Quote:
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.
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.
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.
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It's interesting to contemplate, although I suspect the only way to achieve that number would be to massively increase refugee numbers/engage in major immigration drives in war-torn parts of the Middle East and in sub-Saharan Africa (Venezuela and the Venezuelan diaspora might also be a target at the moment). I suspect that those kinds of numbers would generate major issues in housing, and access to social services, health care, and education. Given the likely countries of origin of such increased numbers of immigrants, I have to wonder whether there wouldn't also be significant issues wrt employment, as hundreds of thousands of these new arrivals would be qualified to work only at the bottom end of the labour market. My own view is that we are probably at or near "peak immigration", barring a major economic upturn, which doesn't seem to be on the horizon