I don’t think a country becomes the country of one group of immigrants by virtue of that immigration. Rather the receiving country can become a more interesting, diverse country as a result.
In the sense that most of the world population is currently Asian, I guess it’s more diverse in aggregate if 25+% of the world population is African. But in terms of individual diverse countries and cultures, Japan being just one example, I question whether it’s more diverse for them to essentially become African over time. Isn’t that the opposite of diversity?
In any case, we agree there will be pushback on this genius plan, and probably we would further agree that some of the pushback may espouse notions of cultural tradition and protection. Today we tend to call these ideas right-wing nationalism or similar, with negative connotation, but I expect to see a lot more of it.
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Agreed, but measuring an individual income vs household median income isn’t a valid way to measure whether a job is low paying.
Change their systems? I’m not sure how population growth “underpins their entire economic and social systems”, so I’m not sure what changes we’d need.
I can see that rapid contraction is a problem. I expect that, when children become more valuable, the culture/politics will change so that women will find that having children is a good thing.
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We can move to contributory tax accounts like in Singapore.
Then its no problem. What you get out is a function of how much you have paid in.
And that will help stabilise the fertility rate.
Yes. A big part of our problem is that most countries are on “pay as you go” systems with many of their programs so they get caught out by demographic fluctuations. Pre-funded systems like Singapore’s are better at addressing this.
I am not a fan of overall population growth. I see the levelling off and eventual reduction in Earth’s total population as a good long term outcome. Our planet is sufficiently stretched already.
fwiw, where i live teachers (and I only mean the licensed classroom leaders with at least a 4yr degree and teaching certificate) pass my state’s median household income after 11 years on the job (and with a masters degree). So that’s $77K.
the educational assistants (para-professionals and the like) get paid relatively little. Like $20K-$30K a year. Maybe as much as $40K.
I assume similar gaps between those who are “nurses” when we split out RNs (or more) from those who are mostly nurse helpers.
I assume you are both talking about modifying public pension systems like Social Security.
Unfortunately, the entire world cannot move to a “pre-funded” system to avoid a demographic crunch of not enough children. A single country like Canada or Singapore can, assuming they buy assets outside their own country. Buying, for example, stocks of companies that only do business in my own country doesn’t work because those companies can’t find “enough” workers because of our demographic crunch.
For an entire economy, all pension schemes are pay-as-you-go because most of the economic goods consumed by retirees are created after they retire. Our plan for eating in retirement is not to fill our basements with cans of soup.
It’s easier for a smaller country to buy assets outside their economy simply because they are smaller. But, we can’t all make that work.
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In terms of the Social Security safety system, this is what I meant by population growth underpinning it all.
In addition, most Western economies rely heavily on debt to fund investment and ultimately economic expansion. It’s all predicated on the idea of continued growth, of which population growth is one implicit piece.
In theory, you’re right, the system could simply be changed. Practically speaking, we’ve seen little or no political appetite for that and most developed Western countries continue to increase population growth via immigration as a measure to delay collapse and transition to a new system.
Robots. If we can expand areas where robots can replace humans, then we won’t be dependent on the population-growth paradigm to prop us up anymore.
How do they contribute to SS, then?
Change social security funding. Fund it with taxes on both labor income and investment income. Then the robots’ owners pay some of the tax.
(IMO, we should do this anyway, whether or not we are concerned about population decreases.)
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Note that if you’ve got a stable population there is less need to fund investments.
No need to invest in new housing or roads or school buildings, mostly just repair/update the old structures.
If investment is in new, productivity enhancing technologies, then it is paid for out of the increase production.
It seems kind of odd to me that we’re arguing that a 65K wage in 2022 (an average which includes teachers in the beginning, middle, and end of their careers), which is lower than probably most entry level actuaries at the time, is weird to call low.
Like I said, it says interesting things about your perspective. Actuaries are highly paid. Even just starting they are well paid.
" The 2023 Current Population Survey Report estimated the 2022 US Population over the age of 15 to be 271,500,000 of which 239,100,000 (88.07%) had incomes over $1. Among those earning $1 or more, the median income was $40,480 and the mean income was $59,430."
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Interesting article on how the two largest US population groups by age, those born in 1990 and 1991, are coping. They sound very much like the tail end of the baby boomers.
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I have a new sympathy for 33 and 34 year olds after reading this. Not only will many of them struggle in their careers but they will have no one to look after them in their old age. At least the baby boomers have the 33 and 34 year olds to care for them.
It makes a huge difference whether you are born at the beginning or end of a baby boom. I was born near the front end and even though there was much competition for jobs when I graduated from university because of the record number of graduates, I have no doubt my career and my financial situation benefited from being born when I was. My youngest brother who was born near the end of the baby boom era had more challenges.
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It was also very different in Europe.
WWII caused large-scale destruction, so during the reconstruction (baby boomer years) homes were very cheap.