Glenn: I don't know if you'll read this or not, but I'd like to ask a question. As an economist, I'm going to assume that you have a fundamental understanding of the demographic cliff and the challenges it poses to the economy of the US (and other industrialized nations). My question is: do you think restricting immigration is detrimental to the QoL of the average extant American citizen and to the wellbeing of the country as a whole? In my opinion, the answer is an unequivocal yes, but I'm a HS dropout with a GED. I would like your take because perhaps there are factors that I'm missing because I have no formal education in economics.
The US fertility rate fell off a cliff between 1960 and 1975. We have been under the replacement rate since the 70s which means that we should have already seen a negative economic impact. When people retire from the workforce, there should not be enough new workers entering the workforce to fill all those jobs. Of course, some jobs don't need to be filled due to automation and process improvements, but in general, we should have been seeing inflation as the savings of retirees flood into an economy with less workers to produce goods and services (basic econ, prices settle based on supply and demand, more money and less goods/services equals inflation). The reason we haven't, in my understanding, is that we've been padding our population with immigration for decades. The last few years, immigration has slowed to a trickle as Covid policies limited mobility. Of course, all real world problems are complex and have many causal factors, and in this case, disruption to production and supply chains from Covid policies as well as the war in Ukraine are certainly impacting our economy. But given the general desperate need for workers as well as the atrociously high inflation rate, I think the largest driving factor is that demographic cliff. As of the 1990 census, 12.5% of the population was 65+ (a good stand in for "retired"). In 2000, it was 12.4%, but in 2010 it jumped to 13.1% and in 2020 it was 13.9%. Current predictions have us hitting 20% by 2030. The glut of demand that's going to be generated by our top-heavy elder generation is going to fall on a class of producers that is smaller than ever, which is going to keep inflation high. Even if people started having tons of kids tomorrow, we'd need 2 decades before those new kids entered the workforce and started producing. Without a massive boost to immigration, I see no way around surging inflation and eventual economic collapse. So it seems to me that we should be practically begging people to come here, especially from cultures that are more fecund, as most developing nations are. We need the people to fill jobs and we need to bring the birth rate back up so that we don't collapse under the weight of a retired class that is not just outnumbering new workers, but are living longer than ever as well.
Again, perhaps there is something I'm just completely missing. But it seems to me that not only is there no real value in even clinging to existing immigration policies, we should be making it easier to immigrate here. I don't see any concern that is as compelling as the demographic cliff to counter that argument.
Glenn: I don't know if you'll read this or not, but I'd like to ask a question. As an economist, I'm going to assume that you have a fundamental understanding of the demographic cliff and the challenges it poses to the economy of the US (and other industrialized nations). My question is: do you think restricting immigration is detrimental to the QoL of the average extant American citizen and to the wellbeing of the country as a whole? In my opinion, the answer is an unequivocal yes, but I'm a HS dropout with a GED. I would like your take because perhaps there are factors that I'm missing because I have no formal education in economics.
The US fertility rate fell off a cliff between 1960 and 1975. We have been under the replacement rate since the 70s which means that we should have already seen a negative economic impact. When people retire from the workforce, there should not be enough new workers entering the workforce to fill all those jobs. Of course, some jobs don't need to be filled due to automation and process improvements, but in general, we should have been seeing inflation as the savings of retirees flood into an economy with less workers to produce goods and services (basic econ, prices settle based on supply and demand, more money and less goods/services equals inflation). The reason we haven't, in my understanding, is that we've been padding our population with immigration for decades. The last few years, immigration has slowed to a trickle as Covid policies limited mobility. Of course, all real world problems are complex and have many causal factors, and in this case, disruption to production and supply chains from Covid policies as well as the war in Ukraine are certainly impacting our economy. But given the general desperate need for workers as well as the atrociously high inflation rate, I think the largest driving factor is that demographic cliff. As of the 1990 census, 12.5% of the population was 65+ (a good stand in for "retired"). In 2000, it was 12.4%, but in 2010 it jumped to 13.1% and in 2020 it was 13.9%. Current predictions have us hitting 20% by 2030. The glut of demand that's going to be generated by our top-heavy elder generation is going to fall on a class of producers that is smaller than ever, which is going to keep inflation high. Even if people started having tons of kids tomorrow, we'd need 2 decades before those new kids entered the workforce and started producing. Without a massive boost to immigration, I see no way around surging inflation and eventual economic collapse. So it seems to me that we should be practically begging people to come here, especially from cultures that are more fecund, as most developing nations are. We need the people to fill jobs and we need to bring the birth rate back up so that we don't collapse under the weight of a retired class that is not just outnumbering new workers, but are living longer than ever as well.
Again, perhaps there is something I'm just completely missing. But it seems to me that not only is there no real value in even clinging to existing immigration policies, we should be making it easier to immigrate here. I don't see any concern that is as compelling as the demographic cliff to counter that argument.