Comment by qiqitori | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qiqitori | Hacker News Reader

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Determining whether there is an actual labor shortage is pretty difficult. In many cases:

* Doing the work in a completely different way would eliminate the need for more people doing the labor. In the case of Japan, there is a lot of small farmland. In the case of the US, farmland tends to be huge. I guess smaller farmland is more labor-intensive. Consolidating smaller strips of farmland into a larger piece of farmland may improve labor intensity. But that means that one person gets to do the farming for a higher margin and everybody else loses their profession.

* Lots of farmland is being worked by elderly people. At some point you can't do it anymore. Somebody not working in agriculture would have to give up their current job and go into agriculture. It's difficult to predict whether that will happen.

* Labor shortage often means "we can't find anybody who is willing to do it for 1000 yen per hour so there must be a labor shortage".

BTW, there are a lot of abandoned houses in Japan; many of them will come with some amount of farmland that could be used, but isn't used.

> Determining whether there is an actual labor shortage is pretty difficult.

The only hard part is nailing down what people mean by “labor shortage”; resolving whether one exists under either the normal economic definition or the one people are actually using is pretty easy, but since the whole point of using the term is to mask that the actual complaint is about wages being too high, its really difficult to get people to admit what they are talking about.

Yep, almost always in rich world "labor shortage" = I can't / don't want to pay a livable wage.

Over here in Europe my country has a sky high unemployment, yet picking tomatoes is mostly done by immigrants from Southeast Asia. The pay for that hard work is so bad that most natives won't bother, but it's okay if your plan is to save for a few years with absolute minimum budget, and then return to somewhere with much lower cost of living. I guess it's just the same with Latin American migrants in America.

Japan has historically been pretty anti-immigration, so they might prefer robots over this arrangement.

> Determining whether there is an actual labor shortage is pretty difficult.

Using the technical definition, it's actually pretty easy. There is also a colloquial definition. But under the colloquial definition it is not just pretty difficult, its is actually impossible as it isn't real thing.

> But that means that one person gets to do the farming for a higher margin and everybody else loses their profession.

Here's what happens here: One large farmer captures most of the market and then relies on farm workers to get the job done, while small farmers are left under-utilized. It seems the same is true in Japan. After all, we're talking about farm laborers, not famers. The small-plot farmer who is also doing all the work doesn't need legions of employees.

Which is all well and good, but when the larger farmer reaches the limits of how many people they can hire, the solution is simple: Cut back. The under-utilized farmers will happily step in to fill the gap.

> It's difficult to predict whether that will happen.

It might not happen, but if it doesn't happen, it wasn't ever needed. Do you see a reason for farmers to farm for no reason? I don't mean no reason like overproducing to ensure there is still food in the event of a catastrophe. That is actually a valid reason, even if it doesn't always seem like it. I mean like produce it and then immediately turn it back into the ground.

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