"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.
> "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.
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.
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.
I can't speak to places outside of the Western Anglosphere, because I simply don't have any information about them—but within it, it's abundantly clear (and there have been some recent studies bearing this out) that a major cause of reduced birth rates is lack of economic opportunity among the non-capital-owning classes.
I 100% guarantee you that if we implemented a full UBI today—one that would pay something close to the median individual income, and even if it were only for adults (and thus you got no "bonus" for having extra kids)—once the initial chaos settled down, you'd see those birth rates go up quite a bit. So many people are waiting to have kids until they're financially stable enough...and then they never become so.
I know that one of the big reasons my wife and I didn't have kids in our 20s was because we were concerned about our financial stability (and frankly, we were better off than most of the people that age today—by quite a ways, since we were homeowners).
The truth is that woman, given a informed choice without societal or religious pressure - would rather not have children. So artificial wombs and AI for raising it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb
Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.
Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.
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.
If all this sounds unsustainable, it's because it is.
We're essentially legitimizing a pyramid scheme here. Economics and policy are all centered around extraction and share holder value. I've never seen any attention paid to making an industry stable or resilient.
Nearly every issue we face day-to-day is either due to companies holding massive control over our society, or companies degrading services we rely on because profit is no longer increasing.
We're not allowed a stable, peaceful life in a stable climate because someone else needs to get one over on someone else.
We could provide for everyone but we have decided making immaterial numbers go up is #1 priority.
When I ask why can't we have companies that exist in a steady state, the answer is another company will take advantage if the first company doesn't first. Why do we live like this? Is this system truly responsible for our technology and comfort? or is the comfort a side-product that can be produced by a number of other systems?
We're being played for fools. We all know it, but we can't imagine an alternative because they've got us all by the balls controlling our health care and housing.
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.
Lots of non-Ukranian Europeans still want to move to the US for example, because there's an idea that in skilled jobs you can make more money in the US.
Likewise, India isn't "kept" in poverty nor is the country at war, but the opportunity for economic prosperity elsewhere is a strong driver for migration. And when India surpasses the US or Europe in economic prospects, the trend will reverse and enterprising people will flock to e.g. Hyderabad and New Delhi.
Economic prosperity, until we do away with capitalism, probably won't ever be homogeneous. Where there's a potential across a circuit the electrons will flow.
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?
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.
That sums up the ideology: That some ethnicities should continuously replace other ethnicities until the latter group has been genetically exterminated.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's super lightweight and superficial even in full. It's just not a large paper and takes a very superficial view of a lot of high level statistics. You can read through it in full in a few minutes and likely come to the same thought.
>This metric ignores the youth cohort
That's very very significant. They are not looking at population pyramids holistically at all. They are just focusing on part of the pyramid. Are there lots of people >65 compared to those between 16 and 65?
Now here's something to consider. If a population has very few children but many elderly they may actually have a great ratio of working/not-working. This study won't see this at all. Merely, look lots of elderly and they're doing great!!
I suspect the reality may well be that the most successful economies have offset the extra costs of more elderly with far far fewer children. So the elderly are indeed a burden as you'd expect but we're offsetting it with fewer children.
I'd also point out that I'm not convinced the arbitrary cutoff of >65 is correct since western governments are all pushing for retirement ages well above that. As in the worst of the bubble in the population pyramids is yet to fully hit, many in that bubble are still working and the effects of below population sustainment birth rates is also yet to fully hit (we don't yet fully have the narrowest parts of the population pyramids sustaining the widest parts). When it does all hit though it could well be devastating and this really superficial study doesn't reassure me at all.
>But these fears are frequently based on oversimplified or misapplied interpretations of economic models, and appear to be driven more by political agendas rather than evidence
A razor for people who think like this:
Do you think Japan and Japanese people would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited sub-Saharan Africa immigration?
This should separate serious people from the not so serious people pretty rapidly.
It's not directly related to your post, but Japan has a very significant Brazilian population that live in very specific parts of Japan. Toyota[1], and its prefecture Aichi, are known for having a Portuguese-speaking population and they are, of course, working as cheap labor in automobile industries. In fact, some signs on the road are written in Portuguese, too.
There's a significant number of Japanese in Brazil, and a large portion of the Brazilian population is of Japanese descent. They're called the Nikkei Japanese, and they're predominantly ethnically Japanese.
Since Brazil has a very significant Japanese population, that makes me wonder: Are these Brazilians in Japan ethnically Japanese or of other ethnicities?
This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis.
I'm still not sure that the local trend of population decline is a long-term indicator; but, there's a bunch of economies along the curve, and things seem fine, for now?
My worry is that this is a railroad fallacy: you can see the train coming, but it's not hitting you now, so everything must be fine in the long-term?
> This is the great part about science: whether or not you agree with the authors' conclusions, they just asked the question "is our preconceived 'obviously correct' conclusion actually correct". Then, they dove in to the data and tried to prove or disprove the hypothesis
Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in.
That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem.
You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.
Actually, in social science you really can't test a hypothesis with data. What's true under one set of conditions won't be true under another and conditions change all the time. Famously, there's the Lucas critique - the idea that a relationship (or the lack thereof) between variables may break, if a policy that exploits the relationship is implemented.
Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.
A fun thing about fertility rates that most don't know. They also determine the exact age ratios within a society. Imagine a population has a common fertility rate of 1. That means each successive generation is half as large as the one prior. And we can approximate the age of fertility as between 20 and 40. So now let's start with 1 newborn and we can work backwards from there.
---
1 new born ->
2 20-40 year olds ->
4 40-60 year olds ->
8 60-80 year olds ->
16? 80-100 year olds
---
Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.
That might be true, but this paper is wildly unconvincing. Cross-country comparisons have way too many confounding factors. Not least that economic growth reduces population growth.
As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.
True, and sure their ways of life were largely alien to us, but I'm confident that our more modern static assumptions can and should outlive us THIS time.
Canada has been absolutely ruined by these elites following the path of immigration. Canada is the perfect case study. Not just in immigration but foreign investment too where you allow all the investment to pour into just one sector: housing.
Canada has been so badly managed that it gives the Soviets et al a run for their money in stupidity, short-sightedness and greed.
Also, Canada is not as big a country as it appears on a map. A good deal of it is uninhabitable.
Readit News
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
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.
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.
It’s quite remarkable. They assert the problem doesn’t exist by essentially treating a highly debated policy change as inexorable.
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
(slide 39, net migration to Earth is zero)
I 100% guarantee you that if we implemented a full UBI today—one that would pay something close to the median individual income, and even if it were only for adults (and thus you got no "bonus" for having extra kids)—once the initial chaos settled down, you'd see those birth rates go up quite a bit. So many people are waiting to have kids until they're financially stable enough...and then they never become so.
I know that one of the big reasons my wife and I didn't have kids in our 20s was because we were concerned about our financial stability (and frankly, we were better off than most of the people that age today—by quite a ways, since we were homeowners).
Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.
Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.
Dead Comment
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.
We're essentially legitimizing a pyramid scheme here. Economics and policy are all centered around extraction and share holder value. I've never seen any attention paid to making an industry stable or resilient.
Nearly every issue we face day-to-day is either due to companies holding massive control over our society, or companies degrading services we rely on because profit is no longer increasing.
We're not allowed a stable, peaceful life in a stable climate because someone else needs to get one over on someone else.
We could provide for everyone but we have decided making immaterial numbers go up is #1 priority.
When I ask why can't we have companies that exist in a steady state, the answer is another company will take advantage if the first company doesn't first. Why do we live like this? Is this system truly responsible for our technology and comfort? or is the comfort a side-product that can be produced by a number of other systems?
We're being played for fools. We all know it, but we can't imagine an alternative because they've got us all by the balls controlling our health care and housing.
I don't think they really expect that to happen (and we can observe that it hasn't); it's just a sales pitch.
Lots of non-Ukranian Europeans still want to move to the US for example, because there's an idea that in skilled jobs you can make more money in the US.
Likewise, India isn't "kept" in poverty nor is the country at war, but the opportunity for economic prosperity elsewhere is a strong driver for migration. And when India surpasses the US or Europe in economic prospects, the trend will reverse and enterprising people will flock to e.g. Hyderabad and New Delhi.
Economic prosperity, until we do away with capitalism, probably won't ever be homogeneous. Where there's a potential across a circuit the electrons will flow.
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.
Obviously that can't be true "forever" assuming that trends never reverse, but their scope is just the "long-term."
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.
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?
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.
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.
Dead Comment
>This metric ignores the youth cohort
That's very very significant. They are not looking at population pyramids holistically at all. They are just focusing on part of the pyramid. Are there lots of people >65 compared to those between 16 and 65?
Now here's something to consider. If a population has very few children but many elderly they may actually have a great ratio of working/not-working. This study won't see this at all. Merely, look lots of elderly and they're doing great!!
I suspect the reality may well be that the most successful economies have offset the extra costs of more elderly with far far fewer children. So the elderly are indeed a burden as you'd expect but we're offsetting it with fewer children.
I'd also point out that I'm not convinced the arbitrary cutoff of >65 is correct since western governments are all pushing for retirement ages well above that. As in the worst of the bubble in the population pyramids is yet to fully hit, many in that bubble are still working and the effects of below population sustainment birth rates is also yet to fully hit (we don't yet fully have the narrowest parts of the population pyramids sustaining the widest parts). When it does all hit though it could well be devastating and this really superficial study doesn't reassure me at all.
A razor for people who think like this:
Do you think Japan and Japanese people would have a higher or lower quality of life if they had accepted unlimited sub-Saharan Africa immigration?
This should separate serious people from the not so serious people pretty rapidly.
[1] Name of a city
Of course literally unlimited amounts of people is a bad thing. Did you mean unregulated?
Regarding your question, it's for you to answer bi-directionally, the result being interrogating hidden information.
I'm still not sure that the local trend of population decline is a long-term indicator; but, there's a bunch of economies along the curve, and things seem fine, for now?
My worry is that this is a railroad fallacy: you can see the train coming, but it's not hitting you now, so everything must be fine in the long-term?
Unfortunately it also shows the difficult part of modern scientific publishing: The authors try to downplay the existence of problems (labor shortages) by arguing that it's really a problem of immigration policies not allowing enough new labor in.
That's a tacit admission that labor shortages are a problem. Proposing a solution to the labor shortage doesn't mean that it's not a problem.
You have to read scientific papers carefully. It's increasingly common to find editorialization or wishful thinking mixed into the logic of papers. More so in some fields than others.
Or take the matter of immigration and international conditions that many others noted in this thread. If every rich country depends on immigration and every poor country strives to become rich, at some point you are going to start running out of places to source immigrants from and there will be a relationship between birth rates and economic performance.
---
1 new born ->
2 20-40 year olds ->
4 40-60 year olds ->
8 60-80 year olds ->
16? 80-100 year olds
---
Just ignoring the 80-100 year olds, we end up in a scenario where you have 6 people in the working age for every 8 people of retirement age. And if life expectancy inches up, then it may be closer to 6 working age people for every 16+ retirees.
As for an aging population slowing the economy, Japan is the classic example of the dynamic: https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-japan-succ... Looking within-country during a retirement boom seems more informative than trying to compare apples to oranges.
Country of Theseus.
Dead Comment
Canada has been so badly managed that it gives the Soviets et al a run for their money in stupidity, short-sightedness and greed.
Also, Canada is not as big a country as it appears on a map. A good deal of it is uninhabitable.