7 ms·

"Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movem

"Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population." This seems to weaken the entire paper. The only regions poised for continuing population growth into the second half of this century are in sub-Saharan Africa and maybe Afghanistan [1]. Is the premise here that unlimited immigration into other regions from sub-Saharan Africa will sustain their economies (and other ways of life?) as the local populations decline? I'm extremely skeptical of that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections

nsxwolf 1y ago
So the assumption is that some populations will always reproduce in sufficient numbers and immigrate, and this just goes on forever and everything’s fine? Those other populations never age and decline?
- 0xcafefood 1y ago
  That is _one_ assumption. Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline. There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
- carlosjobim 1y ago
  That sums up the ideology: That some ethnicities should continuously replace other ethnicities until the latter group has been genetically exterminated.
- allemagne 1y ago
  The paper explicitly states that global population decline is not being projected. Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."
raincole 1y ago
It also means some places on earth have to be kept in poverty or even wars. That's the biggest driver moving people out from their homeland. People who live good, peaceful lives are mostly staying where their are. It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  Yeah, the open borders folks like to paint a rosy picture of, "If we let a bunch of people come here and work cheap, it'll make things better back in their homelands too as they take their training and wages back sometimes." But if that's true, pretty soon they won't have any reason to come here and work cheap, and then the reason the bosses wanted them in the first place is gone. I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.
  - AlOwain 1y ago
    So what to you is the alternative better interpretation; that they continue in destitute poverty?
    - toomuchtodo 1y ago
      As total fertility rate continues to rapidly decline due to educated, empowered women having less kids or no kids, wages will rise globally due to reduced labor supply as prime working labor force cohort compresses. To get to that point, domestic economies with surplus labor need to be stoked with investment (Africa and India) to maximize economic potential until the labor supply constraint is reached. The Great Demographic Reversal Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbea597263a88f27075bd6eb49_17385_suerf.pdf https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe... https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-depopulation-confronting-the-consequences-of-a-new-demographic-reality https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep... https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demographics-their-implications-economy-policy https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra... https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation.pdf https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation....
gotoeleven 1y ago
[flagged]
- dang 1y ago
  We've banned this account for posting flamebait and ignoring our requests to stop. Your comment may have been making a good point about the paper, but you can't drop an "also very rapey" in there. That's like tossing a molotov cocktail on your way home from the grocery store. Groceries are fine; firebombs are not. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991147 (Aug 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203478 (June 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39486588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39486588 (Feb 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38834663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38834663 (Jan 2024)
Guthur 1y ago
It's also extremely exploitative, the premise is actually that we will offload the burden of raising next generations and then effectively steal those that we need to prop up what would naturally be hollowing societies.
- HankStallone 1y ago
  Yes, if the process works in the way it's being sold to us, it skims off their smartest, most talented and ambitious people--the people they most need to improve conditions in their own nations.
- AlOwain 1y ago
  No one is stealing anything, millions willingly immigrate, they get to live better lives (according to their desires) and the home country gets back increased trade, transfer of capital, tourism, and many other things.
  - Guthur 1y ago
    [flagged]
loeg 1y ago
It is a major flaw. Birth rate is falling basically everywhere and below replacement (~2.1) even in places people think of as booming in recent history -- India is at 1.98, South America somewhere around 1.8. It's really just portions of Africa that still have TFR above 2.1 and the rates there are declining over time, too. Immigranting your way of a demographic collapse only works if there are lots of births happening somewhere else.
- toomuchtodo 1y ago
  https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments) (slide 39, net migration to Earth is zero)
  - ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
    > Roughly speaking, the bottom 70% of the population receives net payments (and services) from the government over their lifetime, while the 70%-90% percentile receives approximately zero net payments, the top 10% pays it all. Well, maybe if there was more equal income distribution, less overall penalization to those who do not have as many assets, and so on, then it would be more distributed? I mean, that is basically what is happening anyway, but you have a nation distributing that wealth through social programs, instead of capitalists sharing their take willingly with those who helped them earn it.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - somenameforme 1y ago
      Yip, I'm a advocate for capitalism but there's definitely a bug with interest/investments in that earning money makes it even easier to earn money, even if you do absolutely nothing with your life. Just dump everything in a diversified portfolio and you become an infinite money printer when you reach the point of having enough money that all your expanses are small relative to your capital gains. This issue radically distorts the concept of who is contributing to society and who is living off the contributions of others.
ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
> This seems to weaken the entire paper. It is relative, no? If a nation's population decline isn't as high as another, maybe because of immigration, then they have more human resources? Also, humans tend to migrate?
- jjk166 1y ago
  If everyone around you is starving, it doesn't satisfy your own hunger. Your quality of life depends on absolute production output.
Aurornis 1y ago
> "Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies This does appear to be an admission that labor shortages occur due to lack of workers. The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  The paper is fundamentally flawed in numerous technical ways also. The most overt is that they are looking at the current state of countries with low fertility rates. The consequences of low fertility lag the onset of low fertility by many decades, but are largely inescapable. Taken to an extreme, if everybody in a country just stopped having children, that country would look, from an economic point of view, excellent for at least a couple of decades. For a real example, South Korea has a fertility rate of ~0.7 while Japan has a fertility rate of ~1.4. Yet South Korea seems to be doing okayish, while Japan has clearly entered into decline. The reason is because South Korea had a 3+ fertility rate all the way up to 1976, whereas Japan hasn't had a 3+ fertility rate since 1952. Give South Korea a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia. For that matter give Japan a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia - their decline is still just beginning, as they only hit the current lows in the 90s.
  - 0xcafefood 1y ago
    > if everybody in a country just stopped having children, that country would look, from an economic point of view, excellent for at least a couple of decades. There's even a name for this: the demographic dividend. It's the demographic capital gains tax that comes afterwards that bites hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend
- rayiner 1y ago
  > The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist It’s quite remarkable. They assert the problem doesn’t exist by essentially treating a highly debated policy change as inexorable.
jjk166 1y ago
Even if global population continued to increase forever, that doesn't mean a particular nation would be able to get those immigrants to come fix their demographic woes. It doesn't matter how easy Moldova makes it for people to immigrate, who is choosing to go there over other destinations just as in need of fresh blood? Countries like the US and western Europe maybe can solve their demographic problems with immigration for the next few decades, that doesn't mean that its a generally viable strategy or that it will keep working in a future world when these nations are well past their prime.
rawgabbit 1y ago
Below is the entire paragraph. The first part of the paragraph summarized their research that declining populations do not decline in wealth or productivity; instead their Figure 8 shows increases in Wealth, Research & Development, Human Capital etc. The second part of the paragraph is obtuse and ambiguous wording where they advocate for increased immigration and as far as I could tell had no basis on their actual research. Our results provide a strong evidence-based counter to the politically motivated claim that declining/slow-growing and ageing populations in any way compromise national economic performance, income distribution, productivity, political stability, well-being, or health of its citizens. In fact, such populations generally have the highest socio-economic performance indicators in the world. This result supports the mounting evidence that smaller populations are in fact beneficial to most of society37, in sharp contrast to the unsubstantiated political rhetoric of ‘baby busts’ and an ensuing economic Armageddon1-5. This is because investing in the health, training, and education of workers — especially older, more experienced workers — increases human capital, making the workforce more productive29. Neither is there a basis for an expected penury of working-age people for countries experiencing low population growth or even decline. Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand70. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population30,37,71-73.
amingilani 1y ago
> they occur instead because of inadequate immigration How did they make that assertion? In the body of the paper immigration policies were not included as a variable in the data, nor were they a part of the statistical analyses. I couldn't find anything regarding labor movement at all. It feels weird that it was just thrown there in the end.
mattlutze 1y ago
Perhaps you've misread the quote? It and your counter affirm each other. The quote suggests that there won't be labor shortages in markets that have adequate and adaptive immigration policies, because migration into a country with an aging population is how countries today maintain their labor pools. That the global population will continue to grow into 2100 supports their assertion that all countries should be more immigration friendly so as to reap the bi-directional benefit of available labor moving into geographies that need workers.
conclusiondoubt 1y ago
[dead]
Yoric 1y ago
Indeed, this specific sentence seems a bit odd. However, if there is one thing we're not lacking, it's crisis zones, where people are desperate to move away from if given half a chance. Given both the current rate of climate change and the current political climate, this is bound to increase, even after the global population peak. So I suspect that a lack of migrants willing to resettle to unaffected/less affected regions will not be a problem for the next few decades.

nsxwolf 1y ago

So the assumption is that some populations will always reproduce in sufficient numbers and immigrate, and this just goes on forever and everything’s fine? Those other populations never age and decline?

0xcafefood 1y ago
That is _one_ assumption. Another is that immigrants into these countries can and will just plug right into the local economy and be adequate substitutes for the economic effects of the local population decline. There's everything about a country unrelated to economics that isn't even addressed too that will likely have ... big implications for these countries receiving the mass immigration too. These will likely also affect the economy.
carlosjobim 1y ago
That sums up the ideology: That some ethnicities should continuously replace other ethnicities until the latter group has been genetically exterminated.
allemagne 1y ago
The paper explicitly states that global population decline is not being projected. Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."

raincole 1y ago

It also means some places on earth have to be kept in poverty or even wars. That's the biggest driver moving people out from their homeland. People who live good, peaceful lives are mostly staying where their are. It might be a valid strategy and a very likely future, but I hope all the "we will just let immigrants in so don't worry about birth rates" people think about the implications here.

HankStallone 1y ago
Yeah, the open borders folks like to paint a rosy picture of, "If we let a bunch of people come here and work cheap, it'll make things better back in their homelands too as they take their training and wages back sometimes." But if that's true, pretty soon they won't have any reason to come here and work cheap, and then the reason the bosses wanted them in the first place is gone. I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.
- AlOwain 1y ago
  So what to you is the alternative better interpretation; that they continue in destitute poverty?
  - toomuchtodo 1y ago
    As total fertility rate continues to rapidly decline due to educated, empowered women having less kids or no kids, wages will rise globally due to reduced labor supply as prime working labor force cohort compresses. To get to that point, domestic economies with surplus labor need to be stoked with investment (Africa and India) to maximize economic potential until the labor supply constraint is reached. The Great Demographic Reversal Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival - https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6 https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbea597263a88f27075bd6eb49_17385_suerf.pdf https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe... https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-depopulation-confronting-the-consequences-of-a-new-demographic-reality https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/dependency-and-dep... https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demographics-their-implications-economy-policy https://www.cato.org/cato-journal/spring/summer-2018/demogra... https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation.pdf https://www.bis.org/events/conf160624/goodhart_presentation....

gotoeleven 1y ago

[flagged]

dang 1y ago
We've banned this account for posting flamebait and ignoring our requests to stop. Your comment may have been making a good point about the paper, but you can't drop an "also very rapey" in there. That's like tossing a molotov cocktail on your way home from the grocery store. Groceries are fine; firebombs are not. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44991147 (Aug 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203478 (June 2025) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39486588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39486588 (Feb 2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38834663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38834663 (Jan 2024)

Guthur 1y ago

It's also extremely exploitative, the premise is actually that we will offload the burden of raising next generations and then effectively steal those that we need to prop up what would naturally be hollowing societies.

HankStallone 1y ago
Yes, if the process works in the way it's being sold to us, it skims off their smartest, most talented and ambitious people--the people they most need to improve conditions in their own nations.
AlOwain 1y ago
No one is stealing anything, millions willingly immigrate, they get to live better lives (according to their desires) and the home country gets back increased trade, transfer of capital, tourism, and many other things.
- Guthur 1y ago
  [flagged]

loeg 1y ago

It is a major flaw. Birth rate is falling basically everywhere and below replacement (~2.1) even in places people think of as booming in recent history -- India is at 1.98, South America somewhere around 1.8. It's really just portions of Africa that still have TFR above 2.1 and the rates there are declining over time, too. Immigranting your way of a demographic collapse only works if there are lots of births happening somewhere else.

toomuchtodo 1y ago
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments) (slide 39, net migration to Earth is zero)
- ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago
  > Roughly speaking, the bottom 70% of the population receives net payments (and services) from the government over their lifetime, while the 70%-90% percentile receives approximately zero net payments, the top 10% pays it all. Well, maybe if there was more equal income distribution, less overall penalization to those who do not have as many assets, and so on, then it would be more distributed? I mean, that is basically what is happening anyway, but you have a nation distributing that wealth through social programs, instead of capitalists sharing their take willingly with those who helped them earn it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    Yip, I'm a advocate for capitalism but there's definitely a bug with interest/investments in that earning money makes it even easier to earn money, even if you do absolutely nothing with your life. Just dump everything in a diversified portfolio and you become an infinite money printer when you reach the point of having enough money that all your expanses are small relative to your capital gains. This issue radically distorts the concept of who is contributing to society and who is living off the contributions of others.

ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 1y ago

> This seems to weaken the entire paper. It is relative, no? If a nation's population decline isn't as high as another, maybe because of immigration, then they have more human resources? Also, humans tend to migrate?

jjk166 1y ago
If everyone around you is starving, it doesn't satisfy your own hunger. Your quality of life depends on absolute production output.

Aurornis 1y ago

> "Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies This does appear to be an admission that labor shortages occur due to lack of workers. The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist.

somenameforme 1y ago
The paper is fundamentally flawed in numerous technical ways also. The most overt is that they are looking at the current state of countries with low fertility rates. The consequences of low fertility lag the onset of low fertility by many decades, but are largely inescapable. Taken to an extreme, if everybody in a country just stopped having children, that country would look, from an economic point of view, excellent for at least a couple of decades. For a real example, South Korea has a fertility rate of ~0.7 while Japan has a fertility rate of ~1.4. Yet South Korea seems to be doing okayish, while Japan has clearly entered into decline. The reason is because South Korea had a 3+ fertility rate all the way up to 1976, whereas Japan hasn't had a 3+ fertility rate since 1952. Give South Korea a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia. For that matter give Japan a couple of decades and it'll make the Japan of today look like a utopia - their decline is still just beginning, as they only hit the current lows in the 90s.
- 0xcafefood 1y ago
  > if everybody in a country just stopped having children, that country would look, from an economic point of view, excellent for at least a couple of decades. There's even a name for this: the demographic dividend. It's the demographic capital gains tax that comes afterwards that bites hard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_dividend
rayiner 1y ago
> The authors propose a solution (immigration) to the problem, but in doing so pretend the problem doesn't exist It’s quite remarkable. They assert the problem doesn’t exist by essentially treating a highly debated policy change as inexorable.

jjk166 1y ago

Even if global population continued to increase forever, that doesn't mean a particular nation would be able to get those immigrants to come fix their demographic woes. It doesn't matter how easy Moldova makes it for people to immigrate, who is choosing to go there over other destinations just as in need of fresh blood? Countries like the US and western Europe maybe can solve their demographic problems with immigration for the next few decades, that doesn't mean that its a generally viable strategy or that it will keep working in a future world when these nations are well past their prime.

rawgabbit 1y ago

Below is the entire paragraph. The first part of the paragraph summarized their research that declining populations do not decline in wealth or productivity; instead their Figure 8 shows increases in Wealth, Research & Development, Human Capital etc. The second part of the paragraph is obtuse and ambiguous wording where they advocate for increased immigration and as far as I could tell had no basis on their actual research. Our results provide a strong evidence-based counter to the politically motivated claim that declining/slow-growing and ageing populations in any way compromise national economic performance, income distribution, productivity, political stability, well-being, or health of its citizens. In fact, such populations generally have the highest socio-economic performance indicators in the world. This result supports the mounting evidence that smaller populations are in fact beneficial to most of society37, in sharp contrast to the unsubstantiated political rhetoric of ‘baby busts’ and an ensuing economic Armageddon1-5. This is because investing in the health, training, and education of workers — especially older, more experienced workers — increases human capital, making the workforce more productive29. Neither is there a basis for an expected penury of working-age people for countries experiencing low population growth or even decline. Labour shortages do not arise because of a lack of suitable workers, they occur instead because of inadequate immigration policies that limit or deny the movement of capable, working-age people from elsewhere to fill local demand70. Indeed, none of the existing credible population projections predicts a decline in the global population30,37,71-73.

amingilani 1y ago

> they occur instead because of inadequate immigration How did they make that assertion? In the body of the paper immigration policies were not included as a variable in the data, nor were they a part of the statistical analyses. I couldn't find anything regarding labor movement at all. It feels weird that it was just thrown there in the end.

mattlutze 1y ago

Perhaps you've misread the quote? It and your counter affirm each other. The quote suggests that there won't be labor shortages in markets that have adequate and adaptive immigration policies, because migration into a country with an aging population is how countries today maintain their labor pools. That the global population will continue to grow into 2100 supports their assertion that all countries should be more immigration friendly so as to reap the bi-directional benefit of available labor moving into geographies that need workers.

conclusiondoubt 1y ago

[dead]

Yoric 1y ago

Indeed, this specific sentence seems a bit odd. However, if there is one thing we're not lacking, it's crisis zones, where people are desperate to move away from if given half a chance. Given both the current rate of climate change and the current political climate, this is bound to increase, even after the global population peak. So I suspect that a lack of migrants willing to resettle to unaffected/less affected regions will not be a problem for the next few decades.