[hipster duck]

Originally Posted by milomilo

It would be very interesting if the bolded turns out to be true. Personally I doubt it but if it was the case then it would mean that less developed countries had made huge advances, and this would be great for the world. Once the abundance of low wage labour world wide is reduced, capitalism will start working even better for everyone.

The jury is still out on AI/automation, but the term “demographics is destiny” still rings true, and there have been some astonishing developments in recent years . For example, Bangladesh now has a total fertility rate of 2.1 (replacement level). India is at 2.4 and Pakistan is at 2.55, both falling rapidly.

Also, the burden on immigration to pay existing entitlements might also fall as the boomer generation with their large numbers and defined-benefit pensions die out. Admittedly, this last theory is a little harder to quantify and stand behind, but I don’t think it would shift in favour of more immigration.

As for whether our cities can handle the population, it doesn't matter. People will move there regardless, and if the cities choose not to upgrade their infrastructure, that's their fault and their problem. I don't think there is any mechanism to stop people moving to a city, and the fact that people are moving there implies that the conditions are good regardless of the infrastructure.

In the developing world, there are certainly examples of places that absorb millions of people with no commensurate investment in infrastructure, and just get shittier and shittier every year: Lagos, Jakarta, etc.

In the democratic developed world, where people have certain expectations, I think there are more examples of cities that just maxed out. For example, everybody thought that LA would overtake NYC as the largest metropolitan region in the US. In the 1960s, LA was growing much faster than Toronto is growing now and growing from a larger population base, to boot. But then sometime in the 90s, the wheels came off the bus and now LA is just a very large, very expensive city that added about 500,000 people in the last 10 years (it used to add this every 2 years in the 1950s).

IMO, we should up the immigration rate to 1M a year, borrow a ton of money and buy a load of infrastructure. The economic payoff would easily offset the cost of borrowing and would give Canada a lot more clout in an uncertain future.

I think that’s a crazy high number. You can’t add that many people in a short timespan and not deal with unexpected consequences. They say that just the addition of 100,000 draft dodgers in the 1970s shifted Canada’s politics permanently to the left. I can’t imagine what 1M immigrants every year would result in (and I don’t think anyone really can).