Hacker News Reader

Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

It also means some places on earth have to be kept in poverty or even wars. That's the biggest driver moving people out from their homeland. People who live good, peaceful lives are mostly staying where their are.

It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.

View on HN

If all this sounds unsustainable, it's because it is.

We're essentially legitimizing a pyramid scheme here. Economics and policy are all centered around extraction and share holder value. I've never seen any attention paid to making an industry stable or resilient.

Nearly every issue we face day-to-day is either due to companies holding massive control over our society, or companies degrading services we rely on because profit is no longer increasing.

We're not allowed a stable, peaceful life in a stable climate because someone else needs to get one over on someone else.

We could provide for everyone but we have decided making immaterial numbers go up is #1 priority.

When I ask why can't we have companies that exist in a steady state, the answer is another company will take advantage if the first company doesn't first. Why do we live like this? Is this system truly responsible for our technology and comfort? or is the comfort a side-product that can be produced by a number of other systems?

We're being played for fools. We all know it, but we can't imagine an alternative because they've got us all by the balls controlling our health care and housing.

Citation:

How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465127 - March 2025 (26 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529256 - December 2024 (10 comments)

(You're right, it is a suboptimal socioeconomic system)

I really appreciate you providing citations for my screed. Thank you.

Happy to help. Facts, data, and evidence matters.

capitalism is the current dominant religion.

we're fucked.

Yeah, the open borders folks like to paint a rosy picture of, "If we let a bunch of people come here and work cheap, it'll make things better back in their homelands too as they take their training and wages back sometimes." But if that's true, pretty soon they won't have any reason to come here and work cheap, and then the reason the bosses wanted them in the first place is gone.

I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.

> open borders folks

i don't mean to sound pithy, but some "open borders folks" just fundamentally disagree with the concept of borders (and usually, by extension, the monopoly of violence employed at those borders), regardless of economics.

That does sound like bad news for exploiters, but it sounds like a good thing for people who actually want people to be better off. If open borders means people come, work for cheap, improve their homelands, and eventually stop coming, that sounds like a win-win to me. Are you sure some of the open borders folks aren't thinking like that?

If rich countries' sustanibility depends on poor countries staying poor, it creates a huge incentive for the rich countries to destablize the poor countries and keep them poor.

Just like the US once destablized its southern neighbors to keep them exporting cheap fruits, if the only thing that keeps the US's pension system from exploding is cheap workers from the neighbors, it'd want them to keep exporting cheap labor.

Of course one might argue rich countries will do that anyway so it's not a concern. It's just icing on a poisoned cake.

The issue here is that nowhere is the wellbeing of the low income natives considered.

Is it not considered, or do they just disagree on the effects? The open borders advocacy I've seen is based on it being good for everyone.

So what to you is the alternative better interpretation; that they continue in destitute poverty?

As total fertility rate continues to rapidly decline due to educated, empowered women having less kids or no kids, wages will rise globally due to reduced labor supply as prime working labor force cohort compresses. To get to that point, domestic economies with surplus labor need to be stoked with investment (Africa and India) to maximize economic potential until the labor supply constraint is reached.

The Great Demographic Reversal Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6

https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...

https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep...

https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra...

https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation....

Why do people have enormous amounts of children when they live in destitute poverty, and why is that the responsibility of somebody else to fix?

That's an unsupported assertion.

Lots of non-Ukranian Europeans still want to move to the US for example, because there's an idea that in skilled jobs you can make more money in the US.

Likewise, India isn't "kept" in poverty nor is the country at war, but the opportunity for economic prosperity elsewhere is a strong driver for migration. And when India surpasses the US or Europe in economic prospects, the trend will reverse and enterprising people will flock to e.g. Hyderabad and New Delhi.

Economic prosperity, until we do away with capitalism, probably won't ever be homogeneous. Where there's a potential across a circuit the electrons will flow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com