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Comment by tonymet | Hacker News Reader

economics < productivity < demographics (primarily ) & technology (secondarily)

Every country in the world is trying to solve the same problem: how to preserve economic growth despite a shrinking population and declining productivity.

The USA and western Europe chose to resolve it with immigration.

Japan & (some of) Eastern Europe chose to resolve it without immigration.

Japan is the economic canary because they had a 15+ year head start, and had the best discipline with immigration control. Their economic indicators are trailing-signals of the demographic freefall. Debt can only patch it for so long.

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this is really an oversimplification. Japan has been struggling since the real estate bubble popped and their post 2008 strategy of extremely low interest rates has lead to the yen carry trade which now is causing problems with raising rates, etc. there’s so many specific factors with japan that are causing issues before population

Do tell. From my point of view , economic indicators are the oversimplification , rather than social factors

Actually Eastern Europe is doing immigration despite what headlines you might be reading. Lots of Indians and Filipinos and Latin Americans.

You're right for the most part. exceptions (and faltering) would be Poland, Hungary, Russia, and a few others.

Poland faltering? Three days ago HN had:

Poland now 6th-largest EU economy, ahead of Switzerland and Belgium

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49235323

"Poland's rise is primarily the result of years of economic growth, industrial development, expanding exports and rising consumption and investment."

i didn't mean economically. stop striving to be uncharitable.

In what way did you mean it?

Economically was the most logical interpretation in this discussion of "how to preserve economic growth despite a shrinking population and declining productivity".

> Actually Eastern Europe is doing immigration despite what headlines you might be reading.

"faltering" -- failing to uphold their discipline to restrain immigration

>Every country in the world is trying to solve the same problem: how to preserve economic growth despite a shrinking population and declining productivity.

Which countries are actually seeing secular (ie. not a dip for a few quarters) because of a recession or whatever) productivity decline, and aren't economic basketcases (eg. Cuba or Venezuela)?

you're assuming gdp means productivity.

> Every country in the world is trying to solve the same problem: how to preserve economic growth ...

Why is economic growth needed?

Because politicians whored for votes and "kept" their promises by creating ever more public debt, spending more than they made (usually while lining up their pockets and the pockets of their relatives, including their mistresses).

Politicians are so corrupt and so incompetent that none of them would even be accepted as president of a table tennis club.

Capitalism doesn't need endless growth to work. It's governments spending more than what they should that do.

If there's no economic growth in an aging country, that requires everyone to accept a gradual decline in their standard of living, which is an extraordinarily unpopular idea. (I've talked to people who say they're OK with it, but in my experience, their idea has always been that we'll sacrifice the goods and services they don't personally care about to ensure the ones they do care about remain accessible and affordable.)

Once you start to know the current generation of olds - world wide - you realize that they are just as rotten as the politicians they have put in charge. The difference is just opportunity.

Respect of the elderly is strangling humanity right now, but the olds have always nourished themselves by sucking the life blood of the young. It just has never been as obvious before. It's a vicious cycle, because each generation gets the opportunity to manipulate and bind the younger generations.

Loyalty used to lie with your family, then with your nation. Right now loyalty lies with the generation, and that has catastrophic consequences.

it's much easier to keep people happy while prosperity is growing.

>The USA and western Europe chose to resolve it with immigration.

Immigration is a core tenet of the post-WW2 Western consensus and precedes any demographic scare in most Western countries by decades.

it's a matter of degree

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