigate whether anybody on HN had ever taken an "official" IQ test. I'm sure several people have. Most of us: no.

The point of this thread isn't that IQ testing doesn't exist. It's that reliable (or even plausible) comparative national IQ metrics exist. That has to be true for the claim made upthread to make any sense. And: it isn't true.

>Just not the kind of people that those in power want.

farm owners don't give a fuck what color the cattle is.

>You bring in families from around the world

and if/when they integrate into the host society, their children will have as few children as the natives

>give them amazing opportunities, then hire them to take care of the elderly

yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity

>This is why immigration is so important to the economy of a developed nation.

exploiting the resources of the undeveloped nations is bread and butter of the developed nations, yeah.

cui bono? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh2Vh-G3vEk

"yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity"

Nursing and elder care is a field that anyone can respect. Why do you spit on their contribution to society?

I don't spit at the people who do those jobs, I spit at the people who think those jobs are 'amazing opportunities'.

Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.

If people agreed with your view that it's an "amazing opportunity" then nursing homes wouldn't be catastrophically understaffed.

Of course that doesn't take away from anyone's enjoyment of that line of work, it is truly important, but it's not something that the vast majority of people see as an "amazing opportunity".

Nursing homes are understaffed because they're for-profit entities looking for $15/hr labor.

This. Caring for people is great. Being in poverty while doing almost anything sucks.

America is great at underpaying and overworking almost everyone for almost everything. America is really only good if you're a decamillionaire or better. In general, it tends (YMMV) better to be in Europe for poorer/average folks who get much more value and protections while paying more taxes.

Um yes, precisely. They're not good opportunities for people to make a living. Did you reply to the wrong person or just stating the obvious?

The person you replied to said

>> Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.

That the market doesn't pay well for the work is immaterial to its value.

If you're agreeing to everything they said, and only disagreeing that it pays well: yes.

You're changing the subject, the point of contention was whether it's "an amazing opportunity", not whether the work is valuable.

You’re defining opportunity in strictly monetary terms?

Yes? That's what makes something a broadly recognized "good opportunity" in our current economic system that you can base public policy around. Everything else is just variable personal preference.

People don't leave their home countries and entire lives behind because they're looking for the "opportunity" of nursing a foreigner for a pittance. They do it because they want to make good money and provide for their families.

Around 20% of US elder care facilities will close around 2027 because of the Medicaid cuts that pay for long term care of many to pay for the tax cuts for the rich. It was cynically set to take effect after the midterm elections so people wouldn't realize what was happening.

For the people in countries that still have a high birth rate, they usually are amazing opportunities. Wealthy countries are a lot richer than poor ones, and people will take jobs we scorn.

Unfortunately, we also scorn the people who would want to do them. We set very low immigration limits, and we pay the people who do those jobs (even native ones) very poorly.

So these jobs are simultaneously "amazing opportunities" and "abusive".

if it's so respectable why aren't you doing it?

"kids these days don't want to work!" -- then why aren't you showing them how?

I literally can't afford to do that.

I think the difference between what you're complaining about the person saying, and what the person is actually saying could be solved by workers getting paid like $5/hour more (AKA a living wage).

The person didn't say anything that contradicts what they're saying other than that you're unhappy with the status quo that is offered to migrant workers. And you're absolutely right. But a more constructive dialogue would be "let's improve the conditions for those people."

I know that I reply to a post written by someone who refuses to capitalize at my own risk, but

> yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity

You seem to have inadvertently discounted the experiences of people like my dad’s African-born eye doc, who came to this county for the opportunity of medical training which he now uses to make injections into my elderly dad’s eyes every few months.

(Either that or you’re an idiot).

Actually, I read some of your other posts and I think I figured it out.

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