I am really hoping to see some more innovation in the eldercare space because of this, as the people taking care of them are already stretched quite thin.
I don't think this argument holds up because robots are rising as humans are falling. The net workers available - muscle or machine, mind or computer - will remain the same or increase. A shrinking number of humans will just have to get educated and work smarter.
Some "robots", like tractors, cars, elevators, etc... have indeed replaced many jobs.
I don't buy the idea that we need increasing population to have positive economic growth. I don't think that technology ("robots") are a magic bullet, but they can be part of a future in which we have a stable-size (or even decreasing!) population
Seems like the depopulation timebomb and immigration crisis have the same solution.
1) Rich, educated countries have low population growth, but we need a growing population to grow economically (we need to grow economically for our current debt/prosperity scheme to function)
2) People in poor or war torn places want to come to places with more opportunity and less risk of random murder.
Cue the SpongeBob meme “take the people who want to come here and work and put them over with the people who want people to work for them.”
Didn’t the US drastically reduce their H1B visa count recently for no real reason? Wouldn’t we be better off increasing and expanding that sort of program rather that reducing it?
How many asylum seekers are trained in medicine, engineering, dentistry, carpentry or any of a dozen occupations in short supply? Heck, if we wanted we could pick while cohorts of refugees with complementary skills, plop them down in depressed midwestern towns and have thriving communities immediately.
I’ve know software engineers with master’s degrees from Scandinavian universities who had to leave the country because their visas couldn’t be transferred or renewed in a reasonable time. I know a Korean asylum seeker who has had a pending case for literally years. she’d be thrilled to take any job. She’s an educated, capable white collar worker. She can’t work because her case will be another couple years churning through a system that could literally be replaced with 20 lines of if else statements.
There are plenty of skilled, capable, interested people just waiting for permission to come solve the problem. All we have to do is stop blocking them.
If enough of this happens, the world will become a giant shopping mall in which everyone is from everywhere and no one has anything in common. No common culture, history, identity, ancestry, anything. The distinctions between countries will become meaningless; an America filled with H1B workers will be the same as a Canada filled with their neighbors from back home. Sounds depressing. Personally, I'll settle for lower GDP.
What's the point of having a culture if you can't boast that other cultures are inferior, right?
To offer a less sarcastic remark, let me point out that you seem to be claiming both that there would be "no common culture" and that "America ... will be the same as ... Canada", i.e. there will be a common culture, but it will be shared by everyone.
You could certainly make a strong argument that this monoculture would prevent cultural innovation, but I don't actually think there would be a monoculture, just as there are multiple evolving cultures present within countries today, and in fact a given person can feel an affinity to multiple cultures simultaneously.
> No common culture, history, identity, ancestry, anything.
The EU has freedom of movement and very vibrant local cultures. Arguably, the same is true of the U.S. Even many individual cities within countries maintain strong identities that set them apart from other places.
There are valid reasons to argue that totally open borders are unrealistic; but to think that they'll ever lead to a monoculture is quite baseless.
The Schengen area has existed for about 25 years. The EU for less than 30. There's no common language, but English as the language of businesses is already beginning to dominate.
The USA had many rich local cultures, and to some extent still does - there's a lot of regional differences. But it also has ghettos and isolation, and an awful lot of senseless racial tension.
Is cultural melding inevitable? Maybe, maybe not. But you can't take a mere generation of EU freedom of movement as an indicator of end-state.
America is a cultural katamari damacy. It's pretty amazing how McDonald's, Adidas, Beyoncé, Marlboros, General Tso's chicken, and Spiderman are all from the same culture.
Yeah, sure. But what does that have to do with anything -- how does it make Adidas "come from the same culture as McDonald's, Beyoncé, Marlboros, General Tso's chicken, and Spiderman"?
> The distinctions between countries will become meaningless;
Quoth the Internationale:
And end the vanity of nations. We've one but one Earth on which to live.
Put like that, doesn't sound bad.
> Sounds depressing. Personally, I'll settle for lower GDP.
Lower GDP reduces the amount of wealth that can go around. Sure, it won't matter for those who already have a high standard of living. But for others, it would mean a hollowing out the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to decorate the top.
Trump increased the H1B visa count for the same reason the US always does: cheap labor for corporate America. And it is no coincidence that stagnating American wages for 4 decades results in child births dropping off a cliff. This is not complicated stuff.
> stagnating American wages for 4 decades results in child births dropping off a cliff
Could you also point out the trends for other countries' wages and birth rates? While you're at it, some charts comparing immigration rates and average wages could be really informative too, thanks.
Presumably the argument is that some percentage of immigrants are paid above average, so it's not the case that all corporations only want immigrants in order to pay lower wages. It could instead be that there aren't enough people within the country who have the skills to do the high wage jobs (as presumably the locals would happily take those jobs if they were available, but might refuse to do the low wage jobs that immigrants are willing to do).
You're right that this isn't evidence that wages haven't stagnated, but similarly you haven't produced any evidence that immigration has caused wage stagnation, other than a supposed correlation between the (generally accepted) wage stagnation over the last 40 years on the one hand, and on the other hand, a vague implication that immigration suddenly started 40 years ago and has since that time consistently and coincidentally been just enough to cancel out any wage growth.
+1. While some companies might be abusing the system and using it to get cheap foreign labor, the US also gets highly talented foreigners to work for its companies through this immigration system. Companies pay these talented people exceptional compensation because they want top competitive people to work for them. It is hard for them to find a large pool of similar talent locally (not that American workers aren't talented, but it's just that as skill and talent increase, the pool keeps on getting smaller).
Highly skilled foreign workers are America's competitive advantage to the world. Now other countries realize it, which is why countries like Canada reformed their immigration system a few years back to invite skilled foreign workers by offering them permanent residence. Canada is now poaching people San Francisco bay area, offering them PR even if they don't make the cut-off in their point-based immigration system because they know that if they want to be the tech leader in world, they need this foreign talent pool.
The other option is for developed countries to just get comfortable with focusing on better distribution of the wealth they have and give up on maintaining growth ad infinitum.
I think the threshold for too much diversity is high. Going to college exposed me to a lot of different people and cultures. Despite a few misunderstandings it seemed great for everyone.
The only real downside I can see is if immigrants become isolated in enclaves or the 'natives' are xenophobic. (Ultimately we're all immigrants unless you belong to a demographic that evolved where you live today.)
it’s not really that people don’t want to work in the states, for some it was lack of social support, outstanding college debt that made the bar to entry seem impossible or to late for some. especially for those who took care of their parents growing up because their parents were sick at a young age.
... which they would immediately leave in favor of areas with extant support systems for immigrants of the same culture. Immigrants don't go where they are needed; they go/stay where they can attain the highest standard of living with minimum effort. That's how New York City grew.
> I know a Korean asylum seeker who has had a pending case for literally years
I’m curious, what do Koreans need to seek asylum from? Doesn’t South Korea have a pretty good human rights record? Presumably those coming from the North have a very easy time in the South?
48 comments
[ 8.8 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadYou aren't missing much
https://www.wired.com/story/robot-jobs-coronavirus
Sorry for how spammy wired is, but you get my point, robots are not a silver bullet
I don't buy the idea that we need increasing population to have positive economic growth. I don't think that technology ("robots") are a magic bullet, but they can be part of a future in which we have a stable-size (or even decreasing!) population
1) Rich, educated countries have low population growth, but we need a growing population to grow economically (we need to grow economically for our current debt/prosperity scheme to function) 2) People in poor or war torn places want to come to places with more opportunity and less risk of random murder.
Cue the SpongeBob meme “take the people who want to come here and work and put them over with the people who want people to work for them.”
Didn’t the US drastically reduce their H1B visa count recently for no real reason? Wouldn’t we be better off increasing and expanding that sort of program rather that reducing it?
How many asylum seekers are trained in medicine, engineering, dentistry, carpentry or any of a dozen occupations in short supply? Heck, if we wanted we could pick while cohorts of refugees with complementary skills, plop them down in depressed midwestern towns and have thriving communities immediately.
I’ve know software engineers with master’s degrees from Scandinavian universities who had to leave the country because their visas couldn’t be transferred or renewed in a reasonable time. I know a Korean asylum seeker who has had a pending case for literally years. she’d be thrilled to take any job. She’s an educated, capable white collar worker. She can’t work because her case will be another couple years churning through a system that could literally be replaced with 20 lines of if else statements.
There are plenty of skilled, capable, interested people just waiting for permission to come solve the problem. All we have to do is stop blocking them.
To offer a less sarcastic remark, let me point out that you seem to be claiming both that there would be "no common culture" and that "America ... will be the same as ... Canada", i.e. there will be a common culture, but it will be shared by everyone.
You could certainly make a strong argument that this monoculture would prevent cultural innovation, but I don't actually think there would be a monoculture, just as there are multiple evolving cultures present within countries today, and in fact a given person can feel an affinity to multiple cultures simultaneously.
The EU has freedom of movement and very vibrant local cultures. Arguably, the same is true of the U.S. Even many individual cities within countries maintain strong identities that set them apart from other places.
There are valid reasons to argue that totally open borders are unrealistic; but to think that they'll ever lead to a monoculture is quite baseless.
The USA had many rich local cultures, and to some extent still does - there's a lot of regional differences. But it also has ghettos and isolation, and an awful lot of senseless racial tension.
Is cultural melding inevitable? Maybe, maybe not. But you can't take a mere generation of EU freedom of movement as an indicator of end-state.
Let us be downvoted together. Doomsayers often are hated.
Look at how popular English is internationally. Or the role of American pop culture.
We’ll all wind up sparking English, eating from MacDonalds, and wearing Adidas.
PS thanks for the copypasta
Quoth the Internationale: And end the vanity of nations. We've one but one Earth on which to live.
Put like that, doesn't sound bad.
> Sounds depressing. Personally, I'll settle for lower GDP.
Lower GDP reduces the amount of wealth that can go around. Sure, it won't matter for those who already have a high standard of living. But for others, it would mean a hollowing out the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs to decorate the top.
"Civilization is a youth with a molotov cocktail in his hand. Culture is the Soviet tank or L.A. cop that guns him down." - Edward Abbey
Could you also point out the trends for other countries' wages and birth rates? While you're at it, some charts comparing immigration rates and average wages could be really informative too, thanks.
On H1b I make 400k in an industry that has 120k avg pay for my role. Tell me more about cheap H1b labor
You're right that this isn't evidence that wages haven't stagnated, but similarly you haven't produced any evidence that immigration has caused wage stagnation, other than a supposed correlation between the (generally accepted) wage stagnation over the last 40 years on the one hand, and on the other hand, a vague implication that immigration suddenly started 40 years ago and has since that time consistently and coincidentally been just enough to cancel out any wage growth.
Highly skilled foreign workers are America's competitive advantage to the world. Now other countries realize it, which is why countries like Canada reformed their immigration system a few years back to invite skilled foreign workers by offering them permanent residence. Canada is now poaching people San Francisco bay area, offering them PR even if they don't make the cut-off in their point-based immigration system because they know that if they want to be the tech leader in world, they need this foreign talent pool.
The only real downside I can see is if immigrants become isolated in enclaves or the 'natives' are xenophobic. (Ultimately we're all immigrants unless you belong to a demographic that evolved where you live today.)
Now I am not a believer anymore.
Boundaries and fences are healthy.
I’m not saying diversity is bad, like what majority of people here accuse.
... which they would immediately leave in favor of areas with extant support systems for immigrants of the same culture. Immigrants don't go where they are needed; they go/stay where they can attain the highest standard of living with minimum effort. That's how New York City grew.
I’m curious, what do Koreans need to seek asylum from? Doesn’t South Korea have a pretty good human rights record? Presumably those coming from the North have a very easy time in the South?
“World will starve due to overpopulation”
“West is facing depopulation timebomb”
Heads or tails, they get their ad revenue.
More importantly, they’re simply reporting what others are theorizing (mostly in opinion sections).