GDP per capita is not a measure of wealth, it’s a measure of income. We don’t have great measures of wealth, particularly for natural resources or environmental wealth, but it’s not a stretch to assume that our wealth has been declining—climate change, microplastics, forever (and other) chemicals, exponentially growing use of minerals, deteriorating infrastructure, etc. A billion people in the US would probably result in a faster decline of wealth, which at some point shows up in income. I’m open to other opinions with some evidence.
What I really want is some uncontroversial measure of human flourishing, which unfortunately doesn't exist. But I think RGDP/capita is a pretty good proxy for human flourishing:
As for whether wealth (broadly writ) is declining, it's possible but hard to see in the statistics. For example, life expectancy has been increasing for a while now. Forces like the opioid epidemic (and deaths of despair more broadly) and Covid have countered these trends, but it's hard to argue that these will continue for a long time or rise as the economy grows.
Additionally, if things like PFAS or microplastics were highly detrimental to health, it would probably show up in higher mortality or worse patient outcomes over time, but that's not what we see. These things probably have some effect, but progress in medicine has outweighed them so far.
Similar arguments applies to many of the problems of our time (climate change, infrastructure issues, environmental damage, etc.) if these things really were harming overall wellbeing we should see them somewhere. They probably *do* have an effect, and fixing them is important, but so far they've been outweighed by progress elsewhere. I don't currently see that changing.
More optimistically, I think these problems have solutions rooted in good policy and innovation, that's a major theme of the things I write here!
Thanks for your response. A couple of things: we’ve only started looking for microplastic issues, and I’ve seen two articles in the past month showing negative impacts. There are issues like the increasing number of young people on the spectrum and/or with serious mental health issues that may be environmentally related, and are at least a chirp from the proverbial canary. Same with extinctions.
Great follow up piece Sam. Its stands to reason that more people creates more opportunities for breakthrough ideas and innovations that help propel economic growth.
I am somewhat sympathetic of the technological determinism argument. As I and many others have noted, innovations seem to come about simultaneously, invented by different individuals at the same time: https://www.lianeon.org/p/invention-vs-innovation
But as you note, there are those ‘Moonshot’ projects that defy this phenomenon, whereby throwing enough resources at a project, we can dramatically accelerate the course of innovation.
I contend that landing humans on the Moon was a 21st Century event that was supposed to take place after the invention of reusable rocketry. Instead, the government invested a significant percentage of GDP into the Apollo program that pulled the event into the 20th Century instead, albeit at a cost that was unsustainable.
>Cumulative U.S. Nobel laureates and cumulative U.S. gold medalists are probably pretty correlated, because both series grow linearly with time. It’s unlikely that there’s a direct causal effect, but we can still forecast things into the future just fine.
This is flawed. The prediction may hold up if you don't mess with the system but if you identify this relationship and use it to justify an intervention you're assuming it is at least partially causal. E.g. assuming no causality, if you increase funding for US athletes you shouldn't expect more Nobels. The relationship should actually weaken. But your entire argument here is pro population growth policies i.e. messing with the system. So now you're assuming causality despite saying you didn't need it.
> So now you're assuming causality despite saying you didn't need it.
We don't need to assume causality to make a forecast, but we *do* need to think about causality if we want to talk about policy, see the beginning of the following section.
I address the concern that policy changes might change the relationship between population and wealth more in the conclusion:
"Will policy intervention destroy the fortuitous correlation between population and wealth? Perhaps. But historically, the relationship between the two has been robust to shocks such as legislation, generational shifts, war, and mass migration. It’s unlikely that small policy changes will have an impact [9]."
2 lines that are "up at a constant rate + noise" does not a strong correlation make.
In other words, if the war didn't make a large shift in the population graph or the wealth graph, it can't possibly break the correlation between them.
GDP per capita is not a measure of wealth, it’s a measure of income. We don’t have great measures of wealth, particularly for natural resources or environmental wealth, but it’s not a stretch to assume that our wealth has been declining—climate change, microplastics, forever (and other) chemicals, exponentially growing use of minerals, deteriorating infrastructure, etc. A billion people in the US would probably result in a faster decline of wealth, which at some point shows up in income. I’m open to other opinions with some evidence.
What I really want is some uncontroversial measure of human flourishing, which unfortunately doesn't exist. But I think RGDP/capita is a pretty good proxy for human flourishing:
https://lantpritchett.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Basics-legatum-paper_short.pdf
As for whether wealth (broadly writ) is declining, it's possible but hard to see in the statistics. For example, life expectancy has been increasing for a while now. Forces like the opioid epidemic (and deaths of despair more broadly) and Covid have countered these trends, but it's hard to argue that these will continue for a long time or rise as the economy grows.
Additionally, if things like PFAS or microplastics were highly detrimental to health, it would probably show up in higher mortality or worse patient outcomes over time, but that's not what we see. These things probably have some effect, but progress in medicine has outweighed them so far.
Similar arguments applies to many of the problems of our time (climate change, infrastructure issues, environmental damage, etc.) if these things really were harming overall wellbeing we should see them somewhere. They probably *do* have an effect, and fixing them is important, but so far they've been outweighed by progress elsewhere. I don't currently see that changing.
More optimistically, I think these problems have solutions rooted in good policy and innovation, that's a major theme of the things I write here!
Thanks for your response. A couple of things: we’ve only started looking for microplastic issues, and I’ve seen two articles in the past month showing negative impacts. There are issues like the increasing number of young people on the spectrum and/or with serious mental health issues that may be environmentally related, and are at least a chirp from the proverbial canary. Same with extinctions.
Great follow up piece Sam. Its stands to reason that more people creates more opportunities for breakthrough ideas and innovations that help propel economic growth.
I am somewhat sympathetic of the technological determinism argument. As I and many others have noted, innovations seem to come about simultaneously, invented by different individuals at the same time: https://www.lianeon.org/p/invention-vs-innovation
But as you note, there are those ‘Moonshot’ projects that defy this phenomenon, whereby throwing enough resources at a project, we can dramatically accelerate the course of innovation.
I contend that landing humans on the Moon was a 21st Century event that was supposed to take place after the invention of reusable rocketry. Instead, the government invested a significant percentage of GDP into the Apollo program that pulled the event into the 20th Century instead, albeit at a cost that was unsustainable.
>Cumulative U.S. Nobel laureates and cumulative U.S. gold medalists are probably pretty correlated, because both series grow linearly with time. It’s unlikely that there’s a direct causal effect, but we can still forecast things into the future just fine.
This is flawed. The prediction may hold up if you don't mess with the system but if you identify this relationship and use it to justify an intervention you're assuming it is at least partially causal. E.g. assuming no causality, if you increase funding for US athletes you shouldn't expect more Nobels. The relationship should actually weaken. But your entire argument here is pro population growth policies i.e. messing with the system. So now you're assuming causality despite saying you didn't need it.
> So now you're assuming causality despite saying you didn't need it.
We don't need to assume causality to make a forecast, but we *do* need to think about causality if we want to talk about policy, see the beginning of the following section.
I address the concern that policy changes might change the relationship between population and wealth more in the conclusion:
"Will policy intervention destroy the fortuitous correlation between population and wealth? Perhaps. But historically, the relationship between the two has been robust to shocks such as legislation, generational shifts, war, and mass migration. It’s unlikely that small policy changes will have an impact [9]."
Both have basically been going up.
2 lines that are "up at a constant rate + noise" does not a strong correlation make.
In other words, if the war didn't make a large shift in the population graph or the wealth graph, it can't possibly break the correlation between them.