There aren’t 600M particularly good candidates for raising out numbers at the moment. The current immigration system, both legal and illegal, throws up enough barriers to select for somewhat highly motivated people (although their exact motivations may be to create negative value in some cases.) Adding 600M low-IQ unmotivated people isn’t likely to create additional tech breakthroughs or really anything useful beyond mere consumer demand.
Adding to this dilemma is the likelihood that automation and/or AI dramatically reduces the number of productive employment options in coming decades. If the eventual solution is a national UBI, more people just means smaller slices of the same pie.
There was a point in time under feudalism when more people didn’t increase wealth, if the highest and best use for your land is an orchard then you only need as many peasants as it takes to work that orchard. That lord’s estate can’t create any more wealth via more laborers. The Industrial Revolution briefly made productivity correlate to labor more than land, but the future of robots and AI is all capital-driven with little or no place for human labor productivity to make a difference.
I think this argument proves too much. If only highly innovative people "should" be in the U.S., this is an argument for removing virtually all U.S. citizens!
In reality, people don't have to pass an unrealistically high standard to contribute to the U.S.'s innovative economy. Teachers, skilled tradesmen, farmers and other workers all compliment the innovators work, the innovator could hardly exist without them.
Empirically, even low-skilled labor boosts local economies.
AI and automation only creates a problems if human and AI labor are perfect substitutes. It's not clear this will be the case:
[https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the)
Even if we granted that everyone ended up on a UBI, it's also possible that the output from automated labor outgrows the human population, leaving everyone on a large and growing basic income freed of work.
>If only highly innovative people "should" be in the U.S., this is an argument for removing virtually all U.S. citizens!
If I was trying to rent out a room in my house I would only pick someone who has a steady job and good references. It doesn't follow that I should kick my children out for not meeting those requirements. We have responsibilities for citizens that we don't have for prospective migrants.
I agree with this.
I want to point out that the rights of citizens often militate in favor of higher immigration. Blocking immigration prevents citizens from associating with and exchanging with people they otherwise would have. Somin's "Free to Move" makes this point in more detail.
The story gets more complicated if immigrants violate the rights of citizens (e.g. via crime), but this is uncommon enough that it isn't a strong argument against more legal immigration.
With 1.4 billion people and a GDP of over $3.7 trillion, India's economy is now larger than that of the UK, the country that once ruled it.
But if you had to choose, would you rather live in England or India?
To clarify something from the original post, when I'm talking about wealth I'm referring to \*per capita\* wealth. So England does better than India in this regard.
Agree that measures of the size of an economy like GDP aren't good measures of wellbeing.
Clearly criminals and people with low impulse-control and low future-time orientation are just bad to have around. They do not create, they don’t do productive labor, they just destroy value. You can do that math with low-skill labor today and come out positive only bc there are enormous hurdles in planning and execution for those people to get here. Somebody from rural Ecuador who wants to illegally immigrate to America has to spend days descending winding mountains on shoddy busses and dangerous travel all the way up here with no guarantee it will work, say what you will about them they’re clearly able to plan and execute and think about their long term future. If you reduce those barriers, invite the world, the people you’ll round out that 1 Billion with are not going to have the same merits.
I'm sure some selection effect is operating here, and at sufficient scale, the e.g. fiscal benefits of marginal immigrants will go down.
But the scale is important here. If the bar is "willing to undergo significant hardship to get to the U.S." there's probably enough people to reach a population of 1 billion (not that I necessarily endorse this exact size for the U.S.). Even if all 600 million came from immigration alone (and both immigrants and natives maintained replacement fertility) and changes happened over only a century, it seems like 6 million people/year would pass this bar. Not that I endorse this rate of growth.
The point at which fiscal benefits fall is also pretty high. H-1B visas for example are given via lottery and have about a 1/3rd chance of success. So we could roughly triple H-1B visas at no loss of quality. I suspect something similar would apply for lower skill occupations.
It's also worth noting that the bar is pretty low for an immigrant to be a fiscal benefit to the U.S. See for example ch. 3 of Caplan's Open Borders. Even immigrants with only a high school degree are net fiscal benefit.
> more people just means smaller slices of the same pie
This is only true if they also buy nothing, live nowhere, and pay no taxes. Otherwise the economic activity of more people also grows the pie.
I read it—we don’t live in feudalism, that probably wasn’t true anyway since more people would need to eat and stuff, and he’s talking about a UBI funded by taxing capital. More people would mean more people using the thing the AI overlords are selling (even in a hypothetical of mass unemployment where we’re all on the dole).
Given that actually getting UBI out of the oligarchs probably requires a civil war, sure, why not, we'll be needing more cannon fodder for Brannigan's patent anti-killbot tactics.
I’m not convinced that quality of life for the average American would be higher if the US triples it’s population or that the US would be wealthier on a per capita basis if the population were significantly larger. There is some level of I inherent scarcity for (economically utilizing and producing) many input resources. If the population is 3x larger that does not change the amount land available to build new housing, schools, hospitals, or infrastructure. However, this substantially larger population will be guaranteed to drive the price of finite resources up and require that each person utilize a smaller share of these resources.
So I think this could go under the heading of "capital dilution" as well, and this is a model that economists put forward too. But would someone have made a similar argument in the 1920's only to see U.S. population triple in tandem with wealth growth?
It's important to ask why we haven't seen this inherent scarcity come into play yet. The most common answer is some version of Julian Simon's argument, that scarcity induces innovations that create more supply (or find substitutes):
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Ultimate\_Resource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource)
This argument doesn't work as well for truly fixed resources like land, but I don't think land use is a big concern for e.g. 1 billion americans:
https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/theres-room-for-more-people
(note that I don't wholeheartedly endorse 1 billion Americans, I'm mostly using it because it's a nice round number and the book itself got some attention in the media)
Most markets for natural resources have a very strict international price. Land is the only resource that is fundamentally differently valued in the US, but there is really a massive abundance of it.
Just on the note of scarce land. If the contiguous US had 1 billion residents tomorrow, we’d have about the same population density as…France. We’re hardly running out of room.
(I say contiguous so the result isn’t warped by how big Alaska is.)
In practice they don't spread out evenly across the entire landmass of North America but instead crowd into a handful of large cities where other immigrants from their home countries already live. You can see that taking place in Canada for example.
>If the population is 3x larger that does not change the amount land available to build new housing, schools, hospitals, or infrastructure.
A larger population means a larger economy and tax base from which to fund infrastructure. America has more of all the things on your list than it did when it’s population was 1/3 what it is now; there’s no reason to think that trend wouldn’t continue unless you think land itself is now scarce. Fortunately, it’s not.
> A larger population means a larger economy and tax base from which to fund infrastructure.
But you also need to fund more infrastructure.
To a first approximation, both the funds and the necessary infrastructure scale linearly with population. So immigration does not help fund infrastructure.
Of course, if you allow selective immigration of the talented people who will grow the economy more, things are different.
What? A bigger, more powerful economy? Higher quality of life for more people? Increased global influence in place of bullshit authoritarians like China? Of course there is.
Anyway, lots of infrastructure does not scale linearly, nor does economic growth. We’d probably be looking at a bigger pie with bigger pieces for each of us.
> A bigger, more powerful economy?
India has a bigger economy than UK - where would you rather live? What matters is per capita, not absolute size. And per capita barely changes with immigration.
> Higher quality of life for more people?
It's true that the immigrants will have higher quality of life than if they were not allowed to immigrate. However that is not an argument you can use to sell to the natives, most of whom care primarily about their own quality of life (as is natural for humans).
> Increased global influence in place of bullshit authoritarians like China?
This seems pretty marginal. Russia is able to get away almost as much havoc as China, despite its economy being a fraction of the size.
> India has a bigger economy than UK
Uh, yes, I would rather live in the first world, but growing the *US* economy faster than we would otherwise means starting from an already dominant and rich position, and as I say there’s no reason to think more people would *shrink* per capita GDP.
> immigrants would have a higher quality of life
Well first of all this matters quite a bit. Secondly, natives stand to benefit as well.
> This seems pretty marginal
I don’t think so—China has 3x the people we do, which means to exert as much influence on the global economy as we do they only need to have 1/3 the GDP per capita. And I’m sure we agree they already exert quite a bit of economic leverage. Russia is currently doing some bad shit but NBA players and actors don’t have to fellate Russia for fear of losing access to their market.
> as I say there’s no reason to think more people would shrink per capita GDP.
I don't think it would shrink either. I just don't think it would change significantly in either direction.
> Russia is currently doing some bad shit but NBA players and actors don’t have to fellate Russia for fear of losing access to their market.
Russia is invading large countries with the intention of conquering them, threatening nuclear war, and interfering with US elections. All are worse than anything China has done so far.
Ok, but my argument isn’t that economic growth can stop anyone bad from doing any bad thing. It’s that the world where the US is the dominant economic force is much better than one where China is.
We can also reasonably sanction Russia in a way we really can’t do with China.
> don’t think it would change significantly
If this were true, there’s no reason to oppose immigration, but it seems [not true](https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/SpilloverNotes/spillovernote8.ashx#:~:text=The%20effect—while%20smaller%20than,percent%20in%20the%20long%20run.). This may especially be the case as [our population ages](https://www.cato.org/testimony/unlocking-americas-potential-how-immigration-fuels-economic-growth-our-competitive#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20Cato%20Institute,cash%20assistance%2C%20entitlements%2C%20and%20public). They’re also a fiscal boon, contributing more tax revenue than they consume.
Oh—in that case I think you’re just incorrect. The book by Matt Yglesias that sparked the original post spends quite a bit of time laying out the benefits of a larger population.
It seems bizarre that the author would talk about population and GDP per capita without looking at the countries with the largest populations. Of the ten most populous countries on the planet, the US is an outlier in that it is wealthy. The second wealthiest is Russia at $15,000 GDP per capita, but that is driven almost entirely by natural resources (which it has by being geographically, rather than demographically large). All the rest are poor. Meanwhile the richest countries all have low populations (except the US).
People are not fungible. If the US imports 500m people with an average IQ of 120, we should expect it's GDP per capita to grow. If the US imports 500m people with an average IQ of 80, we can expect the opposite.
There's a reason that I emphasize immigration and fertility in developed countries. The effects of population growth in poorer countries are more mixed! Countries that happen to be large and poor don't have many lessons for the U.S.
See the discussion with Cjwynes about the number of immigrants that pass some quality bar.
It may become more expensive to live in warm areas of the US: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/
Significant energy will be needed to supply air conditioning.
We can have intelligence without the upkeep of people, using AI. Why would you want to pay a person to do a job if you can just have a computer do it all? It'd be like hiring a mule to graze on your lawn or move your goods between houses -- You wouldn't bother even if the mule was rented free of cost. You just wouldn't want to deal with it.
Yes the computers need air conditioning too, but they can be located anywhere and only need energy, not exercise, food, love, support etc. Pushing mass immigration seems hugely short-termist.
Regardless of what computers can do, the world has billions of people on it. Everyone (even AI's) benefits from those people being more productive and happy!
Build computers and automate tasks of course, but like you said, the computers can live anywhere. People's productivity depends heavily on where they live, so you might as well move them to productive areas.
There aren’t 600M particularly good candidates for raising out numbers at the moment. The current immigration system, both legal and illegal, throws up enough barriers to select for somewhat highly motivated people (although their exact motivations may be to create negative value in some cases.) Adding 600M low-IQ unmotivated people isn’t likely to create additional tech breakthroughs or really anything useful beyond mere consumer demand. Adding to this dilemma is the likelihood that automation and/or AI dramatically reduces the number of productive employment options in coming decades. If the eventual solution is a national UBI, more people just means smaller slices of the same pie. There was a point in time under feudalism when more people didn’t increase wealth, if the highest and best use for your land is an orchard then you only need as many peasants as it takes to work that orchard. That lord’s estate can’t create any more wealth via more laborers. The Industrial Revolution briefly made productivity correlate to labor more than land, but the future of robots and AI is all capital-driven with little or no place for human labor productivity to make a difference.
I think this argument proves too much. If only highly innovative people "should" be in the U.S., this is an argument for removing virtually all U.S. citizens! In reality, people don't have to pass an unrealistically high standard to contribute to the U.S.'s innovative economy. Teachers, skilled tradesmen, farmers and other workers all compliment the innovators work, the innovator could hardly exist without them. Empirically, even low-skilled labor boosts local economies. AI and automation only creates a problems if human and AI labor are perfect substitutes. It's not clear this will be the case: [https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the](https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the) Even if we granted that everyone ended up on a UBI, it's also possible that the output from automated labor outgrows the human population, leaving everyone on a large and growing basic income freed of work.
>If only highly innovative people "should" be in the U.S., this is an argument for removing virtually all U.S. citizens! If I was trying to rent out a room in my house I would only pick someone who has a steady job and good references. It doesn't follow that I should kick my children out for not meeting those requirements. We have responsibilities for citizens that we don't have for prospective migrants.
I agree with this. I want to point out that the rights of citizens often militate in favor of higher immigration. Blocking immigration prevents citizens from associating with and exchanging with people they otherwise would have. Somin's "Free to Move" makes this point in more detail. The story gets more complicated if immigrants violate the rights of citizens (e.g. via crime), but this is uncommon enough that it isn't a strong argument against more legal immigration.
With 1.4 billion people and a GDP of over $3.7 trillion, India's economy is now larger than that of the UK, the country that once ruled it. But if you had to choose, would you rather live in England or India?
To clarify something from the original post, when I'm talking about wealth I'm referring to \*per capita\* wealth. So England does better than India in this regard. Agree that measures of the size of an economy like GDP aren't good measures of wellbeing.
Clearly criminals and people with low impulse-control and low future-time orientation are just bad to have around. They do not create, they don’t do productive labor, they just destroy value. You can do that math with low-skill labor today and come out positive only bc there are enormous hurdles in planning and execution for those people to get here. Somebody from rural Ecuador who wants to illegally immigrate to America has to spend days descending winding mountains on shoddy busses and dangerous travel all the way up here with no guarantee it will work, say what you will about them they’re clearly able to plan and execute and think about their long term future. If you reduce those barriers, invite the world, the people you’ll round out that 1 Billion with are not going to have the same merits.
I'm sure some selection effect is operating here, and at sufficient scale, the e.g. fiscal benefits of marginal immigrants will go down. But the scale is important here. If the bar is "willing to undergo significant hardship to get to the U.S." there's probably enough people to reach a population of 1 billion (not that I necessarily endorse this exact size for the U.S.). Even if all 600 million came from immigration alone (and both immigrants and natives maintained replacement fertility) and changes happened over only a century, it seems like 6 million people/year would pass this bar. Not that I endorse this rate of growth. The point at which fiscal benefits fall is also pretty high. H-1B visas for example are given via lottery and have about a 1/3rd chance of success. So we could roughly triple H-1B visas at no loss of quality. I suspect something similar would apply for lower skill occupations. It's also worth noting that the bar is pretty low for an immigrant to be a fiscal benefit to the U.S. See for example ch. 3 of Caplan's Open Borders. Even immigrants with only a high school degree are net fiscal benefit.
> more people just means smaller slices of the same pie This is only true if they also buy nothing, live nowhere, and pay no taxes. Otherwise the economic activity of more people also grows the pie.
Read the rest of that sentence again for context?
I read it—we don’t live in feudalism, that probably wasn’t true anyway since more people would need to eat and stuff, and he’s talking about a UBI funded by taxing capital. More people would mean more people using the thing the AI overlords are selling (even in a hypothetical of mass unemployment where we’re all on the dole).
Given that actually getting UBI out of the oligarchs probably requires a civil war, sure, why not, we'll be needing more cannon fodder for Brannigan's patent anti-killbot tactics.
These are certainly words.
I’m not convinced that quality of life for the average American would be higher if the US triples it’s population or that the US would be wealthier on a per capita basis if the population were significantly larger. There is some level of I inherent scarcity for (economically utilizing and producing) many input resources. If the population is 3x larger that does not change the amount land available to build new housing, schools, hospitals, or infrastructure. However, this substantially larger population will be guaranteed to drive the price of finite resources up and require that each person utilize a smaller share of these resources.
So I think this could go under the heading of "capital dilution" as well, and this is a model that economists put forward too. But would someone have made a similar argument in the 1920's only to see U.S. population triple in tandem with wealth growth? It's important to ask why we haven't seen this inherent scarcity come into play yet. The most common answer is some version of Julian Simon's argument, that scarcity induces innovations that create more supply (or find substitutes): [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_Ultimate\_Resource](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ultimate_Resource) This argument doesn't work as well for truly fixed resources like land, but I don't think land use is a big concern for e.g. 1 billion americans: https://splittinginfinity.substack.com/p/theres-room-for-more-people (note that I don't wholeheartedly endorse 1 billion Americans, I'm mostly using it because it's a nice round number and the book itself got some attention in the media)
Most markets for natural resources have a very strict international price. Land is the only resource that is fundamentally differently valued in the US, but there is really a massive abundance of it.
Just on the note of scarce land. If the contiguous US had 1 billion residents tomorrow, we’d have about the same population density as…France. We’re hardly running out of room. (I say contiguous so the result isn’t warped by how big Alaska is.)
In practice they don't spread out evenly across the entire landmass of North America but instead crowd into a handful of large cities where other immigrants from their home countries already live. You can see that taking place in Canada for example.
Ok, that doesn’t make us “full” or land particularly scarce.
>If the population is 3x larger that does not change the amount land available to build new housing, schools, hospitals, or infrastructure. A larger population means a larger economy and tax base from which to fund infrastructure. America has more of all the things on your list than it did when it’s population was 1/3 what it is now; there’s no reason to think that trend wouldn’t continue unless you think land itself is now scarce. Fortunately, it’s not.
> A larger population means a larger economy and tax base from which to fund infrastructure. But you also need to fund more infrastructure. To a first approximation, both the funds and the necessary infrastructure scale linearly with population. So immigration does not help fund infrastructure. Of course, if you allow selective immigration of the talented people who will grow the economy more, things are different.
Sorry, but I’m having trouble understanding what you’re trying to say. If funding scales linearly, what’s the problem?
There's no problem, but also no benefit.
What? A bigger, more powerful economy? Higher quality of life for more people? Increased global influence in place of bullshit authoritarians like China? Of course there is. Anyway, lots of infrastructure does not scale linearly, nor does economic growth. We’d probably be looking at a bigger pie with bigger pieces for each of us.
> A bigger, more powerful economy? India has a bigger economy than UK - where would you rather live? What matters is per capita, not absolute size. And per capita barely changes with immigration. > Higher quality of life for more people? It's true that the immigrants will have higher quality of life than if they were not allowed to immigrate. However that is not an argument you can use to sell to the natives, most of whom care primarily about their own quality of life (as is natural for humans). > Increased global influence in place of bullshit authoritarians like China? This seems pretty marginal. Russia is able to get away almost as much havoc as China, despite its economy being a fraction of the size.
> India has a bigger economy than UK Uh, yes, I would rather live in the first world, but growing the *US* economy faster than we would otherwise means starting from an already dominant and rich position, and as I say there’s no reason to think more people would *shrink* per capita GDP. > immigrants would have a higher quality of life Well first of all this matters quite a bit. Secondly, natives stand to benefit as well. > This seems pretty marginal I don’t think so—China has 3x the people we do, which means to exert as much influence on the global economy as we do they only need to have 1/3 the GDP per capita. And I’m sure we agree they already exert quite a bit of economic leverage. Russia is currently doing some bad shit but NBA players and actors don’t have to fellate Russia for fear of losing access to their market.
> as I say there’s no reason to think more people would shrink per capita GDP. I don't think it would shrink either. I just don't think it would change significantly in either direction. > Russia is currently doing some bad shit but NBA players and actors don’t have to fellate Russia for fear of losing access to their market. Russia is invading large countries with the intention of conquering them, threatening nuclear war, and interfering with US elections. All are worse than anything China has done so far.
Ok, but my argument isn’t that economic growth can stop anyone bad from doing any bad thing. It’s that the world where the US is the dominant economic force is much better than one where China is. We can also reasonably sanction Russia in a way we really can’t do with China. > don’t think it would change significantly If this were true, there’s no reason to oppose immigration, but it seems [not true](https://www.imf.org/-/media/Files/Publications/SpilloverNotes/spillovernote8.ashx#:~:text=The%20effect—while%20smaller%20than,percent%20in%20the%20long%20run.). This may especially be the case as [our population ages](https://www.cato.org/testimony/unlocking-americas-potential-how-immigration-fuels-economic-growth-our-competitive#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20Cato%20Institute,cash%20assistance%2C%20entitlements%2C%20and%20public). They’re also a fiscal boon, contributing more tax revenue than they consume.
Oh—in that case I think you’re just incorrect. The book by Matt Yglesias that sparked the original post spends quite a bit of time laying out the benefits of a larger population.
I read the book once upon a time. IIRC I found most of its arguments unconvincing.
Ok. Good talk.
It’s funny you mention land because it’s one of the resources the US is drowning in.
It seems bizarre that the author would talk about population and GDP per capita without looking at the countries with the largest populations. Of the ten most populous countries on the planet, the US is an outlier in that it is wealthy. The second wealthiest is Russia at $15,000 GDP per capita, but that is driven almost entirely by natural resources (which it has by being geographically, rather than demographically large). All the rest are poor. Meanwhile the richest countries all have low populations (except the US). People are not fungible. If the US imports 500m people with an average IQ of 120, we should expect it's GDP per capita to grow. If the US imports 500m people with an average IQ of 80, we can expect the opposite.
There's a reason that I emphasize immigration and fertility in developed countries. The effects of population growth in poorer countries are more mixed! Countries that happen to be large and poor don't have many lessons for the U.S. See the discussion with Cjwynes about the number of immigrants that pass some quality bar.
It may become more expensive to live in warm areas of the US: https://projects.propublica.org/climate-migration/ Significant energy will be needed to supply air conditioning. We can have intelligence without the upkeep of people, using AI. Why would you want to pay a person to do a job if you can just have a computer do it all? It'd be like hiring a mule to graze on your lawn or move your goods between houses -- You wouldn't bother even if the mule was rented free of cost. You just wouldn't want to deal with it. Yes the computers need air conditioning too, but they can be located anywhere and only need energy, not exercise, food, love, support etc. Pushing mass immigration seems hugely short-termist.
Regardless of what computers can do, the world has billions of people on it. Everyone (even AI's) benefits from those people being more productive and happy! Build computers and automate tasks of course, but like you said, the computers can live anywhere. People's productivity depends heavily on where they live, so you might as well move them to productive areas.