According to the labor market experts too often heard from here on HN, there is no such thing as a labor shortage. It’s simply a pay shortage. The reductio ad a

According to the labor market experts too often heard from here on HN, there is no such thing as a labor shortage. It’s simply a pay shortage. The reductio ad absurdum response to this is all we need to do to maximize human happiness is reduce the population to a single person and increase their salary to $25T/yr. Labor shortages are real, especially in fields like elderly health care. There’s a demographic, spatial, and training component to the problem as well. Even if there are sufficient people, they may not be in the correct location, have the right skill sets, or at the right phase in their career. Immigration is one way we can address this problem, by increasing immigration of people from younger, lower wage countries to older, higher wage countries like the United States. This will increase average living standards, an admirable humanistic goal we should all be supporting.