Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

All immigration is GDP additive and increases the market for goods and tax income for governments. It offsets low birth rates. If there is a labor shortage it will reduce inflation.

Of course there many considerations but generally it's a good thing.

View on HN

Given the great benefits, I wonder why there is no country on Earth that has open immigration.

It's a good thing for those classes of people you just mentioned (governments, business owners). For everyone else it's just increased competition.

I'm pretty sure that's a pretty reductive take, and if you believe that then you should be ok with decreasing birth rates as well? Every baby born today could be competition for you or your kids in ~16-30 years.

Trying to limit birth rates is a tragedy of the commons (no individual in your community is incentivized to limit themselves), while trying to limit immigration is a competition between two commons (and thus cooperative within your community).

I'll bite. Quality of life in terms of natural resources available only goes down with more people. I'd be much happier with maybe 25% of current population level.

Your comment is a common anti-immigrant trope: we're full/out of water/out of land/out of X!

Where there are shortages why should the solutions be focused on restricting immigration? Should people having children also be penalized?

I didn't say penalized. I think the same is true for everyone worldwide. We're not out of anything. Plenty of room to cram more in. You don't need high standards for clean water, you can tolerate some sewage and dissolved heavy metals. You don't need more than a 10x15x7-ft box to live in with a bathroom at the end of the hall. You definitely never need to have solitude anywhere for your enjoyment, you can be in a crowd of thousands whenever you are awake. You'll live.

I'd live too, but I'd curse the prior generations that left it this way. But we're not far evolved from chimpanzees and we will grow until we collapse.

> I'd live too, but I'd curse the prior generations that left it this way. But we're not far evolved from chimpanzees and we will grow until we collapse.

That's not really what the UN predicts [1]. It looks like it'll peak at a bit shy of 11 billion.

Population growth rates have been going down for awhile.

https://www.un.org/en/UN-projects-world-population-to-peak-w...

Which is mostly a product of cratering birth rates as countries get richer and more developed. I’d argue that’s a sign that we are in the process of collapse. I think we certainly will if 8 or 11 billion people reach the standard of living of the US, just by the ecological impact.

This is just hysterical nonsense. As the population has grown so have standards of living for those in advanced and developed economies. Countries that go downhill do so for reasons separate from population growth.

Much like the "peak oil" hysteria of the 90's your claims require that society as a whole doesn't do anything to solve problems, or adapt to changing circumstances.

If population growth really was the problem, then reproduction would be discouraged. But problems of pollution and resource use can be solved by changing policy and behavior. We can become much cleaner and more efficient without forgoing the very real benefits of population growth.

That's fair enough, but it would require a pretty radical restructure of our economy to do that. Most of our economy sort of depends on a growing population; this has been an issue with Japan (and their slowly-shrinking and aging population) for quite awhile.

Eventually, of course, we will all have to have a neutral or negative population growth rate, but I have to believe that there's an advantage to being the last country with a growing population, though I don't have data to back that up off the top of my head.

Certainly on all counts there. And enough people believe explicitly in demographic competition to make fair leveling and reduction a problem. But this is what leads to long-term sustainability.

Hardly, they're also customers and employers. Also governments are the people, they spend taxes for their benefit.

The business owners don’t get rich from the reduced wages, the consumers do.

Only if the consumers are independently wealthy. Ask any business owner if they will make more money with reducing their workforce wages.

That was a solid chuckle, thank you

Competition in the context of capitalism is considered a feature and not a bug

Reply on news.ycombinator.com