Comment on Anon doesn't like AI
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week agothe sad part is that while immigrants are fine, immigration does disadvantage the people.
(this might seem nitpicking, but it’s like the difference between air and wind. One is a substance, the other one is the movement of it. It is the wind that can cause damage, not the air itself.)
If immigration did not actually harm the people, it would be simple to prove that and get over with it. But immigration does harm the people. If there’s immigration of 3 million people into a country with 300 million people, then you can expect that the Cost of Living (CoL) goes up by roughly 1% for everyone in the country, so there’s a small disadvantage, because the resources are shared among a greater group of people.
However, what’s important in the entire discussion is to keep in mind proportionality. I.e., people make a lot of ruckus about life getting 1% more expensive while at the same time, inflation-adjusted buying power of the people has been reduced more than 50% in the last 50 years. (Assuming same number of hours worked per household.) I.e., wages have gone down a lot, more than fucking half in fact (that’s A LOT!!!). The reason is declining demand for human labor due to automation and such. That should be discussed, and the fact that we need higher taxes on the rich to pay for universal basic income.
In other words, we need proportionality in our discussion. It can’t be that a topic that influences our CoL by 1% gets 70% of our attention while a much more significant topic that influences our CoL by 50% gets only less than 5% of our attention. We need to shift the discussion more towards class issues and away from immigration issues, while acknowledging that immigration is still an issue. Just not the biggest issue.
discocactus@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Selective reasoning, mostly BS. If the COL goes up by 1% so does the productivity, and per worker productivity has been higher then wages in my country since the 70s. If you want to play a game of “the immigrants aren’t skilled or productive” I challenge you to work on a framing crew for one single day in Phoenix AZ. I see now looking at your user name that you’re in Germany- I acknowledge that the context is different there, however I’d be curious to see if the same logic holds true- I’d imagine it does albeit on a longer timescale, since your trades have an actual certification and training process even for lower echelons of workers. I would argue that immigration in general does not harm people, and that it is a grade-school logical fallacy unworthy of serious discussion to say that “if it were true, you could prove it easily.”
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
it does not. In the 19th and 20th century, the number of workers has been the limiting factor to economic growth, so your argument held true. However, time exists, and so does progress, and so you can’t assume that our current circumstance of everybody-has-a-job holds true in the future. It probably won’t be the case.
With the advent of automation and AI, some (white-collar) jobs will be lost to machines. But an even bigger amount of jobs will be lost due to the end of economic growth. It is economic growth that causes the majority of jobs, and if that ceases, so do the jobs. It’s like jobs are like the wind: If things stops moving, they stop existing (they turn into thin air). So unemployment might be a big problem in the future. Adding additional workers to that does not help the economy, but increases unemployment and rather harms everyone.