Global population is crashing, soaring and moving

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00926-6

by NoRagrets • 4 years ago

27 95 4 years ago

ggm3• 4 years ago

We need the people of Africa, to replace the people we aren't having in the developed world. We should stop all this warfare against refugees and accept them willingly, as people with strong motivations to work.

Remittance money will boost the local economy and in time, as their education and middle class grows, the flow will stop and so will their higher birth-rate.

I've made variations of this post about 5 times in HN in the context of stories like this, or the problem of refugees in the UK and Europe.

Merkel accepted the 1.5m for sound economic reasons. Japan will be taking anyone it can soon, at their historically low birth rate. There's only so much robots can do for you.

jelliclesfarm• 4 years ago

Why “people of Africa”?

Someone2• 4 years ago

Sub-Saharan Africa is where the population boom is.

Comparisons:

- https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/

- https://www.populationpyramid.net/asia/2020/

- https://www.populationpyramid.net/europe/2020/

(Northern America is still growing: https://www.populationpyramid.net/northern-america/2020/)

Bancakes5• 4 years ago

How do you know they have motivations to work? Do they also have qualifications to work?

Why do you assume this planet needs billions of people to function?

inglor_cz7• 4 years ago

A lot of European countries have significant African populations (incl. Spain, Italy and France). It does not seem to lead to any economic Wunder. If I meet a black guy there, they are usually trying to sell me or my wife a fake handbag.

Gone are the times when what was needed was raw work force = muscles. One of the reasons why we have fewer kids is that schooling and training for modern job now takes so long that it envelopes a lot of the most fertile years. And one of the reasons why Africa has as many kids as Europeans used to have in the 19th century is because a lot of African youth does not have access to higher education.

But that means that they won't be having good jobs in modern society.

iostream24• 4 years ago

Your comments speak to the feudal markets in most of Europe more than the capabilities of human beings. Here in Portugal businesses are typically depressingly from the same five categories or so, and manufacturing is limited to low tech with much raw material exported. When this failure mindset isn’t present you see all sorts of innovations from the Portuguese market (some Fraunhofer-like startups linked to the universities etc.)

The lack of imagination that comes from forcing everyone to eat pop culture for breakfast in this Eurovision mentality also limits innovation.

Small minded belief in the boxes and categories and a refusal to consider new possibilities is a real limitation in much of Europe that money cannot help us get over.

We’ve become a weak inbred continent incapable of competing on the world class level that our grandparents did in so many fields.

Europe thirsts for new blood, even if some of its less clever locals think otherwise

thefz2• 4 years ago

A lot of European countries have significant African populations (incl. Spain, Italy and France). It does not seem to lead to any economic Wunder. If I meet a black guy there, they are usually trying to sell me or my wife a fake handbag.

Nah. Here in Italy, and in France too, there's a well integrated amount of north Africans since two or three generations. And we're glad they are here.

mcntsh2• 4 years ago

But that means that they won't be having good jobs in modern society.

You said it yourself, the western worker goes into school to work non physical jobs, that means there's a big gap in the physical job part of the labor force that can be filled by immigrants.

popularonion• 4 years ago

Also see the stagnation of Central American and Caribbean countries despite their large populations of migrants in the USA.

Remittances are not some kind of economic cheat code or the basis of a national development policy, they’re basically a painkiller that might help prevent a complete collapse of the country.

AussieWog932• 4 years ago

Gone are the times when what was needed was raw work force = muscles.

Not at all.

Modern economies require huge amounts of people to do service jobs, and many b of these do not require advanced degrees. Here in Melbourne (not Europe, but we have a fairly sizeable African refugee population) you see plenty of black people working in aged/disability care, security and driving jobs.

2000UltraDeluxe2• 4 years ago

Just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, please note I'm a first, second AND third generation migrant.

The problem is that "we" need people to do the dirty jobs we don't want to; wait tables, mop floors, clean toilets, change diapers for the elderly, and so on. Most of those jobs come with a fair deal of risk of physical injury or verbal abuse and the pay is usually crap. What makes you think that migrants would be content with those jobs when we refuse to do them ourselves?

Besides, in large parts of Europe, Eastern Europeans have already grabbed most of the decent jobs available to foreigners. The millions of Ukrainians currently fleeing the war will grab what's left once they start settling in and become available on the job market. In that situation, importing a vast amount of African youth into several generations (at least) of low social status is both cruel and unneccesary.

There's definitely reason to revisit the way we look on migration, but flooding the market with cheap labour is not going to solve anything. We need to reform the labour market and automate the jobs that cannot be made into decent ways of making a living. Other shitty jobs will need to have working conditions improved until the jobs themselves are worth taking.

ggm3• 4 years ago

Nothing you said is wrong, or unfamiliar to me. The recent lorry driver shortage in the UK, and European truck driver comments about how Britain treats long distance drivers (disgusting toilets, abusive behaviours towards drivers) are just the most recent example of jobs british people won't do, and assume foreigners will do for low pay.

Or field work. Or nursing, in the sense of general nursing duties not necessarily high paying theatre and post operative recovery nursing, although Britain needs them too. No, I absolutely do mean the disgusting, dirty, low paid menial jobs that western working class poor people won't do.

That's the story of migration to the USA, the ubiquitous Mexican labour in hotels, cleaning, cafes and bars, meat works that keeps America working.

I absolutely agree "flooding" the market won't help. I'm talking about a 25 to 50 year problem here.

All migrants are exploited at some level, even H1B. They need unions as much as anyone else.

You're not wrong about the next five years. There's going to be a lot of racism at play, and right wingers like Orban and Le Pen will make much of it.

But the underlying economic truth I believe in remains: the west needs migration more than most people realise, and immigration and refugee law is regressive and unhelpful.

FerociousTimes9• 4 years ago

Most of the Ukrainian refugee population consists of women and children at least for now, and in women's case, they are not particularly drawn to hard manual work, these open jobs will ultimately need be filled.

noiseman• 4 years ago

Low wages is a problem that will fix itself. When there was a shortage of truck drivers, wages for truck drivers went up.

That’s how a market economy works. If there aren’t enough people willing to do a job, then wages for that job will go up until there are.

frontman1988• 4 years ago

People in Africa should live sustainable lives in their huge continent itself. That way they will be happier and more satisfied compared to doing degrading jobs to serve their colonial masters once again.

naoqj• 4 years ago

They have failed time and time again. I think that at a certain point we should understand that this is not our fight and leave them alone to do whatever they want with their societies.

odshoifsdhfs3• 4 years ago

No we don’t. We need controlled and ‘value added’ migration. Shall I point to Swedens current events to show what non controlled migration does to a country where the cultures are not compatible?(with similar examples having happening in various european countries)

ggm3• 4 years ago

If you think only letting elites migrate is helpful you know nothing about the nature of society. Sweden will drown in a lake of its own human waste without migrant labour to clean.

Every western nation likes to think migration should be skilled labour only.

They're wrong. It's actually far better to get lots of young, healthy motivated untrained people and invest in them, than import skilled labour only.

MrMan2• 4 years ago

we need full spectrum population growth. imagine in your head that these new people are arriving by birth. they will follow a bell curve in many respects, and so will immigrants.

growth is growth, you have to stop thinking that immigrants are a threat.

mytailorisrich4• 4 years ago

Our economic paradigm is based on an ever increasing population. This is not sustainable and is coming to an end as the global population cannot keep growing and should in fact decrease for the good of the planet and of our quality of life.

Immigration is a short term, economically lazy option, and on large scales leads to major political and social issues, and people do not want it. Politically it is either naive or a tool to advance an agenda.

Our societies need to face the issue of constant (even decreasing in the medium term) population and adapt to it economically and socially instead of trying to kick the ball down the road. The sooner we realise this the better.

Remittance money will boost the local economy and in time

This pie in the sky thinking. All countries developed today or on their way have got there through their own development and industrialisation work. Countries that rely on remittance have an interest and need to keep sending people abroad as that is de facto their "export product" they rely on to survive.

FerociousTimes9• 4 years ago

Immigration is and has always been a hot button. Take for example, the US during the era of exclusive European migration and how it was a challenging and fraught process that entailed tensions, conflicts and even episodic bouts of physical violence to integrate new arrivals and this will always be the case for immigration forever.

So, making it sound like this wave of immigration is particularly different in essence doesn't hold water.

Nesco7• 4 years ago

No we don’t need to be ‘replaced’, thank you for your kind offer but I and also a vast part of the European population want to reject it

AlexAltea• 4 years ago

No, and I am willing to stake everything I have to fight anyone pushing this experiment.

People that engineer the future of countries they will never live at, happy to displace cultures for a fucking basis point, make me deeply sick.

Who in the bloody hell are you, or anyone at Davos for that matter, to dictate what my nation, my town, or my family needs? Have you even been asked? Or is this just the usual arrogance ingrained in all globalists of just "knowing better"?

jackdh• 4 years ago

This has to be a troll surely. You cannot believe that that is the most sensible option.

guilhas• 4 years ago

That sounds the ultimate form of globalization, manufacture children where it's cheaper and import the adults

Most couples eventually want to have a children, they just don't feel they can because the increasing cost of living and lack of support and preparedness from most developed societies, since more people move nowadays they lack family support which would make it easier

If population is reducing is because governments don't mind it and doesn't think they should incentivize it like other things

Birthing a and raising a person is not cheap or easy, but treating it the same as commodities seems wrong

And what is the problem with population shrinking? Some countrifies would well benefit from less population. Everyone complains about stained health services, lack of housing, climate activists "the world has too much population"... Is it just a economic problem that everything has to grow for ever? Change the economic model to allow for natural population oscillations

the_omegist5• 4 years ago

If I wanted to trigger the opposite idea in people's minds I would exactly write what you just wrote... I don't know if it's trolling or manipulation...

shmageggy3• 4 years ago

As more people exit the labour force than enter it, wealthy countries worry about how to preserve economic growth.

Why? They're already wealthy. How about just stop allocating the vast majority of that wealth to a handful of people and then focus on total well-being metrics rather than "growth" for its own sake.

To soften the economic blow of ageing, Sciubba presents four options: raise retirement ages, cut benefits, push more people in the country to work or increase immigration.

Or just push the peasants harder, I guess.

Bancakes5• 4 years ago

The consumerism/industrialism train cannot stop, only crash.

hoseja• 4 years ago

If it doesn't accelerate fast enough the bandits catch up and cut you up into sewer oil streetfood.

barry-cotter2• 4 years ago

You may not know this but you live in the richest, healthiest, freest period of human history. Economic growth is a moral imperative even so because there are still over a billion people living in desperate poverty. If we didn’t care about people outside the OECD, sure we could go to lotus eating but there’s still widespread malnutrition in much of South Asia and they’re doing better than large parts of Africa. Things have been getting better on every continent but Africa in terms of standard of living and health span since WW2 but things can still get better again. Even Africa is a success by any historic standards. There’s a lot less war and starvation than you’d expect from a continent with ~0 GDP per capita growth.

Growth is a moral imperative. Every human deserves a decent standard of living.

mytailorisrich4• 4 years ago

Growth per capita is what matters for your point, not overall growth of an ever increasing number of people.

midasuni2• 4 years ago

OP was arguing against continuous growth in already wealthy areas (often by exploiting those not wealthy), not against growth in Africa.

inglor_cz7• 4 years ago

Richest, yes.

Healthiest, it depends. Obesity and metabolic diseases are at their record highs. That's not health. You can medicate those patients to survive, but that's not health. Go to any street and count all the people who would lose their breath after walking three flights of stairs. This is a major civilizational regression and we don't seem to be attacking it at all.

Freest, really? How do you measure this? Certainly there is more rules to comply with than ever before, you are unlikely to be aware of all of them [0].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...

capableweb• 4 years ago

Why? They're already wealthy. How about just stop allocating the vast majority of that wealth to a handful of people and then focus on total well-being metrics rather than "growth" for its own sake.

Because growth is what is required to make capitalism "sustainable". Without constant growth, capitalism eventually fails. Unless you're for abandoning capitalism, you can't abandon the focus on growth.

I am for abandoning the focus on growth, and therefore also abandoning capitalism, but there are lots of people who don't want to abandon capitalism, a lot of them the same people who hold a lot of power and connections already, so it's a uphill fight.

usrusr• 4 years ago

Got to get them a slightly bigger phone every four years so they don't launch rotten fruit at your yacht.

And no, capitalism does not require constant growth. The very specific subset of capitalism we practice does. Imagine a small world, an isolated island with strictly limited resources. You could easily run that on a form of capitalism, just with some corrective controls against certain tipover states.

Perhaps some very "purity"-focused form of capitalism would inevitably be in the growth-requiring subset, but nobody really does pure capitalism. A lot of people like to pretend they do, but that's just that: pretension, or fooling themselves.

refurb3• 4 years ago

This isn't true. Check Japan with its near zero growth. Nothing about capitalism suggests you can't have a steady state economy.

Of course, if you want the latest health care advances, new housing and other things, that costs more money, so growth helps pay for those things that otherwise would be unaffordable.

Juliate• 4 years ago

Because growth is what is required to make capitalism "sustainable".

Also because there are lots of significant debts around (at country/state/corporate/personal levels) that for sure will not be ever repayed if there's not a growth (or jubilee) mecanism somewhere.

But indeed, "growth" depends on how you define it, on what you value, what equivalences you define.

orangebeet• 4 years ago

Because the market is competitive. If you lean back, you don't stay wealthy...

EliRivers• 4 years ago

Is that definitely true? You might end up not as wealthy as some others, but do you actually lose your wealth?

PeterisP• 4 years ago

For one specific (but large) example, lots and lots of older people in these countries rely on economic growth to ensure that their savings/investment can pay for their retirement, since if economic growth stops they'll be far from wealthy, won't really be able to retire and this will create problems both for them and the general social structure.

As in, even "life as usual" is conditional on at least some economic growth continuing for decades; and even in wealthy countries most people does not consider themselves wealthy enough and will not be satisfied with the idea of things not getting better; they'll definitely throw out any politician who promises keeping status quo in favor of politicians who promise that economy will grow.

shmageggy3• 4 years ago

Yes, our current total reliance on growth has this nasty self-perpetuating quality that will make the transistion to a post-growth economy rather tricky. Since infinite growth isn't possible, we're going to have to grapple with these issues eventually.

usrn• 4 years ago

These older people enjoyed a lot of saved time and money when they were younger by not having children. They ate their cake, I don't see why they get to steal the next generation's so they can have it too.

throwawaye37352• 4 years ago

This seems be a prevailing sentiment on hackernews.

It is a very common thought that we should just spread the wealth to everyone and focus on some total well-being metric to evaluate how "happy" people are and make decisions based on that metric for the greater good. This can easily seem like utopia but it sounds like a nightmare to me. It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society and not worry about our labour force decreasing cause we are already 'wealthy'. In a perfect society of course it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all.

These past 100 years have seen an amazing amount of progress in almost all areas of technology and standards of living. We have a lot more to go and stagnation or worse regression to what we see in places like Russia is not where we want to be. We have to keep innovating and moving forward and working hard to do it. I hope that we can solve the problems we have as a society and stop the gap from growing in the haves and have nots. I believe the solution is focusing on what has made this progress possible in the past; mainly the values of our culture - honesty, treating people fairly, working hard - all of these are important values that we have to work hard to preserve. In the US our society is dependent on three branches of government to exist - We have a lot of checks and balances, but if all three become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people we are screwed. Ultimately everything comes down to people and their decisions. Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not. This really depends on cultural values and education. All of this is not free and takes a ton of hard work to maintain. In this dynamic world if we aren't progressing, growing, getting better we will get left behind, stagnate and probably die as a country and society. This is how nature works. We always have to work hard and get better and keep progressing.

shmageggy3• 4 years ago

It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society
it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all
honesty, treating people fairly, working hard
all three [branches of government] become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people
Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not

This is a wild response to me. I don't see where I suggested (or suggested giving up) any of these things.

pseudo0• 4 years ago

Weird that they skipped an incredibly obvious option #5: make it easier for first-world people to form families and afford kids.

beloch• 4 years ago

Many Liberal Western democracies no longer even pretend to try to balance their deficits or pay down their debts. The prevailing notion is to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP. i.e. Expand the economy and the debt shrinks in relative terms.

This relies on endless growth. Reduced fertility rates and shrinking populations are where this strategy goes horribly wrong. If you borrow to stimulate growth and the population/economy instead shrink, debt spirals out of control.

This is why politicians of all stripes in countries like Canada are so happy to welcome (skilled and/or wealthy) immigrants. If you can't expand your population with native births, you do it with immigration so that endless growth can continue.

You might think that countries able to attract immigration are going to be able to continue expanding their economies and avoid the harsh realities of paying down their debts. However, the global economy is so tightly and complexly interwoven that a blow to one influential country's economy will be felt elsewhere. e.g. China is one country that, for obvious reasons, does not attract immigration. When their population starts to shrink, what will be the impact on the economies of countries like Canada?

Our world order is predicated on endless growth, but we're going to have to figure out how to adapt to long-term global recession.

bryanlarsen• 4 years ago

Money by itself is completely useless.

Imagine two countries. One country puts itself into massive debt building old folks homes and training people to work in them. The other closes their old folks homes to pay down the debt.

Then a few years later, there is a massive need for old folks homes. Which country can afford to pay for them and which can't? The country with massive debt can keep printing money to pay for the old folks homes, but since supply and demand match, they don't have inflation and things are fine. The country with the balanced budget but no old folks homes sees massive inflation because you can't magic old folks homes out of thin air -- it takes time to build them and to train workers. In the mean time because supply and demand are imbalanced the price goes up.

To paraphrase a famous Keynes quote about WW2 -- if you can do something and are willing to prioritize it over everything else you can do, you can afford it no matter how expensive it is. If you don't have the capacity to do something then you can't afford it no matter how much money you have.

The prevailing notion is to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP

This is all that is necessary to create a deflationary environment. It means that there are fewer dollars floating around per point of GDP.

Remember that a large portion of government debt in Western countries, particularly Japan, is owed to itself. That's right, the vast majority of the "massive debt" that Japan has, is held by the Bank of Japan. And a lot of their debt is at a rate of 0%. So most of it is essentially "fake debt", they could wipe it out at the stroke of a pen. The only consequence would be on inflation, and Japan is perhaps the only country in the world that doesn't have an inflation problem.

FerociousTimes9• 4 years ago

You don't necessarily reach death spiral when you fail to stimulate economic/population growth, you still can make it up in productivity gains and if productivity outpaces population size loss, the net result is positive for the economy.

Also, in the event of China losing its preeminent rank in the global economy, another country/union will eventually fill its former role. Yeah, the transition might not be fast and smooth but the degree of built-in resilience in the global system will manage to get us through these unfavorable events.

FerociousTimes9• 4 years ago

They might be wealthy for now but should economic growth stagnates for some time and then when the bust phases come and the economy takes a hit and the gross output starts to contract, the wealth gets to shrink over time and voila now you're officially poor.

In other words, the positive economic growth mindset is a proactive strategy adopted for the rainy days not some sinister scheme to fleece the masses of their earnings.

MrMan2• 4 years ago

anyone here from a place like Latin America to somewhat counter the crazy white nationalist rhetoric? at least racism in central and south america is a bit less binary.

yariik• 4 years ago

There is no racism in Central or South America, it's an invention exclusive to its homeland, the US.

Global population is crashing, soaring and moving

Related Stories