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Notes -
Canada’s decline
Things are not going well in Canada. The hashtag #Canadaisbroken has been going around for a while, but the scale of the decline remains underdiscussed, especially in our media. Canada’s real GDP per capita is 2.5% lower now than it was in 2019. In the U.S. its 6.0% higher. For decades, Canada has had per capita GDP (adjusted for purchasing power) that was about 80% of the U.S. level, now its 72% and falling. Canada is rapidly becoming a European country in terms of living standards. This understates the problem because in Europe its easier to live on less: cars are not necessary in many places and, crucially, rent is much lower. Canada is in the midst of an unbelievable housing crisis. At current prices and interest rates, the ownership costs of a typical home would consume 60% of the median household's income, the highest ever recorded. I went to the U.S. southwest recently and my overriding impression is how much better off America is than Canada now.
The Liberal government’s response to this has been deficit spending. Their lack of fiscal responsibility was dramatic during Covid, but hidden under the guise of emergency they spent $200+ billion on new entitlements and spending programs which has resulted in Canada running a permanent structural budget deficit. When combined with our provinces (which unlike U.S. states are allowed to borrow) and measured as a % of GDP, the country is running Bush Jr.-tier fiscal deficits without wars. And what are these new programs? Almost all of them are means-tested benefits for behaviours progressives like. A new daycare program aimed at moms working 9-5 jobs (i.e. white collar) that does nothing for SAHMs, a dental care program which is only for families making under 90k (creating a huge marriage penalty and implicit tax rate), a carbon tax rebate which is income redistribution in disguise, replacing the modest but universal child benefit with a generous means tested one, etc. If you put it together, Canada has largely rebuilt our 1970s welfare state but will claw it back from you more than dollar for dollar as you earn more. We variously incentivize poverty and moms to work, stay unmarried and put their kids in daycare. Our taxes are high.
The other big push from our government is immigration. They occasionally frame it as a way to stop inflation, but usually they don’t defend it at all and assume the pro-immigration consensus is unshakable. The levels were shocking last year, but they keep rising. Over just the past 3 months, Canada admitted 430,000 new people. Canada now has an absolute annual level of legal immigration (including temporary migration) of about 1.2 million -- higher than the United States. We get about 500,000 traditional immigrants, but the big change from recent years is about 700,000 net “non-permanent residents” who form a new helot class. Canada now has 2.5 million temporary residents who come to study or work low-paid jobs and it has rapidly transformed the entire country. These people represent 6% of the population, but because they are highly concentrated by age, they are about 20% of adults aged 20-40. I spend time in a small town that is hundreds of kilometers from any major city and nearly every store now employs temporary foreign workers from India. Every worker at McDonalds. Every worker at Tim Hortons. They live 6+ to an apartment and have tightened the rental market pricing locals out. With population growth running at its highest ever pace, homebuilding is unchanged at about 250,000 units creating an incremental housing need of a quarter million units per year. Rent inflation is over 7% compared with approximately 0% month over month in the US.
What the past few years has made plain to me is how deep leftism runs in Canada and how dedicated it is to ignoring the effect of incentives on behaviour: We can just subsidize bad behaviour and punish good behaviour endlessly without actually changing behaviour. In many ways Canada is running on the fumes of vestigial British earnestness, politeness and self discipline which has made this work in the past, but I think we’re rapidly burning up our cultural capital and once its gone, I think we’ll tip into a much worse equilibrium. I have leftist friends whose perspective is: “sure things aren’t great, but would the conservatives do better?” which makes me sad. For most people, even smart people like my friends, seeing the bad consequences of things they support doesn’t move the needle at all in terms of their worldviews. And I didn’t get into spiraling crime and government celebration of the deracination of our traditional culture.
I think part of what is happening is Anglo culture’s seemliness has become our greatest weakness. Its unseemly to ‘punch down’ and blame an avalanche of mostly-poor international students for the rental market, or permissive and ‘anti-racist’ criminal justice policy for a huge increase in crime so we equivocate and people say things like “its so brutal, how sad” while continuing to vote in the same way. There is no transmission from failure in office to electoral results, so we end up with people like Trudeau for three terms. One astute observation I’ve heard about Canadian ‘niceness’ is that its fake: people are very cagey about saying what they think in public about anything controversial. Our entire country is a university campus. Canadians live in a world of feel good pablum as our way of life is destroyed. People rage about it, but there is no honest sensemaking apparatus in Canada – because talking about things plainly is unseemly – so rage is dissipated randomly. Even today, even after its failures, the combined polling share of the LPC-led ruling coalition (i.e. LPC+NDP) is nearly 50%.
I still cannot wrap my head around the idea of low/middle wage immigration to a country with billionaires and wealth inequality. All of the “economic efficiency” is just going to go to the very wealthy, whereas by restricting immigration you force the wealthy not just to pay higher wages and allow greater employer QoL, but to invest in the future of the citizens. If companies with longterm plans realize that they need to hire high-skilled Canadians to work as employees, suddenly you’ll find yourself with widespread maternity programs and more investment in education. Your companies will actually be lobbying the government to increase health and fertility.
Because all the efficiency isn't going to the very wealthy?
Again, the only study that has shown any sort of long-term wage depression for workers was in the immediacy of the Mariel boatlift in Miami-Dade, but that's an equivalent amount of immigration nationwide that would never happen, short of Bryan Caplan somehow becoming dictator. Yes, things don't go positively for 100% of people, but most of the actual economic downturn in certain parts of the country is actually due to outside competition from China, not immigration into the US.
Also, fertility is linked to women's education. America could become a fortress with zero immigration, and TFR will keep on going down, as long as birth control and highly educated women with expansive freedom exist.
It’s both true that fertility is linked to women’s education and much more complicated than that; America has a sufficiently large number of much higher tfr subgroups(the core red tribe etc) that the demographic situation would stabilize itself eventually.
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I think when the arcane, longterm, complicated multivariable analyses on economic cause and effect conflict with common logic, we must trust common logic unless there are clear real world cases to disprove it. I have never seen anything approximating a simplified model that explains how increasing the low wage labor pool would not result in worsened quality of life when the wealthy hoard resources and min-max for greed. I have never seen any persuasive argument that supply and demand suddenly stops to work as a principle when you constrict the supply of workers.
If I start a business that requires COBOL engineers, I have one choice and one choice only: hiring COBOL engineers. If there are many to pick from who desire work, I can keep more resources and pay them less. If there are fewer on the market, I need to pay more, end of story. There can be so few COBOL engineers that I can’t hire them to start my business, but before this occurs I would cease to be a billionaire or multi-million! Clearly our country is very far away from having insufficient workers if there is still so much wealth inequality. In every scenario I can think of, in every industry, reducing the labor pool should result in greater wealth equality by forcing C-Suite and investors to let go of resources to use them to recruit and retain talent. God, it’s just so simple… why would any NBA team pay 50 mil for Steph Curry? It doesn’t matter if they don’t want to, they need to, if they want to win, and winning means money. How does this not apply to ever industry, magically, only in complicated studies?
You are looking only at short-term effects. The studies look at more medium and long-term effects. Those immigrants do not just increase the labor supply; they also increase the demand for goodsm which in turn increases the demand for labor. That is why "complicated analysis," not mere "common sense" is necessary to evaluate the effect of immigration on the labor market.
When you add a lower wage employee, that employee’s demand for goods would be less than adding a middle wage employee, because they have less discretionary income. You are decreasing the “median American’s demand for goods”. As an example in America, a new Honduran immigrant who has three sets of outfits and eats primarily rice/beans/carnitas made at home has a very low demand for goods. Very wealthy people have a high demand for goods, yet they buy a lot of wasteful goods when those resources would be better spread downward… what am I missing here? For lower wage workers, I don’t see how their increase of sum total demand for goods could ever come close to approaching the resources that they miss out on because of surplus labor.
I don't know why you are talking about adding employees, rather than about adding residents, which is what the issue is.
Regardless, I that you are relying on a far more complex model than the one you initially posited, one which includes variables for the level of consumption for different types of consumers. So, apparently, common sense is not enough.
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Is this also an argument against TFR > 2.1?
I thought it was the argument against it.
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TFR is directly driven by rural VS Urban and cost of living.
Those who live in rural areas have more kids.
Forcing Urbanization by importing immigrants who settle in cities rapidly increases both urbanization AND the cost of living, cascading TFR downwards.
You're making the problem worse and forcing the children produced by the native rural population to support a bunch of aliens when their old age comes in 20 years (you don't get to be the kind of skilled immigrant slected for in your 20s or even early 30s)
Ethnic Expulsions would be the best thing for birth rates.
Lowered cost of living and rapidly increased perception of risk correlates heavily with higher TFR. There's a reason over 50% of Gaza is under 18
I think you missed my point.
The arguments brought up above against immigrants apply every bit as much to children. All those kids are going to be taking up jobs, housing, etc. People should have just one kid at most to ensure that the good times keep rolling and the CEOs have to keep paying more and more.
Is this supposed to be a gotcha? Are you implying that you can't see any functional difference between the two options? Or are you just trying to bait them into saying something that you can label as racist/eugenicist?
I don't really care about baiting people on a pseudonymous Internet forum for wrongthinkers.
My question is simply, what is the distinction? You mention eugenics, but smart immigrants are actually much worse for the housing market because they earn more money and can pay more for housing.
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This is the theory. Now, let us look at the example of countries that recently tried this recipe for growth.
Croatia Birth Rate
Serbia Birth Rate
Bosnia And Herzegovina Birth Rate
Civil war, ethnic cleansing and atrocities galore, but any rebound and growth is not evident.
Now compare and contrast Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Israel post 48...
That it sucked to be an Eastern or Central european post-communist seems to me the unique factor in those examples
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