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Comment by YesThatTom2 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder did there’s an opportunity here. Like…. Hey, I’ll move to one of these countries and start a business doing _________ because in a shrinking population that’d be great!

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Something where you can exploit cheap elderly labor. Their government pensions, supported by the shrinking working population, won’t be enough to retire

I thought about it the other way: build an accelerator to get paid by nation states to pull young, productive workers to your declining population country (both remote workers and skilled on site workers, think healthcare). Want to start something together (I’m a highly skilled worker familiar with and working on expatriating to Western Europe)? Lots of value to generate in nation states competing for future productivity, and therefore power.

Both are interesting business models.

How would you go about this?

Not really, you just have a smaller consumer group. Not that great for business. In almost all cases educated people are leaving those places for economic reasons.

I like the idea here but what are you going to do?

Local consumers and employees are going down.

Many of these places people professionals are / want to emigrate OUT.

I kinda like the idea of living / working in a sleepy Italian village but then you have the issues of services (government AND private) degrading and so on...

You can already do that in the US too, some rural parts of the country have a significant lack of skilled tradespeople.

Land may become cheaper given fewer people – so, farms?

bulldozing houses and buying land for cheap maybe?

But then what? Farm on it?

Cost of bulldozing and making land farm-able I imagine is crazy high... let alone all you'll get is a patchwork of houses / land.

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