9 ms·
Global population is crashing, soaring and moving
- ggm 4y agoWe 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 4y agoWhy “people of Africa”?
- Someone 4y agoSub-Saharan Africa is where the population boom is. Comparisons: - https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/ - https://www.populationpyramid.net/asia/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/asia/2020/ - https://www.populationpyramid.net/europe/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/europe/2020/ (Northern America is still growing: https://www.populationpyramid.net/northern-america/2020/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/northern-america/2020/)
- Bancakes 4y agoYes and why arbitrarily constrain yourself to Africa. Why not China? Why not the top 10% of each country
- drivebycomment 4y agoChina's population growth has already mostly stopped. In 2021, they had 0.03% growth. https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/china-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/china-population Focusing on Africa isn't arbitrary. They are where the majority of future human population growth will be coming from.
- Bancakes 4y agoAgain I ask, why do you want "booming" populations and not "work-ready, healthy" populations, aka 1sigma upwards?
- Someone 4y agoAre you saying Africans aren’t “work-ready, healthy”? I guess you mean “highly educated” I would think that, in aging populations, many of the jobs most difficult to fulfill by count would be in service jobs (care homes, nursing, Uber eats cyclists, bus drivers, etc) There likely will be millions of people in Africa willing to take on such a job and capable of doing so. Also, chances will be higher that those people would want to emigrate than, say, Chinese nurses, as there will already be plenty of demand in China.
- BlueMatter5 4y ago[flagged]
- Nesco 4y agoFor a part maybe, but some of the proponents of mass migration truly analyse the situation only through the economic lens, as for them a civilisation is reducible to its economy. They also seem to lack the basic mathematical notion that one doesn’t add things that are different in nature: “on additionne pas des choux et des carottes”. For them a population size is a population size with no thought given to the underlying composition of the population. Which is the main reason all their mental models on this particular topic are often so wrong in practice
- ed3202 4y ago
- shmageggy 4y agoWhat a bizzare analogy and false equivalence. Where indigenous populations are declining, it's mostly due to the consequences of the global economic system that ethnic Europeans participate in, as well as outright persecution and colonialism. We already are replacing them.
- BlueMatter5 4y ago[flagged]
- dang 4y ago"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Bancakes 4y agoHow 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_cz 4y agoA 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.
- mcntsh 4y 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.
- inglor_cz 4y agoThat gap is much smaller than it used to be. At the peak of the muscle era, steelworks in my city of birth employed 100 000 people. Now they are down to fewer than 10 000, even though their production has actually grown. Automation took those jobs away. It is not dissimilar to the collapse of the rural areas: once, almost everybody was a subsistence farmer. Now, 1 % of the population can feed the rest.
- mcntsh 4y agoAutomation is certainly a big thing, but we still need people to care for the elderly, drive buses, clean public spaces, paint buildings, work on roads, take garbage, deliver goods, and so on. Some societies, such as Japan, are banking on automation filling these gaps but the affects of low birth rates will be felt long before it can take over completely.
- iostream24 4y ago
- 2000UltraDeluxe 4y agoJust 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.
- ggm 4y agoNothing 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.
- frontman1988 4y agoPeople 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 4y agoThey 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.
- odshoifsdhfs 4y agoNo 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)
- ggm 4y agoIf 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.
- Nesco 4y agoYou just ignored an empirical evidence of a possible failure of your creed to then just reaffirm them. There can be no discussion if you decide that reality is not worth reevaluating your ideology
- hotpotamus 4y agoAs you can see from this thread, the mere thought of investing in black people is controversial, though no one will admit it in those words.
- Nesco 4y agoNo, there are far more charities to help black people than white people, which is in itself not controversial. What is controversial though is replacement migration of white people in North America and Europe (the last of which they are actually indigenous) by black people because the western economic elite find it more economical than to enable the conditions necessary to raise the natality rates
- FerociousTimes 4y ago
- mytailorisrich 4y agoOur 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.
- FerociousTimes 4y agoImmigration 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.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoI think claiming that it is not different is disingenuous. Europe is still grappling with the large wave of non-European immigration from the second half of the 20th century up to now, which has been and is still causing a lot of social and cultural problems. The last thing Europe needs is to add more fuel to the fire, especially that, again, immigration is not a solution and is not needed.
- FerociousTimes 4y agoI still stand by my statement. IN ESSENCE, absorbing migrants is not an easy task, and this applies to ALL migrants, no exceptions made. IN PARTICULAR, some migrants might pose additional challenges to integrate but they are not necessarily to blame fully for this, sometimes the host population are biased against them making the process more arduous for them, while giving at the same time a preferential treatment to other migrant populations.
- Nesco 4y agoNo 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
- jimbob45 4y ago
- AlexAltea 4y agoNo, 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 4y agoThis has to be a troll surely. You cannot believe that that is the most sensible option.
- guilhas 4y agoThat 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_omegist 4y agoIf 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...
- shmageggy 4y 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.
- Bancakes 4y agoThe consumerism/industrialism train cannot stop, only crash.
- barry-cotter 4y agoYou 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.
- jelliclesfarm 4y ago
- Zababa 4y ago> Personally..as a woman.. I find it insulting and humiliating as the whole world stands dumb and uncaring as our identity is being chiseled away. It feels cruel and is bewildering and hurtful. I hope that one day, we will receive the apologies due to us. I feel the same as a man. It's hard to process your identity as a man when all you hear about is toxic masculinity, patriarchy, all men being rapists and stuff like that. Some people have identities that don't really fit into the "regular molds", and I'm glad that as a society we're progressing to accept them more. I just wish this process wasn't so destructive for everyone else.
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoAcceptance of all is important. Erasure is cruel. I am hearing a lot from men these days and it’s good that they are opening up. I am from India and I only grew up with men who were taught that showing vulnerability is wrong. Maybe it’s both a generational thing as well as a cultural artifact. The world is changing. We should too. But in gentle and kind ways.
- AussieWog93 4y agoNot saying your feelings about the identity erasure are invalid, but I doubt it has much to do with declining birth rates. That's an old trend that goes back decades, and if anything has to do more with contraception and women's own decisions around work/family balance.
- jelliclesfarm 4y agoThis is what I mean. Obviously anyone can keep believing what they want..contraception is available all around the world..compare how many countries have normalized the made up word term ‘cis-women’ and have high fertility rates. Facts are staring right at our faces. And we..women..are telling you that this isn’t working for us and the same tired old textbook mumble excuse echoes here on elite intelligent circles on the interwebs. A lack of respect and dignity and equality for women is what started the first wave of feminism. Nobody participated and walked by us in our struggles. But this battle that we are going to lose…everyone is going to lose too. Because our identity is being erased. This is how at least a certain portion of humanity will become extinct. Not an asteroid hitting us or a virus or famine. I hope this western woke virus doesn't spread to the rest of the world.
- MrMan 4y agoanyone 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 4y agoThere is no racism in Central or South America, it's an invention exclusive to its homeland, the US.