from National Review and Kevin Williamson, Don’t Count On the Growth Fairy

And that brings us to a figure that comes up a lot less often in our economic-policy debate: the average real economic growth per capita in the United States, which over the long term has run right around 2 percent.

Whether you are selling cars or shining shoes, you’re generally better off with 300 million potential customers than 150 million of them, for much the same reason that the top 20 bankers and car dealers in New York City earn a lot more than the top 20 bankers and car dealers in Muleshoe, Texas. (That’s the real story of globalization’s effect on the incomes of the highest earners, who now thrive in a global market with billions of customers.) If you own a business, you have a much larger work force to draw from. If you are looking for financing, you have a much larger pool of potential investors.

But not everybody views people as an asset. Some people — the neo-Malthusians on the left and on the right — view people as liabilities. The neo-Malthusians worry that there are too many workers and not enough jobs to go around, that there too many mouths to feed. Sometimes, they believe there is too much supply and not enough demand (as in the case of labor), and sometimes they believe the opposite (as in the case of water). They tend to be anti-immigration, and many of them worry about overpopulation, both on the planet as a whole and in the United States in particular.

The new Malthusians are wrong for the same reason that the old Malthusians were wrong. Between 1950 and 2008, the population of the United States more than doubled. But the economy in 2008 was seven times as large.

HKO

with a lower birthrate growth projections are not likely to be hit without increased immigration. We need a clear policy, but we also need immigration.

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