Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dirtyid 1138 days ago
>tons of potential

I agree there's a lot of potential, but IMO forces working against pop growth potential is increasing. I'm more weary of associate pop growth with assumed developement potential, there some analysis showing old pop heavy export oriented industrial model working less well - trend last few decades is industrialization opportunites being milked dryer sooner and at lower levels of income. What helped East/South Asia is may not be uplift LATAM or Africa to nearly same degree. Geopolitics and labour saving technologies is going to remove a lot of human potential from being realized, meanwhile a lot of the govs of developing countries are futzing hard themselves.

I'm feeling we're entering era where developing opportunties will be limited, and more people will simply mean more people left behind. And if developed countries with declining pops decide to pivot to immigration, brain drain from developing countries is going to get harsh, especially with opennings in western highered if PRC decides to turn off talent taps i.e. PRC demphasising English to limit talent flow out in future gens. If India gets wise decides to not export their demographic divident away, that's ~2M extra braindrain west will be taking from global south. Countries with 1B+ may have surplus to keep going, large countries with 100s of millions may not.

TLDR is I think potential is going to be harder to realize going forward.