10 ms·

Rich, western countries face a stark choice: 6-day workweeks or more immigration

18 points by shinryuu 2y ago

Iulioh 2y ago
The point is, the western world is still in a "stable decline" so as the article said we will see the result of it in a century. The China problem however..thats 2 decades from now..
- BartjeD 2y ago
  Why do you think the western world is in a stable decline? You mean in terms of population? The Chinese population is also declining. So i'm curious why you think the ratio is skewed, my impression is China is going to shrink more, faster, based on their current demographic trajectories. It's actually India, Brazil and many African countries that are growing hard.
  - Qem 2y ago
    I don't know about India or Africa, but births peaked in Brazil by 2012. By stable I think GP meant resistant to measures that governments take to purposely increase birthrates, like slightly better childcare benefits.
jarsin 2y ago
Feel like I keep seeing news/articles about 6 day work weeks. Seems like a coordinated effort.
- jowdones 2y ago
  Yes. We absolutely must to return to the office and work 6 day weeks in 12 hours shifts and take one week vacation in a year, evidently not in one go because can't leave the assembly line. The shareholders must get their dividends!
  - hnbad 2y ago
    It's funny they mention Germany for size given that until recently there had been a push for popularizing the idea of a 4 day work week (of 8 hour shifts) and it seems only earlier this year there's been an increase in news stories pushing in the opposite direction. Simultaneously the Liberal party repurposed the brand it originally used for its own watered-down UBI proposal as a new label for the existing (means-tested, limited and conditional) social welfare. It feels like we're throwing a lot of progress out of the window with very little pushback.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    Hey, don't forget that the government needs their taxes just as much as the shareholders need those juicy profits. I wonder if there is anything in common between the people benefitting from the labour of others in this modern economy, hmmmm...
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > Feel like I keep seeing news/articles about 6 day work weeks. Seems like a coordinated effort. At the same time that article's title gives it too on their immigration coordinated effort: "6-day workweeks or more immigration". You can read it any way you like, it's obvious they're putting both 6-days workweek and more immigration as something people do not want.
- tamimio 2y ago
  Just like how it was with RTO, expect soon some big corporate CEO to start talking about the “need” for that extra day, coupled with some incentives like “work it from home first!!”. This will be followed by a few cringy LinkedIn posts and/or tech bros explaining how that extra workday ACTUALLY changed their lives for the better. Eventually, it will become the norm, and you will be seen as a black sheep if you say otherwise. You won’t “fit” in the company culture and could be terminated or, at best, face zero career advancement or promotion. Just like RTO all over again. It’s ironic seeing news about that extra workday when layoffs are high. Just yesterday, I read about Intel laying off 10,000 employees.
lolinder 2y ago
> A study conducted by consulting firm Korn Ferry found that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people, roughly equivalent to the population of Germany. That talent shortage could slash $8.5 trillion from nations’ expected revenues, affecting highly educated sectors such as financial services and IT as well as manufacturing jobs, which are considered “lower skilled” and require less education. I'm ready to believe that there could be harms associated with this, but it's notable that Fortune doesn't bother actually identifying the real, concrete, human harm caused by an 85-million-person talent shortage. There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death—the decrease in population gave the working class more bargaining power, which led to higher standards of living for the survivors, which created an environment where there was more leisure time to spend creating and consuming arts and philosophy. It doesn't particularly matter to me if this model is strictly accurate to the history, it's a plausible outcome from reduced workforces. We only need to work more if companies need to continue to bring in large amounts of profit. I'll need to see some really persuasive evidence that companies having a smaller bottom line because they have to compete for workers in a shrinking workforce hurts the workers in any meaningful way.
- galdosdi 2y ago
  > There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death Totally irrelevant. A common misunderstanding. That worked then because the main source of wealth was land. Less people means more land per person. That's not been the case since the industrial revolution. Now the main source of wealth is capital, including human capital. That's why New Jersey is so much wealthier than Montana.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > That worked then because the main source of wealth was land. Less people means more land per person. That assumes that people actually owned the land that they were working and weren't renting it from a landlord. If you're renting it from a landlord (with whatever definition of "rent" used in a given time and place) then sure, there's more land available to rent so the rent prices are cheaper, but it's not obvious to me that that's substantially different than the current prospective scenario where the owners of capital have less human capital to go around and so need to pay more for it. It's just a different way of structuring the same scarcity problem—fewer people to work leads to less profit for the holders of capital (whether that capital is in land or abstract financial instruments). > That's not been the case since the industrial revolution. Now the main source of wealth is capital, including human capital. And any event that causes human capital to be more scarce causes it to cost more. Since for most of us our wealth resides almost entirely in the human capital associated with our own selves, if human capital costs go up then our individual wealth goes up. The only exception is if you're in the small class of people who own substantial non-human capital.
bondarchuk 2y ago
..or less growth, but I guess that's not an option for "fortune.com"
petermcneeley 2y ago
It is getting difficult to navigate all this inconsistency. Robot farmer but 6 day work weeks. Climate change but RTO. AI but labor shortage. Like a Ouija board jumping back and forth; what is it trying to spell?
- dv_dt 2y ago
  Greed is good is bad
- tamimio 2y ago
  It was never about the workers to start with. Then you will see it’s actually consistent.
- synicalx 2y ago
  > what is it trying to spell? "Number must get bigger"
- shrimp_emoji 2y ago
  Being bamboozled by the elites with bullshit gaslighting
Modified3019 2y ago
What a lovely false dichotomy. I pick the third option, No, and fuck you.
- illiac786 2y ago
  Why don’t you like either option (I mean, the one about 6 days week I think I understand why)?
  - Rury 2y ago
    Because, there is another option: accept a lower standard of living. And depending on what your standard is, it can be a perfectly acceptable (even desired) option.
    - trilbyglens 2y ago
      This is it. We westerners, and very especially Americans live an incredibly inflated lifestyle. Walmarts stuffed tonthe roof with useless shit, people mistaking luxuries with necessities and whinging like hell when they can't have their air conditioned 3500sqft house stocked with 3 refrigerators and 9 tvs. We waste an absolutely disgusting amount of absolutely everything that we produce. No one values anything, and everything is replaceable. It's sad but I feel like a really and very hard depression would likely be the absolute best thing for this planet and our species in the long term. We are so fat and so lazy and so entitled. It's hard to imagine getting to a more efficient future without a hard cultural reset.
      - illiac786 2y ago
        I think in the long term there is no real solution to making the planet and humans coexist in a sustainable manner. Yes, as Covid showed, stark decrease in human activity is very good for the planet. But it is not a long term solution, a depression wouldn’t be either. I hope I’m wrong but if not, we are on the path for shooting ourselves into oblivion in not so long. Planet will need a couple million years to recover, but I have good hope it will.
deepfriedchokes 2y ago
This sounds more like a threat than a prediction.
- tharmas 2y ago
  They implemented it in Greece.
  - hbogert 2y ago
    Huh? When how and to what extent?
Qem 2y ago
Presumably those young people forced to work their asses off 6 days/week will be even less inclined to become parents, further compounding the problem. Trying to solve lack of workers due to sub-replacement fertility by squeezing more workhours of people that already can't afford children is like ship captains trying to solve the iceberg problem by speeding through areas known to contain them.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  > Presumably those young people forced to work their asses off 6 days/week will be even less inclined to become parents, further compounding the problem. That's not a problem, that's the purpose of the current economical and political order in industrialized nations, whether they are capitalist, communist or mixed. After all the horrors of the 20th century, including both world wars, it is not as easy anymore to trick the youth of the world to die on the battlefields, so the rulers have to device other means to get rid of the younger generations.
  - Lammy 2y ago
    Relevant: John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ presents “An Interim Report to the President and the Congress from the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (1971)
- dzhiurgis 2y ago
  + additional immigration adds more pressure to housing crisis...
  - Qem 2y ago
    Immigration probably makes housing more affordable, as building still a labour intensive activity, and immigration reduces labour costs. We have car assembling robots, but not house building robots, or plumber robots. But we can't count on migration on the long term anyway, as countries with current net positive population growth rates are on the way to go sub-replacement in 1-2 generations as well. Housing unaffordability should be pinned on NIMBY, bias against high density housing, and the decades long push to optimize housing as a rent-seeking friendly investment vehicle instead of simple dwellings. Today if you intend to buy an apartment in a high cost city, odds are that you must not only outbid people wanting to live there as well, but also rich people overseas that invest in real state as a way to stash money offshore and/or evade taxes.
PeterisP 2y ago
The notion of labor shortage relies on the assumption that productivity is the same, but there is a opposite offsetting effect that's comparable (stronger? weaker? who knows, but IMHO of a similar magnitude) - structural unemployent caused by increased automation, as the electronics and AI systems become both more capable and cheaper. There are already many jobs which could be done better by machines, but it's simply cheaper to pay peanuts to a person instead - and as soon as the machine becomes cheaper and/or wages grow that the person is 1% more expensive than the machine, that profession will shrink in numbers. It's counterproductive to try to grow a workforce segment that's likely not be needed soon. If there indeed is a labor shortage for some years, the society will handle the increased wage cost (which also imply increased push for automation) much better than it can handle a large segment of angry unemployed people, so while the future is unclear, it's better (at least for the society - the billionaires definitely benefit from cheap desperate potential workforce) to err on the side of doing less to solve this "problem" rather than doing too much.
Sytten 2y ago
IDK we have record immigration in Canada and a housing shortage. I am not sure the solution is more immigration. We do have a productivity problem though. At some point the working population will find equilibrium when the baby boomer generation dies out.
- tamimio 2y ago
  Unrelated note: Great work on Caido! I tried it a few weeks ago, and it’s fantastic!
unlisted7347 2y ago
I'm working 60 hours a week in a warehouse and I'm fine. Can't believe sitting on your butt for 48 hours a week can be that hard
shrubble 2y ago
How about a pause on immigration while we figure out how it is that despite all the advances in productivity and essentially supercomputer chips inside laptops, there is a need for 6 day workweeks?
ivan_gammel 2y ago
This clickbait headline suggests 6-day workweek as an alternative when job market is defined by limited supply. It feels like the goal is to scare some people to persuade them supporting pro-immigration policies. What a nonsense. Yes, immigration can solve the demographic problems of some Western countries. However it is not sustainable and it will most likely deprive poor countries from the most talented people. This is colonialism in disguise. And the ticking bomb is global: we will see population peak everywhere already in this century, so what’s going to happen when Nigeria won’t produce more workers for America or Europe? We need to focus on fixing demographic problems instead. Solving gender inequality, building parenting-friendly education system, building better safety net and reforming the work - not just for remote cases, but for the majority that still has to attend their workplace.
- tharmas 2y ago
  Immigration has been an Absolute DISASTER in Canada. And any skilled Immigrants who did come all want to leave Canada because it is so expensive.
from-nibly 2y ago
Right, because working an extra day will make up for no one understanding what they are doing, and an increasing number of people not participating in the workforce.
spwa4 2y ago
This neglects to state ... unrestricted immigration can buy us an out, for now, for in theory an maybe ~10 years. So this immigration solution gets us to maybe 2035 or so. And even that is dependent on none of the South American and African countries actually improving. Living conditions in Mexico are rapidly approaching the level where immigration from Mexico will stop outright. Columbia is behind that, but not ridiculously so. Venezuela is an exception, but short of the current government starting a war ... and Brazil won't be providing the immigration numbers we need. Okay ... and then? I won't even reach retirement age until 2045, and I do hope to enjoy retirement for 20-30 years. By the time I kick the bucket, if I calculate right, we'd need ~1.5 times the size of the human population to immigrate to the west. I find this figure problematic. For one thing, that's more humans than the UN predicts will be alive at that time.
- tharmas 2y ago
  Immigration from Mexico (by Mexicans) already has stopped. Those people crossing the border into the USA are not from Mexico. They come from all over the world. Ecuador has no visa entry requirement so people from all over the world go there and then make the long arduous journey up through Central America to the USA.
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    If I understand things probably, many of the workers who do the farming are Mexican.
lo_zamoyski 2y ago
[flagged]
tharmas 2y ago
Why don't the rich elites invest in LSD's (Labor Saving Devices), ie Automation? That investment in technology (LSD's) would also help to create gainful employment. Immigration is just a way to keep wages down and drive Asset prices high.
tamimio 2y ago
http://archive.is/HYyrC http://archive.is/HYyrC In reality, this is what will happen: 6 days a week and immigration, because the ultimate goal is to benefit the corporations. More workforce supply means lower wages, essentially modern slavery.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  We have real slavery in modern times, you should come up with another term
  - a3n 2y ago
    Slavery accepted by the enslaved.
    - fsagx 2y ago
      "The best slave is the one who thinks he is free" --Goethe
    - readthenotes1 2y ago
      Pretty sure not metaphorical slavery, but bonest-to-god "I will kill you if you try to leave except if I sell you" slavery.
tivert 2y ago
> But he maintains the only way to solve rich countries’ labor problem is to let in immigrants to work, particularly from countries where population growth is increasing, such as Nigeria or Tanzania, rather than decreasing. Aren't birthrates declining pretty much everywhere (including Nigeria and Tanzania, per the graphs Google pulls up)? It seems foolish to just assume sub-Saharan Africa is going to buck that trend forever, and be a baby-factory needed to make the math on Western corporate growth targets work. I propose we solve this problem by firing Lant Pritchett from whatever fake job he currently holds and have him work a 128 hour workweek doing something actually productive. If that's insufficient, we can do the same to all the other economists.
clauderoux 2y ago
There is a whole economy that depends on people working 5 days a week, such as hospitality. Furthermore, as someone who is now 60, I can tell you how disastrous for the health it is when you have to work also during week ends. As you can never really rest, tireness stacks up to the point of burn out. You need these days badly to give your mind a bit of fresh air. I went many times through absolute nightmares when a manager had decided on unattainable datelines, which forced us to skip week ends all together. I would spend weeks before being able to work properly again. Those fat geese sitting on a fat matress of stock options, threatning us to make them richer is beyond indecence.

18 points by shinryuu 2y ago

The point is, the western world is still in a "stable decline" so as the article said we will see the result of it in a century. The China problem however..thats 2 decades from now..

BartjeD 2y ago
Why do you think the western world is in a stable decline? You mean in terms of population? The Chinese population is also declining. So i'm curious why you think the ratio is skewed, my impression is China is going to shrink more, faster, based on their current demographic trajectories. It's actually India, Brazil and many African countries that are growing hard.
- Qem 2y ago
  I don't know about India or Africa, but births peaked in Brazil by 2012. By stable I think GP meant resistant to measures that governments take to purposely increase birthrates, like slightly better childcare benefits.

jarsin 2y ago

Feel like I keep seeing news/articles about 6 day work weeks. Seems like a coordinated effort.

jowdones 2y ago
Yes. We absolutely must to return to the office and work 6 day weeks in 12 hours shifts and take one week vacation in a year, evidently not in one go because can't leave the assembly line. The shareholders must get their dividends!
- hnbad 2y ago
  It's funny they mention Germany for size given that until recently there had been a push for popularizing the idea of a 4 day work week (of 8 hour shifts) and it seems only earlier this year there's been an increase in news stories pushing in the opposite direction. Simultaneously the Liberal party repurposed the brand it originally used for its own watered-down UBI proposal as a new label for the existing (means-tested, limited and conditional) social welfare. It feels like we're throwing a lot of progress out of the window with very little pushback.
- carlosjobim 2y ago
  Hey, don't forget that the government needs their taxes just as much as the shareholders need those juicy profits. I wonder if there is anything in common between the people benefitting from the labour of others in this modern economy, hmmmm...
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> Feel like I keep seeing news/articles about 6 day work weeks. Seems like a coordinated effort. At the same time that article's title gives it too on their immigration coordinated effort: "6-day workweeks or more immigration". You can read it any way you like, it's obvious they're putting both 6-days workweek and more immigration as something people do not want.
tamimio 2y ago
Just like how it was with RTO, expect soon some big corporate CEO to start talking about the “need” for that extra day, coupled with some incentives like “work it from home first!!”. This will be followed by a few cringy LinkedIn posts and/or tech bros explaining how that extra workday ACTUALLY changed their lives for the better. Eventually, it will become the norm, and you will be seen as a black sheep if you say otherwise. You won’t “fit” in the company culture and could be terminated or, at best, face zero career advancement or promotion. Just like RTO all over again. It’s ironic seeing news about that extra workday when layoffs are high. Just yesterday, I read about Intel laying off 10,000 employees.

lolinder 2y ago

> A study conducted by consulting firm Korn Ferry found that by 2030, there will be a global human talent shortage of more than 85 million people, roughly equivalent to the population of Germany. That talent shortage could slash $8.5 trillion from nations’ expected revenues, affecting highly educated sectors such as financial services and IT as well as manufacturing jobs, which are considered “lower skilled” and require less education. I'm ready to believe that there could be harms associated with this, but it's notable that Fortune doesn't bother actually identifying the real, concrete, human harm caused by an 85-million-person talent shortage. There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death—the decrease in population gave the working class more bargaining power, which led to higher standards of living for the survivors, which created an environment where there was more leisure time to spend creating and consuming arts and philosophy. It doesn't particularly matter to me if this model is strictly accurate to the history, it's a plausible outcome from reduced workforces. We only need to work more if companies need to continue to bring in large amounts of profit. I'll need to see some really persuasive evidence that companies having a smaller bottom line because they have to compete for workers in a shrinking workforce hurts the workers in any meaningful way.

galdosdi 2y ago
> There's a historical model that proposes that the Renaissance directly came out of the Black Death Totally irrelevant. A common misunderstanding. That worked then because the main source of wealth was land. Less people means more land per person. That's not been the case since the industrial revolution. Now the main source of wealth is capital, including human capital. That's why New Jersey is so much wealthier than Montana.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > That worked then because the main source of wealth was land. Less people means more land per person. That assumes that people actually owned the land that they were working and weren't renting it from a landlord. If you're renting it from a landlord (with whatever definition of "rent" used in a given time and place) then sure, there's more land available to rent so the rent prices are cheaper, but it's not obvious to me that that's substantially different than the current prospective scenario where the owners of capital have less human capital to go around and so need to pay more for it. It's just a different way of structuring the same scarcity problem—fewer people to work leads to less profit for the holders of capital (whether that capital is in land or abstract financial instruments). > That's not been the case since the industrial revolution. Now the main source of wealth is capital, including human capital. And any event that causes human capital to be more scarce causes it to cost more. Since for most of us our wealth resides almost entirely in the human capital associated with our own selves, if human capital costs go up then our individual wealth goes up. The only exception is if you're in the small class of people who own substantial non-human capital.

bondarchuk 2y ago

..or less growth, but I guess that's not an option for "fortune.com"

petermcneeley 2y ago

It is getting difficult to navigate all this inconsistency. Robot farmer but 6 day work weeks. Climate change but RTO. AI but labor shortage. Like a Ouija board jumping back and forth; what is it trying to spell?

dv_dt 2y ago
Greed is good is bad
tamimio 2y ago
It was never about the workers to start with. Then you will see it’s actually consistent.
synicalx 2y ago
> what is it trying to spell? "Number must get bigger"
shrimp_emoji 2y ago
Being bamboozled by the elites with bullshit gaslighting

Modified3019 2y ago

What a lovely false dichotomy. I pick the third option, No, and fuck you.

illiac786 2y ago
Why don’t you like either option (I mean, the one about 6 days week I think I understand why)?
- Rury 2y ago
  Because, there is another option: accept a lower standard of living. And depending on what your standard is, it can be a perfectly acceptable (even desired) option.
  - trilbyglens 2y ago
    This is it. We westerners, and very especially Americans live an incredibly inflated lifestyle. Walmarts stuffed tonthe roof with useless shit, people mistaking luxuries with necessities and whinging like hell when they can't have their air conditioned 3500sqft house stocked with 3 refrigerators and 9 tvs. We waste an absolutely disgusting amount of absolutely everything that we produce. No one values anything, and everything is replaceable. It's sad but I feel like a really and very hard depression would likely be the absolute best thing for this planet and our species in the long term. We are so fat and so lazy and so entitled. It's hard to imagine getting to a more efficient future without a hard cultural reset.
    - illiac786 2y ago
      I think in the long term there is no real solution to making the planet and humans coexist in a sustainable manner. Yes, as Covid showed, stark decrease in human activity is very good for the planet. But it is not a long term solution, a depression wouldn’t be either. I hope I’m wrong but if not, we are on the path for shooting ourselves into oblivion in not so long. Planet will need a couple million years to recover, but I have good hope it will.

deepfriedchokes 2y ago

This sounds more like a threat than a prediction.

tharmas 2y ago
They implemented it in Greece.
- hbogert 2y ago
  Huh? When how and to what extent?

Qem 2y ago

Presumably those young people forced to work their asses off 6 days/week will be even less inclined to become parents, further compounding the problem. Trying to solve lack of workers due to sub-replacement fertility by squeezing more workhours of people that already can't afford children is like ship captains trying to solve the iceberg problem by speeding through areas known to contain them.

carlosjobim 2y ago
> Presumably those young people forced to work their asses off 6 days/week will be even less inclined to become parents, further compounding the problem. That's not a problem, that's the purpose of the current economical and political order in industrialized nations, whether they are capitalist, communist or mixed. After all the horrors of the 20th century, including both world wars, it is not as easy anymore to trick the youth of the world to die on the battlefields, so the rulers have to device other means to get rid of the younger generations.
- Lammy 2y ago
  Relevant: John D. Rockefeller Ⅲ presents “An Interim Report to the President and the Congress from the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future” https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10 (1971)
dzhiurgis 2y ago
+ additional immigration adds more pressure to housing crisis...
- Qem 2y ago
  Immigration probably makes housing more affordable, as building still a labour intensive activity, and immigration reduces labour costs. We have car assembling robots, but not house building robots, or plumber robots. But we can't count on migration on the long term anyway, as countries with current net positive population growth rates are on the way to go sub-replacement in 1-2 generations as well. Housing unaffordability should be pinned on NIMBY, bias against high density housing, and the decades long push to optimize housing as a rent-seeking friendly investment vehicle instead of simple dwellings. Today if you intend to buy an apartment in a high cost city, odds are that you must not only outbid people wanting to live there as well, but also rich people overseas that invest in real state as a way to stash money offshore and/or evade taxes.

PeterisP 2y ago

The notion of labor shortage relies on the assumption that productivity is the same, but there is a opposite offsetting effect that's comparable (stronger? weaker? who knows, but IMHO of a similar magnitude) - structural unemployent caused by increased automation, as the electronics and AI systems become both more capable and cheaper. There are already many jobs which could be done better by machines, but it's simply cheaper to pay peanuts to a person instead - and as soon as the machine becomes cheaper and/or wages grow that the person is 1% more expensive than the machine, that profession will shrink in numbers. It's counterproductive to try to grow a workforce segment that's likely not be needed soon. If there indeed is a labor shortage for some years, the society will handle the increased wage cost (which also imply increased push for automation) much better than it can handle a large segment of angry unemployed people, so while the future is unclear, it's better (at least for the society - the billionaires definitely benefit from cheap desperate potential workforce) to err on the side of doing less to solve this "problem" rather than doing too much.

Sytten 2y ago

IDK we have record immigration in Canada and a housing shortage. I am not sure the solution is more immigration. We do have a productivity problem though. At some point the working population will find equilibrium when the baby boomer generation dies out.

tamimio 2y ago
Unrelated note: Great work on Caido! I tried it a few weeks ago, and it’s fantastic!

unlisted7347 2y ago

I'm working 60 hours a week in a warehouse and I'm fine. Can't believe sitting on your butt for 48 hours a week can be that hard

shrubble 2y ago

How about a pause on immigration while we figure out how it is that despite all the advances in productivity and essentially supercomputer chips inside laptops, there is a need for 6 day workweeks?

ivan_gammel 2y ago

This clickbait headline suggests 6-day workweek as an alternative when job market is defined by limited supply. It feels like the goal is to scare some people to persuade them supporting pro-immigration policies. What a nonsense. Yes, immigration can solve the demographic problems of some Western countries. However it is not sustainable and it will most likely deprive poor countries from the most talented people. This is colonialism in disguise. And the ticking bomb is global: we will see population peak everywhere already in this century, so what’s going to happen when Nigeria won’t produce more workers for America or Europe? We need to focus on fixing demographic problems instead. Solving gender inequality, building parenting-friendly education system, building better safety net and reforming the work - not just for remote cases, but for the majority that still has to attend their workplace.

tharmas 2y ago
Immigration has been an Absolute DISASTER in Canada. And any skilled Immigrants who did come all want to leave Canada because it is so expensive.

from-nibly 2y ago

Right, because working an extra day will make up for no one understanding what they are doing, and an increasing number of people not participating in the workforce.

spwa4 2y ago

This neglects to state ... unrestricted immigration can buy us an out, for now, for in theory an maybe ~10 years. So this immigration solution gets us to maybe 2035 or so. And even that is dependent on none of the South American and African countries actually improving. Living conditions in Mexico are rapidly approaching the level where immigration from Mexico will stop outright. Columbia is behind that, but not ridiculously so. Venezuela is an exception, but short of the current government starting a war ... and Brazil won't be providing the immigration numbers we need. Okay ... and then? I won't even reach retirement age until 2045, and I do hope to enjoy retirement for 20-30 years. By the time I kick the bucket, if I calculate right, we'd need ~1.5 times the size of the human population to immigrate to the west. I find this figure problematic. For one thing, that's more humans than the UN predicts will be alive at that time.

tharmas 2y ago
Immigration from Mexico (by Mexicans) already has stopped. Those people crossing the border into the USA are not from Mexico. They come from all over the world. Ecuador has no visa entry requirement so people from all over the world go there and then make the long arduous journey up through Central America to the USA.
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  If I understand things probably, many of the workers who do the farming are Mexican.

lo_zamoyski 2y ago

[flagged]

tharmas 2y ago

Why don't the rich elites invest in LSD's (Labor Saving Devices), ie Automation? That investment in technology (LSD's) would also help to create gainful employment. Immigration is just a way to keep wages down and drive Asset prices high.

tamimio 2y ago

http://archive.is/HYyrC http://archive.is/HYyrC In reality, this is what will happen: 6 days a week and immigration, because the ultimate goal is to benefit the corporations. More workforce supply means lower wages, essentially modern slavery.

readthenotes1 2y ago
We have real slavery in modern times, you should come up with another term
- a3n 2y ago
  Slavery accepted by the enslaved.
  - fsagx 2y ago
    "The best slave is the one who thinks he is free" --Goethe
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    Pretty sure not metaphorical slavery, but bonest-to-god "I will kill you if you try to leave except if I sell you" slavery.

tivert 2y ago

> But he maintains the only way to solve rich countries’ labor problem is to let in immigrants to work, particularly from countries where population growth is increasing, such as Nigeria or Tanzania, rather than decreasing. Aren't birthrates declining pretty much everywhere (including Nigeria and Tanzania, per the graphs Google pulls up)? It seems foolish to just assume sub-Saharan Africa is going to buck that trend forever, and be a baby-factory needed to make the math on Western corporate growth targets work. I propose we solve this problem by firing Lant Pritchett from whatever fake job he currently holds and have him work a 128 hour workweek doing something actually productive. If that's insufficient, we can do the same to all the other economists.

clauderoux 2y ago

There is a whole economy that depends on people working 5 days a week, such as hospitality. Furthermore, as someone who is now 60, I can tell you how disastrous for the health it is when you have to work also during week ends. As you can never really rest, tireness stacks up to the point of burn out. You need these days badly to give your mind a bit of fresh air. I went many times through absolute nightmares when a manager had decided on unattainable datelines, which forced us to skip week ends all together. I would spend weeks before being able to work properly again. Those fat geese sitting on a fat matress of stock options, threatning us to make them richer is beyond indecence.