Unemployment rates without immigration

Immigration does increase economic output. I take it that's by increased demand, at least in some measure, & not by increased labor, then?

Doesn't immigration tend to have a subtle (or not so subtle?) downward pressure on wages? Immigrants tending to fill the lowest-skill, lowest-pay jobs? (Or is that only true in the U.S.?)

It depends on immigration policy, say if you only accept business and skilled immigrants from countries with similar cultures and standards then you can bet on a lot of high paying jobs. in Canada for example most immigrants tend to reach local wage levels by their 10th year.

But if you are some place like the US with a large porous border to the south where anyone can get in then yes by all means.

Also to the OP, are you a nationalist by any chance?
 

RousseauX

Donor
Which one are we talking about?:rolleyes: The one which says more population equals more prosperity (or output).
Oh more population does increase output, hence why India and China has high absolute GDP.

That however, does not increase GDP per capita, my point is simply that "too many people means no jobs" make no sense.
 
High productivity does not lead to less employment on the long run, since there is no finite demand for goods, it simply leads to a wealthy society where everybody has more stuff.
Assuming that humans somehow would work like that, this is physically impossible. For example, the United States has had a remarkably steady growth of about 3% increase in total energy since 1650. Let's say that the world grows at this pace. If the massive hurdle of resource shortages are somehow overcome, there's still the second law of thermodynamics to deal with. Quite simply, no matter what energy source is used, there's going to be waste heat. Earth will be as hot as the surface of the Sun in only a couple of centuries. The amount of energy used will exceed that of the entire Universe in only a couple of millennia. Such is the power of the exponential function.
 

Except:
We are quite far from the limit.
It doesn't account for increases in energy efficiency.
It doesn't account for increases in energy generation efficiency.
It doesn't account for advents in energy sources.
It doesn't account for changes in human demand: look at oil, once it started becoming scarce people raised prices and acted accordingly.


Who cares what happens 1000, 10000, or 100000 years down the line? We aren't immortals. Even if you do care how would you plan for it?

The people during the industrial didn't have a good idea or plan about the world 200 years down the road. But so what? They planned and lived according to their immediate future. So unless you have can make the point of a critical resource shortage in the next 20-40 years any talk of limits is pointless.

And taking your argument since the universe is constantly expanding and we will eventually reach total entropy with no free energy available why bother doing anything then?
 

Rex Mundi

Banned
Assuming that humans somehow would work like that, this is physically impossible. For example, the United States has had a remarkably steady growth of about 3% increase in total energy since 1650. Let's say that the world grows at this pace. If the massive hurdle of resource shortages are somehow overcome, there's still the second law of thermodynamics to deal with. Quite simply, no matter what energy source is used, there's going to be waste heat. Earth will be as hot as the surface of the Sun in only a couple of centuries. The amount of energy used will exceed that of the entire Universe in only a couple of millennia. Such is the power of the exponential function.

Yeah, this has nothing to do with anything.
 
Except:
We are quite far from the limit.
It doesn't account for increases in energy efficiency.
It doesn't account for increases in energy generation efficiency.
It doesn't account for advents in energy sources.
It doesn't account for changes in human demand: look at oil, once it started becoming scarce people raised prices and acted accordingly
It doesn't seem like you're addressing anything I wrote, but I'll repeat this anyway; the second law of thermodynamics means that reaching 100% efficiency is physically impossible. This is true no matter what energy source is used.

Who cares what happens 1000, 10000, or 100000 years down the line? We aren't immortals. Even if you do care how would you plan for it?

The people during the industrial didn't have a good idea or plan about the world 200 years down the road. But so what? They planned and lived according to their immediate future. So unless you have can make the point of a critical resource shortage in the next 20-40 years any talk of limits is pointless.

And taking your argument since the universe is constantly expanding and we will eventually reach total entropy with no free energy available why bother doing anything then?
~500 years is small potatoes as human civilizations go, but you're essentially not caring about the Earth becoming as hot as the Sun then because you're dead? I mean, wow... that's kind of interesting. Wouldn't it bother you in the least? I mean, we're on a history forum that routinely deals with things much older than that timespan.

Yeah, this has nothing to do with anything.
I'm essentially granting a cornucopian future, the possible means for civilization to grow, still within the physical laws of the universe and showing that the economical talk discussed in this thread is absurd. I'd say it has a lot to do with everything.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Assuming that humans somehow would work like that, this is physically impossible. For example, the United States has had a remarkably steady growth of about 3% increase in total energy since 1650. Let's say that the world grows at this pace. If the massive hurdle of resource shortages are somehow overcome, there's still the second law of thermodynamics to deal with. Quite simply, no matter what energy source is used, there's going to be waste heat. Earth will be as hot as the surface of the Sun in only a couple of centuries. The amount of energy used will exceed that of the entire Universe in only a couple of millennia. Such is the power of the exponential function.
Oh god, that article again, I'm just going to copy paste the exact response to this I just made somewhere else.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a physics professor has pretty conclusively proved that economic contraction due to energy constraints is literally inevitable over even a relatively short-term timescale (ie this century).
This article gets posted over and over again despite being incredibly flawed on a fundamental level since it basically assumes a constant exponential increase in energy usage forever and ever (2.5%), as indicated by the first graph posted in the article:
xxlDHLS.png


This basically the classic, take the average past trends (over 400 years), assume it will remain constant, and then project X years into the future which is hilariously inaccurate because things like energy usage or size of the economy do not grow at constant rates. The US and much of the first world, for instance, have seen energy usage/per capita -drop- since the high point of the 70s. -Despite- no permanent rise in unemployment and constant, exponential growth in per capita income. It seems once industrialization have completed and everyone has cars there isn't much demand for energy intensive goods any more and people instead prefer energy inexpensive services.

EMfNWUF.png


At the same time, the birth rate in the US have fallen to be around replacement, which means that, discounting immigrants (which is really just shuffling people around and you can restrict the number of them coming into the country if you really want to), net energy usage have -fallen- in the US because natural population growth is 0 and energy usage per capita have fallen. Energy usage tend to level off after a while.

Energy usage have greatly increased in the developing world, but that is because they are undergoing periods of industrialization and extensive growth which requires a lot of energy. Even given the best cause scenario for China and India similarly growth in energy usage is not going to last once their economy transitions from middle to high income status. And if they don't, that means their economic growth have stagnated which means their energy usage is not growing by 2.5% per year either.

Ultimately, energy usage have increased rapidly in the last few centuries because of the industrial revolution, so really, for the projection to make sense you essentially have to assume humankind undergoes new equivalents of industrial revolutions: 1790-1970 for as long as the projection last.

tl;dr: increase in consumption does not nessessarily lead to increase in energy usage, services, for instance, takes next to no energy but represents additional employment.
 
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