🌍 US population stall - births plus immigration collapse throttles the economy

“the explanation for all of this is not necessarily about the supply-demand dynamics of labor, but our social policies related to our birth rate and immigration. ... our birth rate in 2021 absolutely fell off a cliff. It was less than 300,000 net births in the entire country. ... So immigration is really the only solution, and we don't really have the sponsorship to do that at a domestic policy level. ... it's going to create a very large imbalance that our economy and our country cannot really recover from.”

“I'm not an economist, but I don't know if that really solves the acute runaway problem that we're experiencing right now. ... I'm not sure the labor solution is going to solve this kind of acute problem that we're going to be facing that seems to be at this point dragging on.”

“So we need to greatly increase the number of people in the country and the people participating in the labor force if we're to avoid a recession, right? ... We need to have, like, a Manhattan project to just scoop up all these mutant geniuses from around the world and get them here and get them starting companies here.”

“The data tells you in every single which way possible that we are not educating our young people to take the jobs that are needed for a high growth, functionally moving economy.”

“So we've had this problem where we really need about 2 million people to reenter the labor force. And if you describe inflation as too much money chasing too few goods, we need to increase production and productive capacity.”

“It's also sentiment. It's like, you know, America is not the shining light on the hill it used to be. Not in the same way.”

“net international migration has just plummeted. We're well under a million folks coming into the country. So the obvious solution to our employment issues is to recruit people from other countries”

“And yet, the unemployment rate is still in the 3% range. And the reason is because that if somebody drops out of the labor force and isn't looking for work, they don't get counted on the unemployment rate. So we do have, if you define unemployment as a large number of people who aren't working, we have a huge unemployment problem. But the problem is they're not counted because they're supposedly not looking for work. So I don't think this economy is that healthy.”

“Jobs and this massive amount of jobs we've had in this country is because of we have a new immigration policy. We don't let people into this country. We kick out PhDs that we trained.”

“people might actually go back to work and Lyft and Uber are reporting that the driver shortages are over. They no longer have to pay people spiffs and stuff like that to get people to come back to work.”

“The thing with the labor participation rate that we're still not sort of like truly factoring in is like, we had a million Americans die because of COVID. And, you know, starting in that Trump presidency, we lost like seven or eight million immigrants.”

“And just slowly going down as boomers retire early because they made so much on their 401Ks and homes. And then you're right, Chamath, we've had negative. We've really cut immigration in the last whatever, five, six years.”