This is the lump of labor fallacy. No profession is so fundamentally limited in the long term and no skills are set in stone.

The article explains the national labor market effects (lower marginal cost, higher marginal benefit), but we are still not done. Resources are allocated more efficiently in the international labor market with permissive schemes, as each individual seeks the greatest marginal benefit for their labor (their comparative advantage).

> The H1B scheme

H1B is a restrictive immigration scheme. The recent policy change is even more restrictive. Everyone is worse off relative to having been completely permissive all along.

To switch immediately to a permissive scheme would likely cause short-term unemployment in certain fields. But over the long term, people's skills can be changed or applied more efficiently, and new entrants will choose to develop skills that maximize utility.

1. Service jobs such as haircutters are needed proportionally to population.

2. RnD and art. If the same proportion of the population does RnD / art, then a higher population means faster progress and more prosperity.

3. Fixed resources. For instance US has a limited amount of farmland. You cannot scale farming up. From one perspective there are a fixed amount of farming jobs. From another perspective people will go hungry if population is too high. The higher population California has, the more carefully it has to save water.

That's sort of related to zero sum thinking - if arrable land ever became scarce there are alternative methods that become viable at higher cost , same for water. (also with additional manual labor and R&D it's easier to solve those problems)

Innovation isn’t a meaningful difference because global population is not changing.

Besides I'm pretty sure the US isn't currently optimizing their farming to use little land. If you were to compare the US and the Netherlands on output per square mile of arable land I reckon you'll find that there is still quite a bit of leeway in increasing production.

However people are also currently arguing that we might be starting to hit the cap and that we should start reduce the number of work hours (8->6) in order to maintain the same amount of employment. A similar discussions is going on around UBI which is focusing on allowing people to remain unemployed and focus on maximizing personal skill and happiness.

>> This is the lump of labor fallacy. No profession is so fundamentally limited in the long term and no skills are set in stone.

Interesting observation. What you argue is true in theory, but I think we can all agree that 100% employment in IT is a practical impossibility. So is 0%, in the modern world. We just don't need to worry or think about it much because in a market economy, people have the right to respond to incentives, and when employment in IT gets too low relative to other professions, salaries start to spike relative to other professions, and when it gets too high, salaries start to drop relative to other professions.

I'm sure that employability in IT at minimum wage is very, very high. The problem would be keeping people capable of doing this kind of work in IT, as most of them would leave. The solution could be based on freedom - a market economy, where people are free to respond to the numerous factors, monetary and non-monetary, such as salary, bonus, possibility for growth, flexibility, work environment (required attendance at open office), location (urban/office park/outdoors/indoors), hiring process (long take home projects and/pr re-taking whiteboard data structures and algorithms exams at every interview) and so forth.

Another way to do this is to create a specific immigration category that allows employers in specific, narrowly defined fields to bestow - and revoke - residency and work rights on people who would like to immigrate. This only works if the system is generally restrictive, but if it is, it's a tremendous way to create a population of workers who can't respond to market signals. I truly believe that the H1B, driven by the general mentality that there are jobs "Americans (ie., people with choice) won't/can't do", rather than jobs that are too shitty to attract people with choice, are a big part of why high tech gets away with such shitty practices.

I support general immigration, but these targeted programs are egregious. Even the suggestion of granting green cards immediately to scientists and engineers doesn't work for me, because it still requires a heavy sunk cost into a particular field (again, coercing people into making a career choice as a condition of working in the US). Look at career prospects for research scientists. As far as I'm concerned, employers in these fields should have a problem hiring. I believe that the academic career path would look very, very different (and much more favorable for those who choose to do it) if universities didn't have such power over the path to living and working int he US as a skilled/educated person.

One basic condition of market economies is that the people who participate in them must be free. Once a non-freedom based visa program hits a certain scale, it can distort markets dramatically. I personally really do think that practices widely reviled in the tech world - such as open offices and take home interview projects, white board exams, and so forth - would collapse in a free economy. If people were free to say "fuck off" without getting deported and/or losing a very limited number of paths to skilled immigration, high tech would have to change to keep hiring. Salaries would go up, working conditions would improve, and guess what - all it takes is ensuring that immigrants, like citizens, are not coerced into a particular field as a condition of living and working in the US.

This effect is on top of the non-zero-sum impact of qualified migrants.

Consider the 1.43 births per woman (and low net migration rate) of Japan and the fact that the GDP was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago. In the same time period the US GDP has tripled. Canada's has almost quadrupled -- and Canada brings in 1% of the nations population each year via immigration, in part to offset its 1.5 births per woman.

(Notwithstanding transitionary points like "but this other country is still growing and will displace things," and "but who will take care of those decaying cities," etc)

There's plenty of room at the bottom, the sky's the limit, etc, etc. Technological improvement is the main (arguably only) long-term driver of growth and there's every indication that we're nowhere near done tapping what's available. Energy consumption per capita in the United States has been trending down for decades now. The "infinite grown in a finite world" criticism of economic growth may have merit thousands of years from now, but it certainly has no merit today.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.PCAP.KG.OE?locat...

Though, OP, there are geopolitical issues with this, as Australia was extremely close to discovering in 1941. That's why Australia opened its immigration policy.

Because there are more people who'd like their children to live a better life than them; than who'd like the opposite.

And while some of that will be intangible things like good friends and a feeling of community, some of it will be things like education, dental services, high speed internet, and working fewer hours - things that cost money.

A politician who can promise growth can promise a better life for rich and poor alike. That's a much easier message to sell than a zero-sum policy.

In a pyramid scheme, it is required.

In a "greater fool" scheme, it is required.

In a political campaign, it is required because it provides a justification for lowering taxes.

However even if we except your premise that an increased GDP will help to fulfill this is highly doubtful. A increased GDP can (and does) very well decrease quality of life. Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.

In fact one of the reasons why the US has been so successful at increasing GDP is that the population has an increasingly unhealthy livestyle.

For evidence, look at the average savings rate in developed countries. It wants were limited, it would be higher. It's also the case that savings rate doesn't increase as income increase (in fact the inverse is often true; compare savings rates in poorer China and Indian to the US).

Clearly humans want things; this is the default case. To show this stops at some stage should require evidence.

>Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.

Driving, cheap energy, tasty food and divorce clearly satisfy human wants.

> For evidence, look at the average savings rate in developed countries. It wants were limited, it would be higher. It's also the case that savings rate doesn't increase as income increase (in fact the inverse is often true; compare savings rates in poorer China and Indian to the US).

That's a giant leap, to get from savings rates decrease in some countries to human wants are unlimited. Moreover, savings rates are quite country dependent (e.g. Germany has very high rates). Might it be that people in the US have been led to believe that they can make up for their unhappyness by buying more things?

> Clearly humans want things; this is the default case. To show this stops at some stage should require evidence.

I can easily think of many people who are quite happy without having more things. So I just falsified your claim. Moreover there is significant research showing that having more things beyond some point does not increase happiness.

> >Traffic accidents, environmental pollution, obesity, divorce all increase GDP, not sure if they fulfill human wants.

> Driving, cheap energy, tasty food and divorce clearly satisfy human wants.

If human wants were limited, we'd expect to see, for any given country, savings rates increasing as incomes increase. We have not seen this, and in fact have seen the opposite (even in America, savings rates now are less than 50 years ago, when Americans were much poorer).

>Moreover, savings rates are quite country dependent (e.g. Germany has very high rates). Might it be that people in the US have been led to believe that they can make up for their unhappyness by buying more things?

Someone could just as easily suggest that German savings rates are too high because Germans are too fearful about the future so they save more. There's no objectively correct savings rate, so we can't say one country's rate is better than the other's.

>I can easily think of many people who are quite happy without having more things. So I just falsified your claim.

My claim is that "human wants" are unlimited, which does not imply that every human's wants are unlimited. If some people have limited wants, and some don't, we'd still expect the sum of human wants to keep increasing. And savings rates suggest that the majority of people don't have limited wants (or at least have not fulfilled those wants).

>Moreover there is significant research showing that having more things beyond some point does not increase happiness.

We're talking about wants here, not happiness. Who are we to say that somebody can't have what they want just because there's a chance it will make them unhappy?

I think a more fruitful direction would be to distinguish between empty dopamine, and the kind of want that you can look back on and feel like it was aligned with your broader interests.

I don't want to be dismissive, but this is basically page 1 of any Econ 101 book ;-)

As much as we make fun of economists, it's basically the only thing almost every economist out there will agree on.

Sure, some examples of GDP growth are win-win, like the ones you've listed. But those improvements--when discovered--will happen whether or not people have growth as a goal. They're good ideas independently.

But making growth a goal on its own is a good way to wind up with more toll roads, more complexity that requires an industry to help citizens navigate it (e.g. realters, tax preparers), more cases where the consumer's decision making is tampered with (e.g. advertising, the sale of addictive things), and the creation of problems just so there will be a market for solutions thereto (e.g. Hallmark).

These are all cases of GDP growth that I think most of us can agree we'd be better off without.

The point is that measures that limit GDP will generally also limit the rate at which these things occur. An idea by itself is rarely enough: it needs capital to execute. Things that limit the growth of GDP limit the growth of a nation's capital.

Only if people get their hair cut more as a result. If haircuts take less time, become cheaper and people get their hair cut just as often surely GDP would go down. Same for package delivery.

If demand is not saturating your efficiency improvement then you are maybe capturing a bigger piece of the pie but the pie may shrink or grow. Isn't the pie the proper measure? Why are we measuring scoops of pie passing back and forth?

People's preferences for family size in a developed world seems to be providing a much more tangible limit to population growth than resources. People simply don't want to have as many children as it takes to substantially grow population when they're rich enough.

I have one. Productivity gains are mostly granted by energy (AKA bigger machines). W/capita is imo a better approximation to a nation wealth than GPD/capita in socialist countries, but even in the us you can see the strong correlation.

80% of this energy come from fossil fuel, coal and gaz make 60% of world electricity (probably more), and oil for movement. This is the limit to growth.

If the reverse is happening, the economy is contracting, this results in people spending less, which results in the economy contracting more, which results in people loosing jobs, those people have less money to spend etc.

Zero economic growth is unstable the slightest bit of noise will cause it to shift into a contraction. So having economic growth and using the limits to the rate of growth to control how much growth happens is much more stable.

I am sure plenty of people across America and western Europe would tell you their quality of life has gone down in the last 30-40 years (as wages have stagnated) and national inequality has increased in these countries.

I personally believe immigration and globalisation more widely are contributing factors to a wealth redistribution of the middle and working classes of wealthy countries to developing ones.

It's perfectly possible for global inequality to come down while globally local inequality increases. That would be a perfect example of Simpsons paradox - if wealth stratifies in every country you might see this.

That we can't have a nuanced discussion about that without it being shamed as nationalism or racism is dangerous. After all, governments are democratically elected to serve their own people. If they aren't looking after their own citizen's interests are they doing their job? More cynically if you structurally ignore the "proles" then you leave yourself exposed to populism rearing its head.

I don't really have any answers, nor much expertise on these matters but I notice a resoluteness on topics such as GDP which resembles faith more than reason.

I think that one of the issues with this GDP going down, which might not be the same in the US as in the EU, is the redistributive nature of the economy in Europe. Many (most?) social programs are paid for by people currently working and they're paid right away. In other words, you pay for your grandparents' pension, you pay for your neighbour's hospital bill, etc.

A falling GDP due to low fertility often comes with an ageing of the population. Older people usually don't work, usually need more healthcare, etc. Hence there's a growing need of money to redistribute, but less money coming in since there are less young people working.

That's accurate. The main "issue" here is that people live longer, ergo their retirement period is longer. When retirement systems were set up, with the retirement age set to ~65, people lived to be 70. Now they live to be 80, and the retirement age is still at 65.

On the other side: "back in the day", a lot of jobs where quite physical, which made it hard to do them in your 60ies. That's very different today. And of course: productivity gains more than make up for low fertility, we no longer need 30% of the population to work in food production, thanks to automation and modern technology, 1-3% can do the same just fine.

> the GDP [of Japan] was lower last year than it was almost twenty years ago

That is an extraordinary claim that's contradicted by brief searching: https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-constant-prices

Nobody said 'caste, second class or non-citizens' though. Yes, people who have the 'colonialist mentality' might assume that foreign-born people are only capable of replacing menial workers, but that's not implied by the basic logic that if people are born below the population replacement rate some countries and above it in others, some population transfer might be desirable and not consistent with much of the reality of immigration.

The British government has gone backwards on this: a British-born child of non-British parents was stripped of her citizenship, barred from the country, and denied legal appeal. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/topics/c347vzp58nzt/shamima-begum...

All the rhetoric which drove repatriation of the Windrush migrants [a much more representative case than Begum leaving the UK to join ISIS] was based around the popularisation of the idea that the UK was 'full' of 'unsustainable' numbers of migrants. So it certainly doesn't help immigrants to pointedly refuse to state reasons why this is incorrect.

Btw I still want open migration for all the other reasons.

I think what you are doing is assuming that the current state of the system is all it can be and that people's decisions they make resulting from the current system what they truly want.

- Pregnant women can start working 6 hours a day at full pay from week 12.

- Up to two years of paternity leave at ~80% pay, capped at roughly 3x the median wage. Either parent can take this, or it can be split.

- 3 weeks of paternity leave after giving birth for the father.

This means a couple can muddle through the first two years of a child's live without worrying about paying for day care of having to quit jobs.

Note that this incentives are country-wide and available for all citizens. The government pays you indirectly while you are in paternity leave.

How does this encourage not parenting?

Yes, we should have those things.

No, they won't increase birth rates, they'll probably drive them down. I know it's counterintuitive, but they data is very clear.

I want to understand your argument better - are you arguing in favour of replacement of population for the economic benefits (of who?)?

So why would I - a person living in a country with my own culture surrounded by my own people - want to have adults from another culture with their own sets of values and morals over children from my own people?

Irrespective of the merits or lack thereof of paying bonuses for having three or more children, fertility rate in Hungary is still well below replacement rate, and well below the US birth rate for that matter.

But if the reason is that people just don't feel like having 2 or more children, well, that should be up to them, no?

That's the “Total” (e.g., projected hypothetical lifetime) fertility rate; completed fertility rate (measured by women age 40-44, so it's a tiny bit low since some, and an increasing number, of women actually have children past that age) is actually up above the replacement from a low of 1.86 in 2006. TFR is only useful as a tool to project the future CFR, but it has a pretty variable history in actually doing that, and there are reasons to suspect it currently may be underestimating what it will end up being for women currently in their childbearing years for the same (but inverted) reason it overestimated it during the baby boom.

Have you considered that the causation may be in the reverse?

The article pokes fun at skeptics of women in the workforce in the 60's and 70's. Yet real wages have remained stagnant since then, and given that divorce rates are significantly higher when the woman is the higher earner, it's not insane to suggest that falling (who am I kidding, fallen) family formation rates are due to those couples now having trouble forming in the first place.

Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap is required reading here.

And before you say that it will go to remote work: big tech has been dying and trying to outsource everything as it is still cheaper than legal immigration. There might be bigger incentives if wages do rise, but they have pretty much been there all the time

That's actually the opposite of what happens. As a country develops, wages go up and fertility goes down. Check out this chart of GDP per capita vs fertility rates. [2] It's a well known and extremely strong effect.

Fun and very poignant quote: In a 1974 UN population conference in Bucharest, Karan Singh, a former minister of population in India, illustrated this trend by stating "Development is the best contraceptive." [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility#/media/Fi...

for instance, wealth disparity creates economic vortexes that suck people (women particularly) into unproductive economic outputs, like finance rather than childcare, not to mention a comfortable home life is increasingly out of reach for relatively more and more people. increasing corruption and general unfairness lead people to lose faith and opt out of productive life altogether.

gdp is certainly gamed as well, and leaves out some very important productivity measures, again, like childcare and homemaking, because these are historically seen as "free".

In some places, sure, but certainly not in all, and the correlation holds everywhere. For instance, New Zealand's birth rate is 1.8, and is the worlds's least corrupt country on the perception of corruption index, a much lower GINI coefficient than the US, and much better childcare, mat/pat leave policies and so on. Finland is another example, with a birth rate of 1.49

if we want both high (and growing) gdp and fertility over replacement, we need more economic fairness, particularly around wealth and income, which has all sorts of unintuitive distorting effects. that requires capital to be loosed from captive greed and spread more broadly and deeply into the economy.

immigration in place of high reproduction is fine too for growth, which is one of the points of the article.

you can't get prosperity and choke off sources of activity and innovation, which is what the US (and similar) is doing. those in power, along with the lower classes clinging to the scraps of privilege trickled down to them, want neither economic fairness nor immigration because it potentially dilutes their power and influence, others be damned.

they'd rather have most of a smaller pie (the current situation) than a proportionally-smaller but absolutely-bigger piece of a bigger pie (the zero-sum thinking). that's the conundrum in a nutshell.

I'm having a hard time grasping what evidence you have that even tried to suggest this.

https://www.brookings.edu/research/half-a-million-fewer-chil...

I read your article, and nothing there tracks the correlation between birth rates and income in a greater-than-replenishment situation. I conceded that in the tail end, rising wages may lead to more births, but I have not seen (including in your citations) an indication it would lead to an above-replenishment birth rate. Just some micro-level changes.

I agree that educated, empowered women delay having children and have less children overall. Yet, the data shows income plays a part as well. Economic insecurity acts as an arrestor on the fertility rate (rightfully so), and economic security increases the fertility rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility#/media/Fi...

Wealth inequality is a symptom of government policy, nothing more.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

The question is rather what is a healthy level of inequality and should the government work on increasing inequality.

Most people under estimate the amount of inequality in the US, this [1] is an awesome video illustrating it. Also there is some interesting research on modelling inequality as a phase change process and that there exist some point of no return after which inequality only increases towards a oligarchy/plutogarchy without a revolution type event [2]

[1] https://youtu.be/QPKKQnijnsM [2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-ine...

The fact that income and wealth inequality are different in different countries is proof in and of itself.

This is an _incredibly_ rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union. I would suggest researching Waldsiedlung as a starting point.

However to say that government policy can't substantially reduce inequality is patently absurd. The government has the power to take things from people, every year, in taxes.

You have no idea what you're talking about, just stop. Source: born in USSR

Take the flip side. Scarcity of talent leads to competition which leads companies to be aggressive in deterring movement of employees to competitors so things like non competition agreements increase. In extreme cases you get cartel like activity between Apple <> google and others agreeing not to recruit or hire each other’s employees. Similar protections against employees founding their own companies. So while income may increase with restrictions on immigration, all of other effects may Outweigh the salary offset.

That's a tall bar to clear.

"More [house cleaners] makes it easier to [clean more houses] and more manageable prices making it easier to expand the market. Lower [house cleaning] cost makes pricing better which makes demand increases. There’s a positive feedback loop that also results in more opportunities for [house cleaners]."

Clearly house cleaners currently working in the US would benefit from unrestricted migration of people restricted to house cleaning.

"Scarcity of talent leads to competition which leads companies to be aggressive in deterring movement of employees to competitors so things like non competition agreements increase. In extreme cases you get cartel like activity between Apple <> google and others agreeing not to recruit or hire each other’s employees."

Obviously barriers to entry to professions do not always (probably never not once ever) lead to the subjugation of the members of that profession by cartels. I assume brain surgeons are then the worst off having been captured by hospitals, held in captivity and forced to preform brain surgery all day.

No one goes around saying “house cleaning is eating the world!”

Speaking of extremely narrow claims, of course this isn’t the case. Most policies do not have the goal that no one is harmed.

As the most obvious example: criminals are harmed by laws which punish crime.

Even minor loosening of restrictions to immigration might at least temporarily harm people whose jobs involve deporting immigrants or filing difficult immigration paperwork.

Even a criminal is better off in a jail than in a society run exclusively by gangs and local warlords.

I've seen these responses a lot to the economic case for migration, the general tone being that economists are too simplistic in their model of migration, some fall through the cracks and so on, but what always seems to be ignored is that the exact same argument applies to political measures limiting migration.

In fact the politicization of migration restriction for populist, racist reasons and so on is significantly stronger and a bigger threat than the downsides of the economic case for open migration.

People in tech are very well acquainted with this logic when it comes to regulatory capture.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/01/immigration-wall-open-b...