Increasing working lifespans is a partial solution (people aren't fans of this for obvious reasons): Optimistically we do have a lot of work being done in regenerative/SENS medicine (I'm completely unqualified to judge how good that research is, but it is happening); Pessimistically this is just increasing the pension age.
Another solution is automation and robotics. This is further away than the flashy demos from Boston Dynamics and Tesla suggest, but not fundamentally absurd especially as it doesn't really need the robots to be humanoid. Given the power/compute requirements and the difficulty of vision processing, I assume this will be about 5 years behind self-driving cars.
Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates.
It has downsides, esp to the xenophobes, but in the long run, redistribution/migration of populations from the south -- where climate change is going to have the most serious impacts -- is just going to be part of life.
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates.
> It has downsides […]
The main downside you have to counter is building enough housing, which Canada is not.
The federal government (AFAICT) sets immigration targets/numbers without consulting the provinces and municipalities to see what they can handle. The US (pop. 330M) brings in 1M immigrants in the last few years, while in Canada (pop. 40M):
> In 2022, Canada welcomed 437,180 immigrants and the number of non-permanent residents increased by a net 607,782 people. Both figures are the highest levels on record and reflect "higher immigration targets and a record-breaking year for the processing of immigration applications," StatsCan said.
So. The narrative here in Canada has shifted to blaming immigration for housing woes. While there might be something to it, it smells suspiciously like shifting the blame away from monetary/fiscal/legislative policy. 20 years of low rates (federal concern), and an under-regulated real estate market (provincial concern).
Notably not all parts of Canada have this problem, despite having high immigration rates. Immigration is still high to, e.g. Edmonton, and employment rates are good, etc. but housing affordability there is "fine" (relatively, for now).
I think you started to touch on the problem here, which is the dysfunction of our federal/provincial relations. Political trends right now want to blame Trudeau (I don't like him either, but whatever), so they're pointing the finger at immigration. But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying. Now that they're caught with their pants down here in Ontario their answer is to pave over farmland and build more low-density McMansions, which, well, it's blatant vote buying and corruption because the people in those 905-belt houses vote Tory and the developers contribute to the PC party.
That and building public housing is something people in western G7 countries have become disturbingly allergic to. The last time we had housing crisis at this level, that was one way out of the problem: we built massive rental towers all over the place, along with public housing projects.
In large part what we have here is a powerful baby boomer electorate that has up until now felt itself benefited by skyrocketing real estate prices. The increases in their home values allowed them to ignore their pathetic retirement savings. It was an "Eat The Young" mentality that just assumed "Number Goes Up" forever on real estate prices. And governments -- both prov and fed -- were perfectly willing to just keep feeding that fire.
It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low. So the numbers spiked afterwards for a bunch of causes, partially recovery from that, partially policy, and partially refugees from the war in Ukraine.
> So. The narrative here in Canada has shifted to blaming immigration for housing woes. While there might be something to it, it smells suspiciously like shifting the blame away from monetary/fiscal/legislative policy.
There are multiple things that need to look at, but we've had similar policies for decades on most other fronts, but the inflection point in prices started around 2015 which is coïncidentally when immigrations numbers—especially foreign student visa—kicked into a higher gear.
Mike Moffatt has done a lot of interesting research on this that's worth checking out.
> But the provinces (esp Ontario and BC) have failed to accommodate the immigration rates by building housing and densifying.
If provinces are only able to build at a rate of X units per year, why are we bringing in (e.g.) 2X the number of people? Yes, we should be building more units, but one of the factors in determining how many folks to bring in is being able to house them.
If we can build only build X units in 2023 then we should only bring in X. If we get to X+Y units in 2024, then that's how many people can be brought in.
You don't allow in X+Y (or 2X) people and hope that the units will magically appear.
There is no wand that can be waved to suddenly get more framers, plumbers, electricians, inspectors, urban planner, and capital.
If folks are told "in year 202X we are planning to bring in X people", they can plan for it: but that's not what is happening. Right now it's "here are X people, deal with it, it's your responsibility".
If provinces are only able to build at a rate of X units per year, why are we bringing in (e.g.) 2X the number of people
But this was my point. Because the health/survival of the Canadian economies requires that rate of immigration, that's what we do. But its on the provinces, not the feds, to manage housing & municipal issues. But there's a deep conflict of interest about how this is managed. Too many voters, real estate agents, developers, and contractors see benefit from rising housing prices, donors and voters for both parties.
What do you think would happen at the ballot boxes if a provincial government started building mass tracts of rental housing -- like governments did in the 50s in the post-war baby boom when we last had a serious housing crisis? Housing prices and rents would plummet, and landowners, developers, and upper middle class homeowners would be coming after the party in power with pitchforks.
Likewise, if immigration were to be throttled tomorrow, annual GDP growth would flatline and we'd be in recession and labour shortage territory. And the gov't that did this would also be punished.
When I see pundits on the TV about real estate prices: it's almost always some joker of a real estate agent or mortgage broker, not a real economist. It's like asking a wolf why the flock of sheep is thinning out.
Picking 2015 as an inflection point seems ridiculously partisan. I'm 50 next year. I've lived through both Conservative and Liberal governments. They've both made the same mistakes on this file, and they both suck. Housing has been precipitously rising since the end of the 90s. It was already in double-digit growth rates in Toronto and unaffordable for working class people when my wife and I bought our first house in 2005.
The reality is that the most serious "inflection point" was 2008, when US (and most global) housing prices collapsed and stabilized, while Canada's continued to grow exponentially.
Trudeau was not Prime Minister then.
For better or for worse we have a federal system, and the provinces play the role of managing housing stock and municipal affairs, not the feds.
> But this was my point. Because the health/survival of the Canadian economies requires that rate of immigration, that's what we do. But its on the provinces, not the feds, to manage housing & municipal issues.
But the provinces do not know ahead of time what needs to happen. The feds simply announce a number for the next year or so and then everyone else has to scramble. If the feds say that X people are coming, but you can only build X/2 units because that's all resources (trades, land plots) available, how do you suddenly get new capacity?
If we need X people to come in for a health economy, but can only handle Y<X, then we do not just let X people, we build up to being able to going from Y to X.
> Picking 2015 as an inflection point seems ridiculously partisan.
Nothing partisan about it:
> Up until 2015, Moffatt said, Ontario had a well-functioning real estate market, but changes to federal immigration policy under then Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and that have been expanded by Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, increased the amount of newcomers to Canada.
> When the price of oil crashed in 2015, not only did more immigrants choose to settle in Ontario instead of Alberta and Saskatchewan, many Canadians who moved to Western Canada for economic opportunities started coming back.
More people arrived than could be handled because there was no prior preparation.
Yes: lower levels of governments need to up their game. But the upper levels can't just steam roll them and hope for the best: everyone needs to get on the same page on what's presently possible and then what's needed for the future.
> The narrative here in Canada has shifted to blaming immigration for housing woes. While there might be something to it, it smells suspiciously like shifting the blame away from monetary/fiscal/legislative policy.
While other government interference in the market is certainly a factor, it's not just a "narrative" that immigration is the main driving force behind the severe distortions in the Canadian housing market. It's reality, backed by numbers and what's going on on the ground.
> It's also not fair to point at 2022 immigration numbers, when 2020/2021 had far lower immigration rates, due to COVID. The temporary foreign worker program was effectively suspended, and immigration rates were low.
The pre-2020 immigration numbers, even going back decades, really aren't much lower. It was over 300,000 people in 2018 and 2019, for example. It was well over 200,000 a year from 1990 through to 2017 (except for 1998 and 1999, although both were still near 200,000).
By Canadian standards, 200,000 to 300,000 people would be a larger mid-sized city. While there has been some property development, of course, I don't think that the equivalent of a new Saskatoon, or a new Gatineau, or a new Regina, or a new Burnaby is being built each and every year just to house and support the incoming immigrants for that single year.
An interesting thing about the lockdowns, especially after the foreigners who could temporarily leave had left, and when the higher education situation was uncertain and a huge number of foreign students didn't bother to attend in person, apartment rental prices in the major cities dropped significantly.
A number of my colleagues across the country who live in apartments, and who couldn't flee the country, ended up moving to new apartments to take advantage of this situation. Some of them were getting free months and other bonuses, and generous referral fees were being offered to existing tenants who found new renters, even in places like Vancouver and Toronto. That was certainly not common before, and not since.
Canada's flawed immigration policies are by far the main contributor to today's housing situation and other economic problems. The solution isn't to rush to build more low-quality housing. The solution is to put an almost complete halt to all immigration into Canada, including of permanent residents, foreign "students", "refugees", "asylum seekers", and every other type.
The difference is that canada is taking qualified professionals as migrants, people who have the training to work in a developed economy, that know English or French.
Europe is taking refugees with very low work qualifications, a lot of them barely literate in their own languages, and who can't communicate on their host countries language. If anything, the way foreign migration is done in most of Europe, it is making things worse, as it is severely burdening their social budgets.
The way "foreign migration" is done in most of Europe is to isolate those people from the domestic population, provide them with the bare minimum in social services to keep them alive and prohibit them from working while constantly threatening to deport them at a moment's notice. At least that's how it's done for asylum seekers and refugees.
Even historically Germany called immigrant workers "guest workers" because the expectation was that after spending 20 years in the country and building up our economy they would please go back to where they came from. This left most immigrants with one of two options: either full assimilation to the point of trying to out-German the Germans in order to fly under the radar, or sticking to their own entirely, resulting in what was first affectionally called "multiculturalism" and is now breathlessly reported on as "parallel societies". The middle ground, being integrated into Germany while maintaining some of their cultural identity was never seriously accepted as a valid option. Good luck if you also had the wrong skin color or eye shape or can't fake laugh about racist jokes about yourself.
And let's not get started on France's grandstanding about the Francophonique while shooing African immigrants into lawless slums to be neither seen nor heard until they get angry enough to set cars on fire and be beaten down by police again.
Europe's problems with immigration and refugees are entirely self-made. The handling of Ukranian refugees is evidence of this: as soon as Ukranians fled the war, European countries bent over backwards to lift all the sanctions that would normally apply to foreign refugees and treat them like EU citizens. Politicians would literally argue that it'd be inhumane to put Ukranian refugees into refugee shelters. And this had nothing to do with individual qualifications or skills.
Exactly this. I'm Canadian but have German family, and the difference in mentality is astounding. Europeans remain entranced by "blood citizenship" and archaic, essentialist, ideas of citizenship based around family descent and ethnicity. E.g. I could qualify for German citizenship/passport on account of ethnic-descent (on both sides of family) but people with the wrong last names, working hard and with a lot to contribute, can have a much more difficult time (though I understand there's been reform here.)
I personally think that trying to draw lines around states on ethno-linguistic boundaries is frankly how a lot of the 20th century attrocities began. They are in large part artificial.
I was hoping we were headed towards a multicultural future. But unfortunately I see political and cultural trends going the other way again, including here in Canada.
Because it's a fiction. Germany has never been just "German", likewise for France. They've always been a hodgepodge of ethnicities and languages and dialects, and destinations and sources for migration. It's only in the modern (17-18th century and on) that you start to get this narrowing of definition and some attempt to actually eliminate diversity within (rather arbitrary) political boundaries. ("The language of the Republic is French." aka f*ck you Breton, Occitan, Alsace, various other dialects of French, etc.)
If you pan the camera out over history, it's a bit absurd.
FWIW my Oma was Alsatian, German (dialect) speaking and my father was born in France at the end of the war... but is German.
For anyone claiming any European country is "originally an ethnostate" I recommend zooming in a little and looking at cultural and language minorities, especially endangered languages. In many cases even people born in those countries aren't aware of all of them and would consider at least some groups "foreign" despite them having been around for hundreds of years and often only recently marginalized. This seems to be well-known in France and Spain thanks to the existence of separatist movements but the only thing people usually seem to know about Germany is that some people in neighboring countries speak German dialects because the borders changed throughout history -- and it's far weirder than that. Many of these languages go back to "travelers", which in modern continental Europe is now only associated with Roma and Sinti peoples.
Counterintuitively, research shows that the European approach is better for the economy and for native European workers than the Canadian approach is.
An example: Canada lets an English or French speaking engineer in, Europe lets in somebody with poor European language skills and no relevant skills that ends up working as a janitor. The engineer comes in near the top and displaces Canadians downward. The immigrant engineer is unlikely to put a Canadian engineer out of work, but they do ease the upward pressure on engineering wages. OTOH The janitor comes in at the bottom and pushes Europeans up. That high school dropout who was previously stuck being a janitor now competes favourably for customer-facing retail managerial roles.
Jobs are not a zero-sum game. Every working person a country has increases the demand for jobs by a significant amount. The zero-sum intuition most people have is highly misleading.
Yeah I think the approach here in Canada has also contributed to the housing price crisis because it's cherry-picking immigrants with large initial investments, and they're coming here and dumping $$ into "sure thing, number only go up" housing.
And we've ended up with a bit of a shortage of working class unskilled labour, while at the same time screwing skilled immigrants who came here thinking they were coming to a land of prosperity to be an engineer or doctor and they end up as taxi drivers or convenience store clerks.
Additionally a large factor in the number of "foreigners" in Canada seems to be foreign students, who often don't actually stay in Canada after graduating but tend to be affluent and thus drive up costs/prices without contributing to the labor pool.
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates.
That worked great in the XX century, but the supply of potential immigrants from countries with a high(90%+) literacy rate is dwindling due to fertility rates falling below replacement in source countries. As it stands most such people currently reside in South East Asia.
This is not a viable strategy for the next 20 years, let alone 50 years.
I highly doubt western europe will open up their doors. It's already difficult to immigrant there now. Once pressed I imagine the opposite scenario. No way Europe can sustain immigration accessibility on the level of USA and still include all of the benefits.
It's not like we're going to have any choice in the matter. Vast regions of the world are quickly becoming uninhabitable both because of climate change and of the damage done during colonialism and its political consequences. We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open. I personally think it would be more ethical and pracical to open them now, but I seem to be in the minority.
> We can either choose to open the doors willingly or they are going to be blown open.
why do you think this? it's next to impossible to completely stop piecemeal border crossings. but beyond a certain scale, it becomes something that militaries can oppose directly. are you suggesting the europeans would not have the stomach for military action against migrants, or that the migrants would somehow defeat them in sheer numbers? if it's the former, I would point out that were are already seeing questionable events with migrant ships in the mediterranean.
>Vast regions of the world are quickly becoming uninhabitable
Have you got any concrete examples? The temperature range for human habitability is pretty wide; the temperature regularly gets up to 50 degrees in summer in the Gulf States (like UAE and Saudi) yet the quality of life there is quite high, in spite of it being a literal desert. Most of the refugees entering Europe are fleeing good ol' fashioned wars, not environmental catastrophes.
You don't need to have a very high average. It's sufficient to have a high wet bulb temperature for a few days to kill off large portions of the population. Also consider that Africa is going to represent most of the demographic growth of the world in the next few decades. And consider the effects of all this combined with political instability you quickly get into a situation like the floods in Libya.
I'm talking about citizenship. I'm not familiar with every single country's policies, but it's simply a fact that the USA is more accommodating to immigrants than Germany and France, for example. France for instance barely provides support for English speakers, god forbid any other country that speaks other languages.
An immigrant who finds themselves in New York City, to contrast, will see that the city provides government assistance in dozens of languages and proof of address and things of that nature aren't even required.
Take France for instance, 10% of people living in France in 2021 were immigrants (born in another country). Net Migration is in the 100-200k range per year.
France, Spain and Germany are among the betters in terms of immigration. If you consider the rest of western europe, not so great. Even france in particular isn't really that accommodating.
Why? The whole point of accepting refugees is that they're running away from a horrible situation from where they came from (persecution, war, famine, genocide, uninhabitable weather, you get the gist) and accepting them is saving their lives. They are, in theory, the ones most in need.
Of course there are people just looking for better economic opportunities, and people who target specific Western countries to be a refugee in (e.g. Pakistanis that show up in Germany - if they were really fleeing from a critical situation they would stop in the first place that is calm and safe, not continue the journey to a richer country), but they aren't really refugees in the actual sense of the word.
> Europe can (and does to some degree) solve this issue the same way we do here in Canada: high immigration rates.
This only works if it's difficult for migrants to get on welfare. Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work, which doesn't contribute to supporting the growing retired population. (Not that migrants should be blamed for this; if you could get a better life for yourself and your family just by moving to a country that paid you for not even having to work, of course it's a rational decision).
In most countries it's _impossible_ for immigrants to get on welfare, until they become fully naturalized. This is a myth that's put about by the right.
There is however a state obligation towards asylum seekers while their claim is pending, and a basic interest in not allowing huge camps of starving homeless people to develop.
In most EU countries one has access to social benefits from the permanent-resident stage (which typically takes 3-5 years to obtain). It is not necessary to be fully naturalized.
> Otherwise you attract migrants who just want to live off welfare, not work,
This is a common misconception. Those people on welfare work, it's just that it's mostly illegal employment. This is a widespread phenomenon everywhere in Europe, particularly in construction.
Exactly. Actually many people in trade jobs (construction, hairdressers, etc) additionally work in illegal employment (or do paid "favors" for acquaintances), at least speaking from my experience as a German in Germany.
This usually has to do with those jobs being too badly paid to attract enough people to do all the available work as well as those jobs not paying a sufficiently livable wage and welfare being tied to unemployment or fully deducting any income 1-to-1. A naive solution would be converting welfare to something of a reverse income tax (so e.g. for every €2 you earn your welfare would be reduced by €1 rather than €2, down to zero, and no income tax would be paid on any income up to 2x of welfare). But politicians seem to be more interested in squeezing welfare recipients harder because they think people who aren't working (legally) must be punished until they start working - nevermind that some of those welfare recipients are not part of the work force due to age or legal status and thus can't legally work.
>In October the finance ministry, in its annual report on the issue, estimated that in 2018 immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants drained from public finances a net 31bn kroner ($4.9bn), some 1.4% of GDP. Immigrants from Western countries, by contrast, contributed a net 7bn kroner (see chart).
So yes, it has downsides... The downside of not working at all. (In this comment, I am separating Western and non-Western immigrants, since you mentioned xenophobes)
Contributing to public finances isn't the only thing for which we need people, it's not even the most important thing. We are going to need a lot of people to care for the elderly, people working in construction, etc. Which particular group then does the much higher paying jobs that contribute more taxes is less relevant.
Also, things like building roads and infrastructure, picking fruits, logistics, etc. The value of these jobs for the society are not commensurate with their wages.
> immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants
Key word "descendants". Are those by any chance children, who were born in the country (therefore are not themselves immigrants) and need to be educated? It seems dishonest to count them as not contributing when they're not old enough to.
Again, most immigrants are not eligible for any welfare until they are fully naturalized.
The UK, for example, has significantly more empty homes than homeless people[0]. I don't know the physical distribution of these properties, so purely hypothetically: if the empty properties are in deprived areas of the country that don't have jobs, they might as well be in Montserrat for all the impact they have on the UK housing market in the places with jobs.
Are you suggesting that the reason that 250,000 houses that have been empty for 6 months isn't enough for 250,000 homeless people, is something other than the houses being nowhere near the job opportunities?
It won't. Those homes will just go in fewer hands so the rich will be richer the poor will be poorer.
We've already had a low birthrates for a while and property prices (where the jobs are) have gone nowhere but up, outpacing Inflation, wage growth and sometimes even the stock market.
Nobody cares the desolate countryside homes are sitting empty because there are no jobs there.
I imagine that Europe's demographic issues are going to force something needing to give on the QoL side of things.