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J.K. Lund's avatar

Some enlightening charts here. More people means more ideas, more innovation, and more labor, key components of economic growth. This is especially true at the city level where, as I will discuss in an upcoming Risk & Progress essay, innovation and GDP grow superlinearly to population growth.

It also presents a stark warning for those who seek to “close” the borders to immigrants on the right, and those on the left that celebrate shrinking populations. Neither outcome will bring the utopian future they promise.

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Antipopulist's avatar

This is a weird article. Population has a large impact on total GDP, but much less of an impact on GDP per capita, yet it's the latter that this article is focusing on. GDP per capita is mostly a measure of productivity, which itself is mostly a function of a society's technological progress. Tech progress has been slowing quite a lot since the 1950s in nearly all areas except for computers. Forecasting GDP per capita into the future would need to almost entirely focus on which effect would dominate, either science continues slowing to a crawl such that productivity remains nearly constant, or computers (perhaps through AI) become so great that it leads to another era of rapid growth similar to the 19th century.

Total population levels would have almost nothing to do with it, outside of black swan events (e.g. total population crash) or something that impacts productivity/science like older people working less.

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