Contrary to what most economists and analysts tell us, a large population, or even a growing population, might be more harmful than beneficial in the new age of AI and robots.
If we want to talk about national wealth, much depends on how we define it but if we define it as the mass of goods divided by the number of supplicants for those goods we begin to ask, if our GNP is produced by artificial intelligence and robots, do we need more than 330 million people to increase production? If we are dividing the sum of production by the population, would not a more manageable population make us richer rather than poorer?
If we are entering a technological age in which wealth at the level of conception is done by a very few brilliant human minds while the bulk of production is done by smart machines, how do we distribute the wealth? If we don't distribute the wealth, do we risk revolution? If we do distribute the wealth will we certainly kill off incentive?
It seems to me these questions become all the more intractable the more disparity between the elite and the consuming class is increased by virtue of size of population.
Most of the arguments in favor of large population, or more intelligently of growing population, center on the need to create markets for consumption. In an age in which 3D printing is making us rethink the entire concept of economies of scale, should we not also rethink this maxim?
You touched on another argument in support of an ever-growing population: Social Security.
I do not understand an argument that essentially says that the way to shore up a Ponzi scheme is to expand the Ponzi scheme to an ever greater number of participants. I do not accept the view that we need to engage in an immigration/population Ponzi scheme in order to maintain a growing economy. That is what we say about Social Security. In effect we divide the cost of maintaining our seniors by an ever shrinking workforce and despair at the arithmetic so we simply kick the can down the road and make it ultimately worse.
Instead, we should analyze these problems in terms of productivity of our machinery rather than productivity of our workers. Inevitably, we are going to have to substitute robots for people as we have already done in the world of information technology. The downside of the present system is to encourage sending our jobs to India and China. I think we have somehow got to think in terms of production overall instead of production per man-hour. We already have the tools, such as return on capital etc. but we are not employing them in the policymaking arena.
