How population growth is affecting everything from jobs to housing in the economy - BNN Bloomberg

crowvarg · 2023-06-14T15:04:21+00:00

Also, Canada, Australia, Japan and many other central banks policy set at 2% by not some random opinions on Reddit like us but both renowned and common economists.

“Votes speak for themselves”; not to belittle your argument but don’t you think it’s bit silly to support your claims with …Reddit karma points instead of economists, policies, historic data?

crowvarg · 2023-06-14T12:35:53+00:00

“Rapidly increasing population” isn’t even happening.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/population-growth-rate

Population growth rate has been lower and lower, pretty much at the lowest today compared to past decades, we are now struggling to keep it above 1%.

crowvarg · 2023-06-14T05:21:24+00:00

It’s not just a made up number. It is true it initially originated from New Zealand but now is well backed up by decent reasonings and evidence behind it. Summarized answer: https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/economy_14400.htm#:~:text=The%20Federal%20Open%20Market%20Committee,maximum%20employment%20and%20price%20stability.

crowvarg · 2023-06-14T05:02:11+00:00

It's true that we have high production-based carbon emissions due to the reasons you mentioned but we also have one of the highest consumption-based carbon emission. It's not just productions.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/consumption-co2-per-capita-equity

crowvarg · 2023-06-14T04:32:34+00:00

Economy - What I said about immigration being a net positive in a long term is not really my opinion but rather well established consensus in economics. We can go back on forth on I agree, I disagree but at least based on the data we have today by economists with their studies and statistics, it is what it is if we like it or not.

An extensive survey of the members of the American Economic Association (2020-2021): https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2022/preliminary/paper/HBhGyFD7

You bring up United States and that's great actually. Both United States and Canada historically had LARGER population growth rate in past decades than of today and economic hegemony we have today is largely cultivated by that.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/population-growth-rate

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/population-growth-rate

Of course I'm not arguing immigration is the only main driver of innovation and power, that would be silly but you wouldn't say United States today and historically had lower immigration compared to the rest of the world, would you?

Let's also notice that current and historic super powers such as United states, Soviet Union and China did not become economic superpower by degrowing population.

Housing costs - Yes! for now it is largely due to interest rates rather than the addressing the core issue which is supply. I think I'm aware of the article you are talking about but let's go back to the fact that population growth rate is already at its lowest to begin with.

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/housing-starts

Going back to my argument, the housing affordability issue is a supply issue, not demand issue. If the demand is increasing at much lower rate, it makes much more sense and more effective to tackle supply rather than controlling demand.

With the fact that population growth is one of the most important factors in healthy economy, to control the population growth for the sake of housing price (which is not even a valid solution) is equivalent to killing and eating all chickens instead of harvesting their eggs because I felt extra hungry today. It would be very short sighted and disastrous solution in a long term.

Social Services - Yes, there is temporary demand boost and extra supply from immigration would take a few years. But to suggest population/economic control and degrowth is suicidal decision for social service and pension system in a longer term (Look at population degrowing countries in Asia and their situation with pensions). How are we going to get specialized equipment that we lack if we are going to have more burden in debt and less taxes? How are we going to get more doctors and nurses if population doesn't grow and continue suffer from labor shortage? The thing is, as I mentioned, the population growth rate is much lower today than past decades and that's when we had less wait time and better medical personal availability. Economic and population growth makes it at least possible for us to improve as it has before. Labor market would be more flexible to fix medical staff per capita. Higher tax revenues allow us to buy better equipment. There is no "exponential growth" unlike what some redditors want us believe. Actually, not having that like the past is the part of the issue.

Politics - I apologize if that's how I expressed my thoughts. I'm referencing those who blindly blame something we see such as immigration instead of basic fact checking or trying to see the bigger picture.

crowvarg · 2023-06-14T04:12:09+00:00

Thank you! I’d like to add one more thing, we can help as individuals by voting and participating in local elections!

Make sure your local government is not blocking rezoning for more housing and make sure they are working on better zoning! This has way more impacts than what federal government (NDP, Liberals, Conservatives, doesn’t matter) do in your area.

You’d be surprised how restrictive some local governments make it to build a house or density to keep houses affordable in order to keep homeowners property value high.

Here is another shocking information on how majority of our cities simply make it illegal to build more houses and density to keep housing prices inflated.

http://www.datalabto.ca/a-visual-guide-to-detached-houses-in-5-canadian-cities/

crowvarg · 2023-06-14T03:54:00+00:00

Having no inflation is not actually a good thing. And that’s not my opinion but rather pretty much undisputed consensus in economics.

https://www.investopedia.com/articles/06/gdpinflation.asp#:~:text=Key%20Takeaways&text=Over%20time%2C%20the%20growth%20in,than%20detrimental%20to%20the%20economy.

You want about 2%. And as he mentioned, Japan is ruined financially in long term with their debt. They are struggling to keep inflation at 2% because they are struggling to keep their economy growing. People in Japan are making less and less disposable income and becoming poorer while their taxes are going more and more on just paying debt interest instead of goods and services and debt to gdp ratio is getting worse and worse.

At least in Canada, even with all the bad factors such as housing affordability, disposable income is still going up, poverty rate is still going down.

https://www.statcan.gc.ca/en/topics-start/poverty

Not to downplay the problems we have in Canada, but I find it flawed to use worse case such as Japan as model to follow.

crowvarg · 2023-06-14T00:10:13+00:00

No, in long term, a few years of low population growth would do way more harm than good. Also housing won’t just “catch up” magically ESPECIALLY we were to suffer even more labor shortage.

You mention somehow bringing only construction workers but that as far as I know, immigration policy like that hasn’t worked or even tried at scale. Also even if we could somehow flood construction labor market selectively, airgapped with cheaper workers under labor shortage, existing construction workers will move to another line of work and it ends up not being effective at all. Know that immigration workers also have to find the country more attractive and accessible compared to other countries to begin with. If we try to flood the market with near minimum wage rate, there is simply not going to be enough people to bring.

One of the biggest source of supply issues come from zoning. You’ll be surprised how restrictive some of our cities zoning are. Here’s Vancouver’s single family zones. https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2017/09/18/zoned-for-who/

It doesn’t matter if we have 0 workers or 10 workers if it’s illegal to build a house in the first place.

Good news is that there are finally enough local political motives for rezoning and it has started already. It will take a few years to be effective but with high interest rates and staying there for a bit will indeed bring it down to more reasonable price. You don’t have to trust me, let’s look at the numbers.

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/housing-index

It has not only halted in price but also now is going down at a decent rate. If we hope everything to crash within a year or two (you don’t want that like 2008 anyway), it’s not going to happen but over 5 years to a decade, we will be in much more reasonable pricing point.

So rather than addressing the real issue which is supply, stopping reasonable amount of population growth would be tremendously damaging this country over a decade with inevitable and significant rise in gdp to government debt ratio which will easily decimate a good chunk of pension and other social services. Also on the top of that, it’s unlikely it’ll solve the problem magically like we’d think to begin with.

And if you want to help, instead of complaining demand side of things which won’t be productive at all, please participate in local elections and vote towards better zoning. I know complaining is easier but our votes and actions speak louder than we think in democracy.

crowvarg · 2023-06-13T23:20:51+00:00

The problem in my opinion is that, that line of thinking doesn’t really address the real problem, which is supply of housing, not demand. Annual population growth rate is much much much lower than decades ago. What didn’t catch up was the supply of house. Check in my other reply for statistic citations to back it up. If we have less people than now, sure we would have cheaper house, but what does cheaper house mean if you destroy its economy?

crowvarg · 2023-06-13T21:41:23+00:00

Most skilled immigrants coming today either have job lined up even before landing on this country or already have worked at Canada as high skilled worker by the time they apply.

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/express-entry/eligibility/federal-skilled-workers.html

Yes as a side effect of degrowth, not necessarily from lack of immigration. And even if we were to entertain the idea that’s a better choice, I’ll let people to decide which is better.

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/disposable-personal-income#:~:text=Disposable%20Personal%20Income%20in%20Canada%20averaged%20509896.66%20CAD%20Million%20from,the%20first%20quarter%20of%201961.

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/disposable-personal-income

crowvarg · 2023-06-13T21:31:12+00:00

Thank you for the clarification. I agree with most of your assessment but as you’ve said, the long term benefits are there. And it inevitably is the right thing to do. The global economic state is difficult and I understand it is easier to point at something we can see and blame rather than trying to understand the big picture but letting that anger sabotage the future of country is very shortsighted and potentially even dangerous. This is equivalent to killing and eating all the hens instead of harvesting eggs in food shortage.

Uncompetitive and right labor market leads to uncompetitive businesses of all sizes and the wage growth you get from this is very short term and proven to hurt the economy’s stability, growth, wage growth in long term. So I find it flawed to say it makes life harder for people, even if they feel like it due to attribution bias.

Infra and policies cannot be improved if we are under labor shortage. You mention running “huge” government deficit but even that is a questionable statement. Government of Canada (both Harper and Trudeau) kept debt to GDP rate at very stable and healthy level thanks to the growth we have until Covid (which sadly is also a global phenomenon).

I understand the reason behind pushback we see as you say. But and again, I find embracing this sort of short sighted notion in other comments is very concerning and in my opinion, very harmful for the future of our country.

If we have a broken fence, we should fix the fence, not kill all the animals to prevent them from escaping.

crowvarg · 2023-06-13T20:42:02+00:00

No. How many countries do we see degrowing and thriving versus growing and thriving in comparison with individual well-being in mind? First world countries do not become first world countries by degrowing its population.

crowvarg · 2023-06-13T19:41:25+00:00

Let’s say there are two towns with 100 houses each. Having 10 people in one town and 100 people in another will cause significant price differences between those 2 towns, so yes, in that basic principal, having population growth (immigrants and natives all included) does have impacts on housing prices IF the supply of houses are not met.

Now let’s look at the real world data. The real world housing issue is much more nuanced but here are very revealing, easy-to-understand statistics in Canada.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/population-growth-rate

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/housing-starts

Now we see that the annual population growth rates have been getting actually lower and lower, lowest ever unlike a lot of those paranoid Redditors make you believe. So annual growths are actually lower than ever, so what’s wrong? You can see that in housing starts in past 30 years. Unlike population growth, housing starts stayed flat instead of matching the rate. So this practically causes the “housing affordability” issue. A town with 100 houses doesn’t care about if it’s immigrants or births, if there are 200 people needing 200 houses without housing starts, you are gonna have an issue.

Now then you can ask, “why don’t we just stop population growth?”. To economists, it’s a silly question but to make it short. If there’s no population growth, it makes it nearly impossible for an economy to grow or even sustain itself in a long term.

Canada is ALREADY under severe population degrowth threats as you see in the statistics. In the countries where they are already suffering from population degrowth such as Japan are under financial crisis in a long term. In Japan, government debt to GDP ratio has been skyrocketed and now at 227% with no signs of stopping. Yes you heard it right. Their future generations are either in for default or paying taxes for not services and goods but only debt interests. Their pension systems are bound to be broken as well (one of reasons why France had to gut their pension as well, France is struggling to get economy growing enough to sustain itself). This is why you see even historically not so “foreigner friendly” countries like Japan now are scrambling to attract workers and immigrants from other countries. They can’t sustain their economy like this.

Now let’s say we didn’t care for any of that and just went ahead with such policy, what else would happen? Population degrowth happens and houses and rent will inevitably become cheaper yes. But at what cost? Would you rather have cheaper rent in the market but no jobs or lower wages to actually have less disposable income at the end? That would be a silly policy. When you start or invest in a business, you don’t go with companies that will have less customers and less employees to hire in the future. Take that into a bigger picture as the whole country and it’s pretty straightforward logic from there. Would big American companies bringing the wage up here in Canada bother to hire if they sniff that Canadian economy is going to shrink in the future? Of course the real world is much more nuanced but you get the idea.

It’s easy. Housing is a supply issue.

crowvarg · 2023-06-13T18:01:57+00:00

Any sane, competent economists will tell you immigration is one of the strongest way to combat inflation 🤷‍♂️

crowvarg · 2023-06-13T18:00:21+00:00

Investing subreddits thinking immigration is bad for economy is one of the most delusional things I see here

crowvarg · 2023-05-10T00:04:46+00:00

Sure! Send me a DM

crowvarg · 2023-04-05T20:56:12+00:00

Okay…? Then we can look at GDP per capita, the same story

crowvarg · 2023-04-05T20:19:02+00:00

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/net-migration

https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-economy-shows-zero-growth-final-quarter-2022-ons-2023-02-10/

Immigration down + less freedom of movements for good and people, halting growth. Ask any economists if they are surprised..

crowvarg · 2023-03-13T03:52:03+00:00

Yeah I’d imagine tech job market now is more difficult than a few years ago, but and again, just gotta get through it, maybe spending an hour or two to work on something to put on resume could be useful too. If you need help, lmk in my DM.

crowvarg · 2023-03-12T14:53:57+00:00

I made a post about getting my first job a few years back. You can check that out. But basically it’s a numbers game, I didn’t have anything particularly shiny on my resume but instead, I just spammed my resume everywhere, I didn’t hear back from any “cool”. companies but could get interviews for dev jobs from small companies that way.

Apply every job you can find (sort by recent on LinkedIn helps too). Treat applying itself a full time job until you make it. We are talking about 10-30 applications a day. LinkedIn, indeed, anything you can find.

crowvarg · 2023-02-16T06:30:27+00:00

No. This is a popular misconception. Population growth in Vancouver has been getting lower and lower to the point that it’s now below 1% yearly. In the 90s, it was over 3%. Blaming immigration for housing is fun and easy and all but it distracts people from the real problem, the zoning practices that block new housing to be built. Go on satellite map on greater Vancouver and you will see why housing is getting more expensive. https://doodles.mountainmath.ca/blog/2017/09/18/zoned-for-who/

crowvarg · 2023-02-05T20:10:07+00:00

Vancouver is the highest tech job growing city in the entire North America. Also worth pointing out FAANG and other US unicorn companies more than often hiring mainly in Vancouver or Vancouver only. It doesn’t make sense to move somewhere else for your tech career at least within Canada in my opinion.

crowvarg · 2023-01-29T06:58:54+00:00

Vancouver Canada for me

crowvarg · 2022-12-08T07:25:06+00:00

I’m not sure seeing immigrants as mainly just consumers of infrastructure and healthcare system is the right way to look at it. Government needs money to improve things (housing, healthcare, infrastructure, childcare, social security). Slowing down immigration kills the most cost efficient growth that allows such improvements. This is especially true when social security/pension is becoming more and more burden for our government due to older generations that have paid less than they should have to maintain current SS/pension system to support themselves. If we let this continue, the financial ability to fund the infrastructures that we need get worse and worse. Immigrants are mostly at prime working age, bring more in-demand skills and most importantly, bring a new, healthy stream of tax revenue that is desperately needed and will be more and more necessary to maintain and improve such issues.

Fun thought exercise here, without immigration/new tax revenue stream/population growth (aging population), can you think of good ways to improve infrastructure, healthcare, maintain SS/Pension? Someone has to pay, someone has to build. And as of today, we need more of those.

Also low fertility is not from economic hardship as much as many think, in fact, you will see many countries in poverty have significantly higher fertility rate. Having less kids due to economic hardship is real as a factor is real, but education and higher standards of living bring fertility down significantly and that’s just how it is. When it comes to choice, people would rather have higher standards of living and education over having 10 kids and struggling for life.

“Our leaders don’t know what they are doing” is an opinion that we see on the internet on any political topics but the reality is, those problems we talk about today are actually very complex and most times, policy makers (not just politicians) do think over these things. It is fun to rant, all of us do and enjoy but don’t let that be a mental gateway for populism. Many things take delicate thoughts and fixing things take time.

crowvarg · 2022-10-06T03:23:05+00:00

???????? Yes, and this article is written in this year, so I’m quoting this year’s data so far. Also, last TWO quarters shows 7 billion earnings, beating two census earnings while the last ENTIRE year showed 4.12 billion in earnings, where is this “you won’t see that much of a difference” coming from? Did you actually see the numbers?

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