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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30715 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023

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Yeah, I think a huge issue is that elites making these policies don't have skin in the game and have to deal with some of the downstream consequences of their decisions. They don't need to live next door to the non-integrating immigrants and their descendants. If things eventually hit Brazilianisation, they can retreat to gated communities or the Martha's Vineyards of the world.

My other thought is that a solution would be to hold out until robotics and AI can decouple the economy from population. But to a degree you would still need a lot of workers in services like healthcare and aged care even if the economy wasn't a problem.

You can't have economic growth in a slowing country

There are so few examples of countries that have had sustained declines in population that this claim seems to lack sufficient evidence. I can think of one counterexample though, Ireland saw a continuous drop in population alongside an overall increase in wealth from the 1840s until 1961.

Theoretically it shouldn't be true either, as long as innovation is happening there will be some source of growth. An aging population might be a bigger problem then a shrinking one here.

The other would be to rejigger the economy to work acceptably in conditions of slowing or stalling growth, but that would require a complete rewrite of our understanding of prosperity -- or at least (not that this is any less difficult) a reshaping of the economies of places like Europe into something less connected to the global financial system, which demands continued growth for survival.

The latter sounds too complicated for me but there seems to be a common sense way in which prosperity could increase with a declining population: With lots of old people dying off GDP per capita increases and people in the prime of their life find that property has gotten a lot more affordable.

I still don't see the appeal. Bringing in lots of low-wage laborers doesn't result in genuine economic growth. If anything, it leads to economic stagnation, because the real driver of economic growth is increases in productivity - of the kind that immigration stymies, because why invest in productivity when the flow of labor is so generous?

I don't know the answer to this, but suspect that it's something horribly short-termist, like goosing projected GDP numbers to placate the analysts & keep interest rates low until the next election.

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