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Comment by lenkite | Hacker News Reader

Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers. As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.

Basically, the billionaires dislike it and hence are changing the message. They want you to be ants.

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> As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.

Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).

[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

I'm not sure the Black Death is a good example of gradual population decline

> Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers.

Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.

Except for outsourcing, of course. The labor pool isn't limited domestically for many kinds of work. And for tech specifically, the labor pool is highly mobile. So if another country becomes the best place to go, then the labor pool will move there. The simple analysis probably results in, counter-intuitively, the opposite of what you want, which is a decline in the competitiveness of American tech

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