U.S. population growth is slowing down. Here's why that's a bad thing | Hacker News Reader

U.S. population growth is slowing down. Here's why that's a bad thing

americamagazine.org

20 pointsmikesabbagh50 comments

Population decline isn’t all bad. A labor shortage would finally cause wages to move upwards, no? One of the big reasons folks in the 1950s could be paid well for lowish skilled jobs was the small labor pool employees were willing to pick from.

And that’s exactly why a large portion of businesses and the political machine are 100% OK with mass illegal immigration.

Not when there’s an excess of “under the table labor” which doesn’t pay federal or state taxes, making them comparably much cheaper to employ.

> Unfortunately, a sustained population loss would be incompatible with economic growth. Fewer people would mean a decline in business activity, imminent labor shortages and a worsening age imbalance that would leave more senior citizens without enough caregivers.

Same old reasoning that we've heard a million different times.

Can't we simply increase immigration when needed. Japan is a bad example because they are a xenophobic population that doesn't accept immigration. Tired of this this bullshit take every single time.

We live in a different world than 1800-2000 when migration, births, and fossil fuels were the powertrain of growth. The math has changed.

Edit: I don't know what the answer is, other than to say 'it's probably not what it was before'.

>Can't we simply increase immigration when needed.

Not when you have a major political party doubling down on nativist sentiment and rhetoric. Remember "migrant caravans"? Or midwestern conservative politicians stoking fears of MS-13? Or "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us."

Immigration is scary to many people in the USA and one party deliberately stokes that fear.

Over 10% of US population is estimated to be undocumented. I don't believe these census numbers are accurate at all, we are doing fine in terms of importing young population.

>Over 10% of US population is estimated to be undocumented.

Not even close, it's closer to 3-4%:

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/immigra...

https://www.brookings.edu/policy2020/votervital/how-many-und...

https://www.fairus.org/issue/illegal-immigration/2020-how-ma...

https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/interactives/u-s-unauth...

I have a hunch that any source putting it at >10% is attempting to stoke the same nativist sentiment and rhetoric I mentioned in my parent comment.

I guess 3.5% is not 'close' to 10% but it's still a very material number, and 'very unhealthy' in terms of managing civil and social infrastructure. 'Undocumented' is just an upside down way of saying 'dirty cheap labour with no rights' which is possibly the greatest guarantee of inequality etc.. They need to be on the books one way or another the issue has to be sorted out.

Census counts everyone, included non citizens, regardless of citizenship.

That’s why there was controversy adding a “are you a US citizen?” to the questionnaire.

> Census counts everyone

Census doesn't count. People count themselves in census.

Can you help me understand your distinction?

Cheap labor lowers wages and undermines unions ability to negotiate. In the long term the additional demand generated by immigrants balances out and things are fine. In the short term many forms of labor are devalued and people who are already live here fine at their wages are undercut.

The idea that anti-immigrant sentiment is purely driven by racism isn't accurate.

As is typical on internet forums nuance is always lost when it comes to these kinds of issues.

My wife and her family are immigrants FYI so when I say these things I'm not some bigot. I'm just a guy that used to work in the construction industry and saw the impact on wages for lower skilled professions.

If we legitimized the immigration status of those people, why wouldn't they join the very same unions and keep wages high for everyone? The villains here are the capital class and their interest in keeping the rest of us in conflict with each other, not struggling immigrants.

> If we legitimized the immigration status of those people, why wouldn't they join the very same unions and keep wages high for everyone?

Because of this per the unions https://twitter.com/unitehere/status/1383450861595074563

Labor unions have long lobbied against legal visas for immigrants.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/biden-agenc...

They lobbied obama admin to cut these visas ( and others) by half from bush era high.

"displaces U.S. workers while suppressing industry-wide wages. "

> The villains here are the capital class

You seem to have it all mixed up. 'Capital class' lobbied hard and reversed Trumps visa bans and are major lobbiest for legal h2 visas.

I'm not talking about visas, just make them citizens with the same rights as the rest of us. Then they can join those unions on an equal footing.

> legitimized the immigration status of those people,

> I'm not talking about visas

So only "legitimate" immigration status according to you is full citizenship? Like hand out citizenship at the port of entry ?

> Then they can join those unions

Its not about the footing. Union's main concern is high unemployment among its ranks.

" In one city where 91% of our current #union hotel housekeepers are still out of work, a major hotel company is asking for more H-2B visas.

Why is this necessary?"

edit: Looks like you are trolling here based on your flagged/downvoted comments

Legitimizing people's status would definitely help to a degree, but not fully.

The wage to earn a significantly higher standard of living than that found in the poorest Central American nations where most of these human beings come from is significantly lower than the "living wage" that we on the left talk about frequently.

"so why not just raise the minimum wage, that'll solve the issue!" is what many say to this.

Yes, it would, if the construction, meat packing, agriculture industries were remotely capable of having enforcement against hiring "under the table" workers, which based on my experience in these industries growing up in a rural location of the southern US, isn't possible.

At the end of the day, in the short term, demand for labor is relatively fixed, and increasing the supply, even if you ensure that the human beings that are added to the supply are given the rights they deserve, is going to lower the price of labor. Supply and demand doesn't care about our morals. It's indifferent, because individual humans and businesses are going to make rational economic decisions when they rent labor from human beings, and will go for the quieter, cheaper, far less likely to complain about working conditions person than the American who they tell themselves (as they choose the undocumented person) didn't capitalize on the opportunities they were offered being born here and therefore doesn't deserve it. (This is a rationalization I've encountered numerous times, and often it was uttered by people who chose to hire undocumented folks instead of a crew from LaborReady, a short-term labor business that is compliant with the law.)

"Fewer people would ... leave more senior citizens without enough caregivers."

I think we should first try making Senior Caregiving a competitive field, by paying a living wage. I realize that might make shareholders and healthcare lobbyists grumpy - but as a nation, I think we could weather that storm.

That's a funny way of saying "we have designed our country like a pyramid scheme where paying the bills requires an ever broadening population base to cover the last generations debts.

Propaganda. Psychological warfare. Look at the rest of the anonymous articles by “the editors”. You should know exactly what they’ll suggest to ‘fix’ the problem.

"Unfortunately, a sustained population loss would be incompatible with economic growth."

This is a pretty hefty dose of globalist neoliberalism right there.

I think we may want to put question marks around 'rapidly declining population' as 'a problem to consider' (In Japan it's decline in birth, Hungary it's emigration) with existential considerations and consequences.

But the 'warm bodies is growth' mentality which is actually part and parcel of the industrial revolution ... needs to be rethought.

US, Canada, Australia, and Brazil etc. need to think about this a little more.

I don't disagree with you at all but unfortunately without population growth the social safety net in most industrialized countries would completely collapse.

Imagine what it would look like for a politician to try to tell the American public that social security needs to be radically reformed and restructured.

>I don't disagree with you at all but unfortunately without population growth the social safety net in most industrialized countries would completely collapse.

It hasn't in Japan.

Sure Japan has not collapsed, the US wouldnt either however,

A) Japan's pension, ss, medical liabilities per person are much smaller than what the US has created.

B) I wouldnt call the Japanese economy a success story over the last 20 years. They are just sliding by

This sounds like an argument from the same voters who are losing their jobs to automation. They just don't have the experience or education to comprehend how various forms of automation generate far greater productivity gains than more warm bodies.

Can you point me to the people who are actively losing their jobs to automation? I hear about this theoretical “crisis” only on hacker news, and not anywhere in the real world.

TL;DR our economic system has assumptions of continued population growth baked in all over the place.

These arguments are always hogwash, crying about the economy while not providing any labor regulation or economic support to people who have children (paid time off, subsidized child care, etc). They should be ignored.

The lower the total fertility rate, the better for planetary resource consumption and contention issues.

Exactly this. The hand wringing over something whose cause is so obvious is just very frustrating. Does the author have any idea how much child care costs per week? This is what you get when all social costs are forced onto the young, poor and overworked.

Father of 5 (grown) here: My spouse was disabled. That meant in good (healthwise) years, I had some locked in childcare.

Even with that ~advantage, most years were spent in a constant cycle of barely keeping the utilities on and housing paid - or not.

America Magazine is run by Jesuit priests, among the most left-leaning of Catholic organizations, they're editorially both pro-labor and pro-child support.

Ahh... using God’s name to guilt people into paying for their own self-destruction. Nothing new. The Bible says a lot about this type of people.

I like the Jesuits mark on history. It's one of the few religious group I kind of look up to. To a extend. They produced some pretty solid scientist like Teillard de chardin or Angelo Secchi.

But that's just a side note. --

If I'm correct your statement is that paying for pro-labor or pro-child support policies is paying for self-destruction. Could you elaborate?

Irrelevant. They have are two policy points. Firstly, they oppose tax exemptions for native mothers. Secondly, they support immigration.

Let's think critically here. Please tell me exactly what immigration has to do with children. Immigrants are mostly adult males. Native-born babies are ... babies. So, to sum up, they're against babies, and they're for adult males from other places.

And then there is the 'pro-labor' policy. They suggest to increase the number of adult males in the labor force. What effect will that have on wages? So to sum up their policy: more workers at lower wages. Hmm... sounds a lot like every other media outlet that supports gutting the middle class and farming the poor.

Sorry; you've been lied to.

As Catholics, they’re also pro-natalist, and are always going to support people having more children over less or no children, even if it’s not in the best interests of those having said children.

Problem is that we're still in a zero-sum game that the CCP wants to play.

"The data released on Monday, from the Chinese ministry of public security, showed the number of new birth registrations in 2020 was 10.035 million, compared with 11.8 million in 2019. The 2019 figure marked the lowest point since the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949."

"Zhang Lijia, a writer, journalist and social commentator, said there was a change in attitude and many women – especially urban-living and highly educated – no longer regarded marriage and parenthood as “necessary passages in life or the essential ingredients of a happy life”."

“In another word, it is about choice. Better education, higher income and more career options grant these women the freedom to choose a lifestyle they desire. They are assertive enough to resist the pressure from their parents to produce children. And the society is more tolerant than before.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/10/china-birthrat...

Yeah but they still have over 4x the population of us, hah.

Pyramid schemes always need new blood or they will collapse.

Almost no economy is a pyramid scheme. American, European, and Asian economies have been functioning for hundreds of years. Populations only started growing in the late 1700s, even though they (in Europe and Asia) had already had an established economy.

I think he means national pension schemes such as Social Security or CPP. Longer lifespans and shrinking populations are both very detrimental to their returns.

No matter how you organize it, pensioners use what is produced by the working population. PAYGO systems just make that explicit.

Pensioners once produced what the pensioners of their generation consumed.

It's the same logic I offer to retirees+parents, who grump over having to support a school system.

Unfortunately, having so many retirees that pensions are a problem means there are too many retirees for your suggestion to be politically feasible.

That is a major problem in most developed societies. But if you were FDR, Truman, RB Bennett, or any other leader, then you probably couldn't have predicted demographic collapses 100 years in the future.

"Please don't post shallow dismissals. A good critical comment teaches us something."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Telling people not to have children and then importing people has always been the agenda.

The US government could do a lot more to assist with childcare (grants, subsidizing daycare, etc) but it would involve taking money from rich people in the form of taxes, so it's unlikely to happen.

You’re being downvoted but it’s true. And this sentiment is something shared by both the national populist and socialist, so you’d think there would be more support for it.

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