anyone here from a place like Latin America to somewhat counter the crazy white nationalist rhetoric? at least racism in central and south america is a bit less binary.
We need the people of Africa, to replace the people we aren't having in the developed world. We should stop all this warfare against refugees and accept them willingly, as people with strong motivations to work.
Remittance money will boost the local economy and in time, as their education and middle class grows, the flow will stop and so will their higher birth-rate.
I've made variations of this post about 5 times in HN in the context of stories like this, or the problem of refugees in the UK and Europe.
Merkel accepted the 1.5m for sound economic reasons. Japan will be taking anyone it can soon, at their historically low birth rate. There's only so much robots can do for you.
Just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, please note I'm a first, second AND third generation migrant.
The problem is that "we" need people to do the dirty jobs we don't want to; wait tables, mop floors, clean toilets, change diapers for the elderly, and so on. Most of those jobs come with a fair deal of risk of physical injury or verbal abuse and the pay is usually crap. What makes you think that migrants would be content with those jobs when we refuse to do them ourselves?
Besides, in large parts of Europe, Eastern Europeans have already grabbed most of the decent jobs available to foreigners. The millions of Ukrainians currently fleeing the war will grab what's left once they start settling in and become available on the job market. In that situation, importing a vast amount of African youth into several generations (at least) of low social status is both cruel and unneccesary.
There's definitely reason to revisit the way we look on migration, but flooding the market with cheap labour is not going to solve anything. We need to reform the labour market and automate the jobs that cannot be made into decent ways of making a living. Other shitty jobs will need to have working conditions improved until the jobs themselves are worth taking.
Most of the Ukrainian refugee population consists of women and children at least for now, and in women's case, they are not particularly drawn to hard manual work, these open jobs will ultimately need be filled.
Nothing you said is wrong, or unfamiliar to me. The recent lorry driver shortage in the UK, and European truck driver comments about how Britain treats long distance drivers (disgusting toilets, abusive behaviours towards drivers) are just the most recent example of jobs british people won't do, and assume foreigners will do for low pay.
Or field work. Or nursing, in the sense of general nursing duties not necessarily high paying theatre and post operative recovery nursing, although Britain needs them too. No, I absolutely do mean the disgusting, dirty, low paid menial jobs that western working class poor people won't do.
That's the story of migration to the USA, the ubiquitous Mexican labour in hotels, cleaning, cafes and bars, meat works that keeps America working.
I absolutely agree "flooding" the market won't help. I'm talking about a 25 to 50 year problem here.
All migrants are exploited at some level, even H1B. They need unions as much as anyone else.
You're not wrong about the next five years. There's going to be a lot of racism at play, and right wingers like Orban and Le Pen will make much of it.
But the underlying economic truth I believe in remains: the west needs migration more than most people realise, and immigration and refugee law is regressive and unhelpful.
Oh, migration is well underway; Russia's making damn sure of it.
As for fixing the job market, we need to raise the status of the low-status jobs rather than consider people as commodities where you can just get another source rather than solving the supply issues. Importing people straight into the lower classes will just grow the lower classes, with all the downsides that has to offer; crime, prostitution, political or religious extremism, etc.
One thing at the time: Make working in a nursing home an acceptable occupation rather than something that's done by the most desperate. Service personel should be valued, rather than threatened or constantly pushed down. When the guy who pays someone else to mow his lawn stops looking down on the guy who mows it, that's when we can start considering attracting foreign labour to fill positions. If it's still a problem at that point.
A lot of European countries have significant African populations (incl. Spain, Italy and France). It does not seem to lead to any economic Wunder. If I meet a black guy there, they are usually trying to sell me or my wife a fake handbag.
Gone are the times when what was needed was raw work force = muscles. One of the reasons why we have fewer kids is that schooling and training for modern job now takes so long that it envelopes a lot of the most fertile years. And one of the reasons why Africa has as many kids as Europeans used to have in the 19th century is because a lot of African youth does not have access to higher education.
But that means that they won't be having good jobs in modern society.
> A lot of European countries have significant African populations (incl. Spain, Italy and France). It does not seem to lead to any economic Wunder. If I meet a black guy there, they are usually trying to sell me or my wife a fake handbag.
Nah. Here in Italy, and in France too, there's a well integrated amount of north Africans since two or three generations. And we're glad they are here.
Then explain why Le Pen + Zemmour were over 30% in the last election, knowing that there is now a sensible amount of votes from people of African descent? Your personal experience seems to contrast a bit with mine on that point
69% of Muslims, which comprise a large part of African immigrants in France, voted for Jean-Luc Mélenchon. They are not responsible for the high score of Le Pen and Zemmour
1) Ethnics statistics aren't allowed in France
2) care to show the source for this ?
3) what does it even mean ? "69% of Muslims" : who went to vote ? Who are french citizens? Who are over 18? who are on the voting lists?
Also see the stagnation of Central American and Caribbean countries despite their large populations of migrants in the USA.
Remittances are not some kind of economic cheat code or the basis of a national development policy, they’re basically a painkiller that might help prevent a complete collapse of the country.
Those regions could be in even worse shape were it not for remittances.
Or they could be in even better shape if the migrants had stayed at home and worked on improving their own countries instead of brain draining to the USA.
Your comments speak to the feudal markets in most of Europe more than the capabilities of human beings.
Here in Portugal businesses are typically depressingly from the same five categories or so, and manufacturing is limited to low tech with much raw material exported.
When this failure mindset isn’t present you see all sorts of innovations from the Portuguese market (some Fraunhofer-like startups linked to the universities etc.)
The lack of imagination that comes from forcing everyone to eat pop culture for breakfast in this Eurovision mentality also limits innovation.
Small minded belief in the boxes and categories and a refusal to consider new possibilities is a real limitation in much of Europe that money cannot help us get over.
We’ve become a weak inbred continent incapable of competing on the world class level that our grandparents did in so many fields.
Europe thirsts for new blood, even if some of its less clever locals think otherwise
"We’ve become a weak inbred continent" ... "Europe thirsts for new blood"
That sounds really weird, like a rehashed mix of old style eugenics.
By the way, the worst problems with inbreeding are either in royal families, or in countries that condone cousin marriages. As you can see from this map, it is not Europe that takes the top spots in consanguinity.
Europe is one of the continent with the lowest actual inbreeding rate contrarily to Africa, the ‘new blood’ you seem to cherish.
Could you, who is so clever compared to the stupid xenophobes, explain something to me? I am very curious about me how the crack dealing migrants from Mali and Niger that regularly vandalise my street will rejuvenate our economy?
Also it seems that in your indisputable intellectual superiority you seemed to forgot something rather… basic: that a country may not just be an economy?
>Gone are the times when what was needed was raw work force = muscles.
Not at all.
Modern economies require huge amounts of people to do service jobs, and many b of these do not require advanced degrees. Here in Melbourne (not Europe, but we have a fairly sizeable African refugee population) you see plenty of black people working in aged/disability care, security and driving jobs.
Of those jobs you named, aged/disability care is the only sector that is going to grow, because of the demographic development. Unless medicine makes great strides in treating aging, more nurses and caretakers will be needed.
Growth in security jobs is possible, though it spells a bad omen: if more security is needed per capita, there is something going wrong with law enforcement policies.
Human driving jobs will disappear one day, much like horse drivers did. Even though autonomous driving is proving to be a harder nut to crack than people expected, by 2050 it will be solved.
In the meantime, Africa will add about a billion people. They must be educated, there simply isn't enough muscle jobs for them in the developed world.
> Even though autonomous driving is proving to be a harder nut to crack than people expected, by 2050 it will be solved.
In 1960s, top researchers believed that scene understanding (one of the hardest computer vision problems) will be solved by an undergrad during summer internship. I feel that this prediction that we'll for sure autonomous driving in a couple decades is an example of similar hubris.
There is steady improvement in the field and roads can be adapted over time, too (special beacons etc.) I feel that the main hurdle to clear will eventually be human psyche.
We have grown accustomed to the non-zero chance of a fellow human crashing into us, but being flattened by a robot gone wild is deeply repulsive, even if the actual rate of accidents sinks way under the current norm.
>Growth in security jobs is possible, though it spells a bad omen: if more security is needed per capita, there is something going wrong with law enforcement policies.
Possibly a cultural difference; "security" here basically means nightclub bouncers and the occasional guy at the supermarket/chemist.
> But that means that they won't be having good jobs in modern society.
You said it yourself, the western worker goes into school to work non physical jobs, that means there's a big gap in the physical job part of the labor force that can be filled by immigrants.
At the peak of the muscle era, steelworks in my city of birth employed 100 000 people. Now they are down to fewer than 10 000, even though their production has actually grown.
Automation took those jobs away. It is not dissimilar to the collapse of the rural areas: once, almost everybody was a subsistence farmer. Now, 1 % of the population can feed the rest.
Automation is certainly a big thing, but we still need people to care for the elderly, drive buses, clean public spaces, paint buildings, work on roads, take garbage, deliver goods, and so on. Some societies, such as Japan, are banking on automation filling these gaps but the affects of low birth rates will be felt long before it can take over completely.
No we don’t. We need controlled and ‘value added’ migration. Shall I point to Swedens current events to show what non controlled migration does to a country where the cultures are not compatible?(with similar examples having happening in various european countries)
If you think only letting elites migrate is helpful you know nothing about the nature of society. Sweden will drown in a lake of its own human waste without migrant labour to clean.
Every western nation likes to think migration should be skilled labour only.
They're wrong. It's actually far better to get lots of young, healthy motivated untrained people and invest in them, than import skilled labour only.
There is a difference between elites and just about anyone.
The lack of labour to 'clean' or wait tables is not because locals don't want to do it. Is because locals don't want to do it in the exploitive conditions they have to work. Raise the conditions/pay and they will want to do it. 'Poor' immigrants take those jobs because it is better than what they have back home, but we shouldn't aim to exploit immigrants to keep our cheap shit.
Pretty much all over europe fruit picking companies/owners exploit this. No-one in their right mind want to work for less than minimum wage, temporary contracts, 12hour days under the sun skirting any kind of health and safety laws. So they go and pick poorer people from other countries where it is a step up from where they are from. Think the covid lockdowns proved pretty much that. In my country, owners complain they don't have people to work in turism/service industry and beg beg beg government for more open borders. And of course no-one wants to. Unpaid work hours, salaries paid under the table so owners don't pay employment taxes on that. No labour security because 'who needs a contract'. So now we have a bunch of pakistani people (nothing against them), that hardly speak the language working in shitty conditions, because owners don't want to pay the required legally mandated salaries + work conditions.
I am far in the income ladder compared to 'these jobs', but I want the people working them to have a decent standard of living, higher salaries and better work conditions, but that will never work if we keep exploiting 'poor' immigrants with open door policies.
Not only the unscrupulous business owners are guilty of exploiting these poor migrants but there are other accomplices like the government turning a blind eye to these practices as they get to benefit from the exploitation of cheap migrant labor but also the general public is an accomplice with their apathy and indifference to the suffering of these workers and also, and I hate to do this, by reframing the debate in nativist terms like you did here.
The solution should be to offer a decent immigration path/track for these workers that balances all the interests of concerned stakeholders, and also make sense from an economic standpoint because sometimes you can't make a business case for paying high rates for low-skilled jobs as this might weigh negatively on profitability and drive some establishments out of business.
Yes, governments are accomplices in this, and yes, as I mentioned, we want cheap shit and turn a blind eye.
But we have laws like minimum wage, hours of work per week, social security contributions, health and safety etc. I don't care if it is a white or a black or a green man from mars that does a job, but I want him or her to have the protections we establish by law. The only reason there is these 'imports' of low skilled poor people is because business men know they can get around these laws and exploit them since most of them don't know better.
Wether is abiding by the law makes a business go out of business, then so be it. You may disagree with the minimum wage, the safety laws, and I encourage anyone to vote in accordance to that, but as soon as they are laws, either a business can work following them, or should not exist. We don't go and say 'well, loansharks can only exist by breaking some kneecaps, otherwise the business model wouldnt work' and let them do it.
And I am pissed because I saw these things first hand many times. Even called the respective government entities to expose the situation, and nothing was ever done, because as you said, governments benefit from this also.
For example (and I saw this happening more than once), minimum wage here is around 700 euros. Of this, the employee pays 70 to social security getting net 630 (minimum wage doesn't pay taxes basically). The employer has to pay around 200 euros on 'extras' to social security and other things. So it costs around 900 euros. I saw foreigners that didn't know better saying they wanted to get 500 at the end of the month. Employer paid them in cash 500 at the end of the month illegally, no contributions to social security or unemployment. Working more than 40 hours per week and id something happens to employee, he is fucked, and for this privilege, the owner saves 400 euros per month. So no, I don't want even more open borders to allow more and more exploitation.
200 moldovians in slave conditions, a quote:
> When asked why he continued to work like this, the Moldovan migrant explained that his boss did not give him money because he withheld it and deducted it to Social Security to guarantee European citizenship.
You just ignored an empirical evidence of a possible failure of your creed to then just reaffirm them. There can be no discussion if you decide that reality is not worth reevaluating your ideology
As you seem to know so well what is right or wrong : can you name me 3 countries who "[massively invested] in young, healthy motivated untrained people" and got better ?
The problem with your statements is they are so extreme on one side that even people like me who usually don't care about such topic have to weight in in the other direction to make another voice heard...
No, there are far more charities to help black people than white people, which is in itself not controversial. What is controversial though is replacement migration of white people in North America and Europe (the last of which they are actually indigenous) by black people because the western economic elite find it more economical than to enable the conditions necessary to raise the natality rates
The unhealthy fixation on the so-called Great Replacement conspiracy theory purportedly occurring in US/Canada primarily, and to a lesser degree Europe is tedious and unimaginative to say the least.
The intellectual efforts need not to be invested not in proving/disproving this theory but on why the Anglo countries in the New World get to absorb all the migrants from the Old World (excluding Europe) when Central and South America should at least theoretically attract migrants when in practice that this in not the case, and to make matters worse they export migrants to other countries outside of that bloc because let's face it, the New World will always be fluid when it comes to the legitimate claim to the lands since all the nation-states in that part of the world are byproducts of the Age of Exploration.
These are the questions that should be investigated and researched and not some lunatic conspiracy theories that do more hard than good for the concerned people.
we need full spectrum population growth. imagine in your head that these new people are arriving by birth. they will follow a bell curve in many respects, and so will immigrants.
growth is growth, you have to stop thinking that immigrants are a threat.
No, and I am willing to stake everything I have to fight anyone pushing this experiment.
People that engineer the future of countries they will never live at, happy to displace cultures for a fucking basis point, make me deeply sick.
Who in the bloody hell are you, or anyone at Davos for that matter, to dictate what my nation, my town, or my family needs? Have you even been asked? Or is this just the usual arrogance ingrained in all globalists of just "knowing better"?
People in Africa should live sustainable lives in their huge continent itself. That way they will be happier and more satisfied compared to doing degrading jobs to serve their colonial masters once again.
They have failed time and time again. I think that at a certain point we should understand that this is not our fight and leave them alone to do whatever they want with their societies.
Our economic paradigm is based on an ever increasing population. This is not sustainable and is coming to an end as the global population cannot keep growing and should in fact decrease for the good of the planet and of our quality of life.
Immigration is a short term, economically lazy option, and on large scales leads to major political and social issues, and people do not want it. Politically it is either naive or a tool to advance an agenda.
Our societies need to face the issue of constant (even decreasing in the medium term) population and adapt to it economically and socially instead of trying to kick the ball down the road. The sooner we realise this the better.
> Remittance money will boost the local economy and in time
This pie in the sky thinking. All countries developed today or on their way have got there through their own development and industrialisation work. Countries that rely on remittance have an interest and need to keep sending people abroad as that is de facto their "export product" they rely on to survive.
Immigration is and has always been a hot button. Take for example, the US during the era of exclusive European migration and how it was a challenging and fraught process that entailed tensions, conflicts and even episodic bouts of physical violence to integrate new arrivals and this will always be the case for immigration forever.
So, making it sound like this wave of immigration is particularly different in essence doesn't hold water.
I think claiming that it is not different is disingenuous.
Europe is still grappling with the large wave of non-European immigration from the second half of the 20th century up to now, which has been and is still causing a lot of social and cultural problems.
The last thing Europe needs is to add more fuel to the fire, especially that, again, immigration is not a solution and is not needed.
IN ESSENCE, absorbing migrants is not an easy task, and this applies to ALL migrants, no exceptions made. IN PARTICULAR, some migrants might pose additional challenges to integrate but they are not necessarily to blame fully for this, sometimes the host population are biased against them making the process more arduous for them, while giving at the same time a preferential treatment to other migrant populations.
Yes, some migrants are more 'challenging' to integrate, especially to assimilate partly because some cultural differences mean that they do not want to assimilate and will not assimilate. This is key to what Europe has been experiencing.
Of course, for instance when Italians migrated to France that did create some tensions at the time but a generation later there was no difference apart from the Italian family names, because French and Italian cultures are very similar and, yes let's be honest, they both look pretty much the same.
Europe can and should pick and choose who to let in. As things stand there is no benefit for Europe in mass immigration from outside of Europe.
That sounds the ultimate form of globalization, manufacture children where it's cheaper and import the adults
Most couples eventually want to have a children, they just don't feel they can because the increasing cost of living and lack of support and preparedness from most developed societies, since more people move nowadays they lack family support which would make it easier
If population is reducing is because governments don't mind it and doesn't think they should incentivize it like other things
Birthing a and raising a person is not cheap or easy, but treating it the same as commodities seems wrong
And what is the problem with population shrinking? Some countrifies would well benefit from less population. Everyone complains about stained health services, lack of housing, climate activists "the world has too much population"... Is it just a economic problem that everything has to grow for ever? Change the economic model to allow for natural population oscillations
If I wanted to trigger the opposite idea in people's minds I would exactly write what you just wrote...
I don't know if it's trolling or manipulation...
Are you saying Africans aren’t “work-ready, healthy”? I guess you mean “highly educated”
I would think that, in aging populations, many of the jobs most difficult to fulfill by count would be in service jobs (care homes, nursing, Uber eats cyclists, bus drivers, etc)
There likely will be millions of people in Africa willing to take on such a job and capable of doing so.
Also, chances will be higher that those people would want to emigrate than, say, Chinese nurses, as there will already be plenty of demand in China.
For a part maybe, but some of the proponents of mass migration truly analyse the situation only through the economic lens, as for them a civilisation is reducible to its economy.
They also seem to lack the basic mathematical notion that one doesn’t add things that are different in nature: “on additionne pas des choux et des carottes”. For them a population size is a population size with no thought given to the underlying composition of the population.
Which is the main reason all their mental models on this particular topic are often so wrong in practice
What a bizzare analogy and false equivalence. Where indigenous populations are declining, it's mostly due to the consequences of the global economic system that ethnic Europeans participate in, as well as outright persecution and colonialism. We already are replacing them.
> As more people exit the labour force than enter it, wealthy countries worry about how to preserve economic growth.
Why? They're already wealthy. How about just stop allocating the vast majority of that wealth to a handful of people and then focus on total well-being metrics rather than "growth" for its own sake.
> To soften the economic blow of ageing, Sciubba presents four options: raise retirement ages, cut benefits, push more people in the country to work or increase immigration.
Many Liberal Western democracies no longer even pretend to try to balance their deficits or pay down their debts. The prevailing notion is to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP. i.e. Expand the economy and the debt shrinks in relative terms.
This relies on endless growth. Reduced fertility rates and shrinking populations are where this strategy goes horribly wrong. If you borrow to stimulate growth and the population/economy instead shrink, debt spirals out of control.
This is why politicians of all stripes in countries like Canada are so happy to welcome (skilled and/or wealthy) immigrants. If you can't expand your population with native births, you do it with immigration so that endless growth can continue.
You might think that countries able to attract immigration are going to be able to continue expanding their economies and avoid the harsh realities of paying down their debts. However, the global economy is so tightly and complexly interwoven that a blow to one influential country's economy will be felt elsewhere. e.g. China is one country that, for obvious reasons, does not attract immigration. When their population starts to shrink, what will be the impact on the economies of countries like Canada?
Our world order is predicated on endless growth, but we're going to have to figure out how to adapt to long-term global recession.
Imagine two countries. One country puts itself into massive debt building old folks homes and training people to work in them. The other closes their old folks homes to pay down the debt.
Then a few years later, there is a massive need for old folks homes. Which country can afford to pay for them and which can't? The country with massive debt can keep printing money to pay for the old folks homes, but since supply and demand match, they don't have inflation and things are fine. The country with the balanced budget but no old folks homes sees massive inflation because you can't magic old folks homes out of thin air -- it takes time to build them and to train workers. In the mean time because supply and demand are imbalanced the price goes up.
To paraphrase a famous Keynes quote about WW2 -- if you can do something and are willing to prioritize it over everything else you can do, you can afford it no matter how expensive it is. If you don't have the capacity to do something then you can't afford it no matter how much money you have.
> The prevailing notion is to reduce the ratio of debt to GDP
This is all that is necessary to create a deflationary environment. It means that there are fewer dollars floating around per point of GDP.
Remember that a large portion of government debt in Western countries, particularly Japan, is owed to itself. That's right, the vast majority of the "massive debt" that Japan has, is held by the Bank of Japan. And a lot of their debt is at a rate of 0%. So most of it is essentially "fake debt", they could wipe it out at the stroke of a pen. The only consequence would be on inflation, and Japan is perhaps the only country in the world that doesn't have an inflation problem.
You don't necessarily reach death spiral when you fail to stimulate economic/population growth, you still can make it up in productivity gains and if productivity outpaces population size loss, the net result is positive for the economy.
Also, in the event of China losing its preeminent rank in the global economy, another country/union will eventually fill its former role. Yeah, the transition might not be fast and smooth but the degree of built-in resilience in the global system will manage to get us through these unfavorable events.
For one specific (but large) example, lots and lots of older people in these countries rely on economic growth to ensure that their savings/investment can pay for their retirement, since if economic growth stops they'll be far from wealthy, won't really be able to retire and this will create problems both for them and the general social structure.
As in, even "life as usual" is conditional on at least some economic growth continuing for decades; and even in wealthy countries most people does not consider themselves wealthy enough and will not be satisfied with the idea of things not getting better; they'll definitely throw out any politician who promises keeping status quo in favor of politicians who promise that economy will grow.
Yes, our current total reliance on growth has this nasty self-perpetuating quality that will make the transistion to a post-growth economy rather tricky. Since infinite growth isn't possible, we're going to have to grapple with these issues eventually.
These older people enjoyed a lot of saved time and money when they were younger by not having children. They ate their cake, I don't see why they get to steal the next generation's so they can have it too.
They might be wealthy for now but should economic growth stagnates for some time and then when the bust phases come and the economy takes a hit and the gross output starts to contract, the wealth gets to shrink over time and voila now you're officially poor.
In other words, the positive economic growth mindset is a proactive strategy adopted for the rainy days not some sinister scheme to fleece the masses of their earnings.
This seems be a prevailing sentiment on hackernews.
It is a very common thought that we should just spread the wealth to everyone and focus on some total well-being metric to evaluate how "happy" people are and make decisions based on that metric for the greater good.
This can easily seem like utopia but it sounds like a nightmare to me. It's nice to think we should stop progressing as a society and not worry about our labour force decreasing cause we are already 'wealthy'. In a perfect society of course it would be wonderful if we could all work exactly the jobs we want or not work at all.
These past 100 years have seen an amazing amount of progress in almost all areas of technology and standards of living. We have a lot more to go and stagnation or worse regression to what we see in places like Russia is not where we want to be. We have to keep innovating and moving forward and working hard to do it. I hope that we can solve the problems we have as a society and stop the gap from growing in the haves and have nots. I believe the solution is focusing on what has made this progress possible in the past; mainly the values of our culture - honesty, treating people fairly, working hard - all of these are important values that we have to work hard to preserve. In the US our society is dependent on three branches of government to exist - We have a lot of checks and balances, but if all three become full of corrupted, greedy, or uninformed people we are screwed. Ultimately everything comes down to people and their decisions. Preferably we have more people making informed intelligent and reasonable decisions than not. This really depends on cultural values and education. All of this is not free and takes a ton of hard work to maintain. In this dynamic world if we aren't progressing, growing, getting better we will get left behind, stagnate and probably die as a country and society. This is how nature works. We always have to work hard and get better and keep progressing.
You may not know this but you live in the richest, healthiest, freest period of human history. Economic growth is a moral imperative even so because there are still over a billion people living in desperate poverty. If we didn’t care about people outside the OECD, sure we could go to lotus eating but there’s still widespread malnutrition in much of South Asia and they’re doing better than large parts of Africa. Things have been getting better on every continent but Africa in terms of standard of living and health span since WW2 but things can still get better again. Even Africa is a success by any historic standards. There’s a lot less war and starvation than you’d expect from a continent with ~0 GDP per capita growth.
Growth is a moral imperative. Every human deserves a decent standard of living.
The only parts of the world that qualify as wealthy are Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. There’s a lot more of the world than Africa that’s far from rich, if not so poor that lack of calories probably isn’t a worry. A per capita income like China or Thailand is an improvement over the natural condition but is still not good enough.
Healthiest, it depends. Obesity and metabolic diseases are at their record highs. That's not health. You can medicate those patients to survive, but that's not health. Go to any street and count all the people who would lose their breath after walking three flights of stairs. This is a major civilizational regression and we don't seem to be attacking it at all.
Freest, really? How do you measure this? Certainly there is more rules to comply with than ever before, you are unlikely to be aware of all of them [0].
Yes you really do lose your wealth. Managing wealth is an active and very difficult thing. People all around the world are trying to steal your wealth and they are super motivated to do it. Everyday there is someone saying "you have to buy this next big thing - give me your money." This is how the luxury market works.
Even if you were very frugal and stuck your money in the bank you would lose that money to inflation. Even if you were smart and put it in real estate or Bitcoin or something else you still have to manage it and manage yourself to not make mistakes with it. Managing wealth is a very hard problem.
And we are actually talking about at a country level here - if a powerful country doesn't innovate and continue growing they become england. Then eventually a bigger more powerful country like china eats them if they don't have powerful friends.
> Why? They're already wealthy. How about just stop allocating the vast majority of that wealth to a handful of people and then focus on total well-being metrics rather than "growth" for its own sake.
Because growth is what is required to make capitalism "sustainable". Without constant growth, capitalism eventually fails. Unless you're for abandoning capitalism, you can't abandon the focus on growth.
I am for abandoning the focus on growth, and therefore also abandoning capitalism, but there are lots of people who don't want to abandon capitalism, a lot of them the same people who hold a lot of power and connections already, so it's a uphill fight.
This isn't true. Check Japan with its near zero growth. Nothing about capitalism suggests you can't have a steady state economy.
Of course, if you want the latest health care advances, new housing and other things, that costs more money, so growth helps pay for those things that otherwise would be unaffordable.
>By 2018, only one such company (Toyota) remains in the top 50. Many Japanese companies replaced a large part of their workforce with temporary workers, who had little job security and fewer benefits. As of 2009, these non-traditional employees made up more than a third of the labor force. For the wider Japanese workforce, wages have stagnated. From their peak in 1997, real wages have since fallen around 13% —an unprecedented number among developed nations.
-Wikipedia on the Lost Decade (1990-2???)
Got to get them a slightly bigger phone every four years so they don't launch rotten fruit at your yacht.
And no, capitalism does not require constant growth. The very specific subset of capitalism we practice does. Imagine a small world, an isolated island with strictly limited resources. You could easily run that on a form of capitalism, just with some corrective controls against certain tipover states.
Perhaps some very "purity"-focused form of capitalism would inevitably be in the growth-requiring subset, but nobody really does pure capitalism. A lot of people like to pretend they do, but that's just that: pretension, or fooling themselves.
> Because growth is what is required to make capitalism "sustainable".
Also because there are lots of significant debts around (at country/state/corporate/personal levels) that for sure will not be ever repayed if there's not a growth (or jubilee) mecanism somewhere.
But indeed, "growth" depends on how you define it, on what you value, what equivalences you define.
> Personally..as a woman.. I find it insulting and humiliating as the whole world stands dumb and uncaring as our identity is being chiseled away. It feels cruel and is bewildering and hurtful. I hope that one day, we will receive the apologies due to us.
I feel the same as a man. It's hard to process your identity as a man when all you hear about is toxic masculinity, patriarchy, all men being rapists and stuff like that. Some people have identities that don't really fit into the "regular molds", and I'm glad that as a society we're progressing to accept them more. I just wish this process wasn't so destructive for everyone else.
I am hearing a lot from men these days and it’s good that they are opening up. I am from India and I only grew up with men who were taught that showing vulnerability is wrong. Maybe it’s both a generational thing as well as a cultural artifact.
The world is changing. We should too. But in gentle and kind ways.
Not saying your feelings about the identity erasure are invalid, but I doubt it has much to do with declining birth rates. That's an old trend that goes back decades, and if anything has to do more with contraception and women's own decisions around work/family balance.
This is what I mean. Obviously anyone can keep believing what they want..contraception is available all around the world..compare how many countries have normalized the made up word term ‘cis-women’ and have high fertility rates.
Facts are staring right at our faces. And we..women..are telling you that this isn’t working for us and the same tired old textbook mumble excuse echoes here on elite intelligent circles on the interwebs.
A lack of respect and dignity and equality for women is what started the first wave of feminism. Nobody participated and walked by us in our struggles. But this battle that we are going to lose…everyone is going to lose too. Because our identity is being erased.
This is how at least a certain portion of humanity will become extinct. Not an asteroid hitting us or a virus or famine. I hope this western woke virus doesn't spread to the rest of the world.
That this is comment is ‘flagged’ exposes the rot in the society. If this gagging can be done in an online forum..imagine how utterly powerless women feel in the real world amongst those who refuse to stop erasing their identities and yet want them to be breeding vessels for the human race.
