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I guess I wasn't clear enough. Lets break down the working population into categories: [unique skills - ceos, etc] X people [highly demanded skills - top

by RyanZAG 14y ago

I guess I wasn't clear enough. Lets break down the working population into categories: [unique skills - ceos, etc] X people [highly demanded skills - top class engineers, specialty surgeons, etc] Y people [regular required jobs - doctors, pharmacists, designers, etc] Z people [unskilled jobs] A people [unemployed] As the population decreases, the demand for each of the sets should decrease in proportion if per capita GDP would remain the same (ignoring wealth effects). However, this isn't the case. If Sony needs 10,000 engineers to create their phones for export to USA, they will still need 10,000 engineers regardless of decreasing population. In addition, a medical school that takes 50 students per year will continue to take 50 students per year even if populations fall, as the number of applicants is far in excess of 50. This is just a few examples, but you could easily find far more. The root cause of this is the existing wealth of the country will enable more people to succeed as the population decreases. A further indication of this effect is that GDP per capita is strongly related to wealth.

philwelch 14y ago
There actually are limits to physicians per capita. You wouldn't have a functioning economy where everyone was a physician. If the population drops by 10%, demand for physicians drops as well. For engineers it's a supply side issue--we could productively employ many more engineers than we do, but it would take immense breakthroughs to have a population where everyone could be an engineer. That's what I meant when I said you'd have to selectively cull the unproductive. If you reduce the population, the remaining workers have to be more productive for per capita GDP to rise, and you still haven't shown that this would happen. It doesn't help if you only need 10,000 engineers when you can only produce 0.01 engineers per capita. You'd need this proportion to rise. How does lowering birth rates do this? In other words--sure, you could probably have a very per-capita rich Galt's Gulch with only 1000 people. But reducing the population arbitrarily to 1000 people will not accomplish this.

by RyanZAG 14y ago

philwelch 14y ago

There actually are limits to physicians per capita. You wouldn't have a functioning economy where everyone was a physician. If the population drops by 10%, demand for physicians drops as well. For engineers it's a supply side issue--we could productively employ many more engineers than we do, but it would take immense breakthroughs to have a population where everyone could be an engineer. That's what I meant when I said you'd have to selectively cull the unproductive. If you reduce the population, the remaining workers have to be more productive for per capita GDP to rise, and you still haven't shown that this would happen. It doesn't help if you only need 10,000 engineers when you can only produce 0.01 engineers per capita. You'd need this proportion to rise. How does lowering birth rates do this? In other words--sure, you could probably have a very per-capita rich Galt's Gulch with only 1000 people. But reducing the population arbitrarily to 1000 people will not accomplish this.