@Dicko: http://www.pmo.gov.sg/News/Messages/PM+Lee+New+Year+Message+2010.htm ... Singaporeans are called upon to increase their birth rate.

I don't see where he did that.

@Dicko: The argument is to increase GDP per person, not to to just increase the GDP.

You would expect growing the population to do that. Assuming you do it by adding workers, you are altering the balance of workers vs non-workers in favour of workers. The overall effect is more production per person.

@Dicko: In fact the PM speaks about limiting the number of people in Singapore.

Yes. And in the next paragraph he speaks about the need to bring in more foreign workers. He can speak out of both sides of his mouth at once it seems, just like politicians everywhere. Numbers speak louder than words, and Singapore's current population growth rate is 5.3% http://www.google.com/search?q=singapore+population+growth+rate - more than double ours http://www.google.com/search?q=australia%27s+population+growth+rate

@Thermoman: 25% does seem a bit high for GDP to cope with 2 per cent increase.

It isn't that hard to justify. We have to build infrastructure to support that person, as you point out. What those figures say is it costs us 12.5 man years to build the infrastructure required to support one person. So lets start with the house we put that person in. That costs around 10 years wages, and so is equivalent to around 10 man years of effort. He probably shares the house, but then there is his portion of all the other things you list - hospitals, roads, sewage, shops, schools, trains, planes, cars, jails, police.

If you don't build those things, they we have to share them around. So, for example if you don't build houses, the vacancy rate drops, and the price will go up accordingly. If you don't build roads, you get lots of congestion, followed governments scrounging around for money, followed by toll ways. If you don't build power stations, you get blackouts, followed by steeply rising electricity prices as they scramble to pay for the new infrastructure. Sound familiar?

BAYGON,

A very sensible and accurate post.

well done.

@rstuart

I'm pretty sure 25% IS pretty hard to justify, as Curmudgeon pointed out. They will become a thing called, tax payers, you see.

Furthermore, since when have we started to reffering to 'years' as 'man years', we're the dominant species man! Revel in it! Maybe when apes take over the world you can use the term...that or you must be an alien, dog or something...

Sydney Carton: "I'm pretty sure 25% IS pretty hard to justify, as Curmudgeon pointed out. They will become a thing called, tax payers, you see."

Yes, well there is a certain logic in that. The same logic applies to kids. They cost society nothing, because they will all become tax payers one day. All you have to do to make it work is ignore is the time gap between when you pay out the money, and when you get it back.

@Sydney Carton: Furthermore, since when have we started to reffering to 'years' as 'man years'

It is sort of like "years" versus "light years". So a year is a measure of time, a light year is a measure of distance, and a man year is a another way of measuring money. Got it?

As far as population goes it's simply a matter for each town and city- or hypothetical future settlement in the desert on an artesian basin- to decide amongst themselves whether they need more or less people.

Control would simply be the permission to build new houses or apartments, with increasing young people (And old people) living at home with their parents or children and wanting a new place becoming a large enough lobby to demand the singular construction of a new series of houses or flats to accommodate- of course, by then cramped houses would be a broad enough problem for everyone to want to figure out a way to accommodate.

If they WANT people, they would build lots of new houses and highrises and try to promote living there to attract business.

Expansion can ONLY be:
-a totally new settlement in a totally new area selected as having as minimal negative environmental, agricultural and social footprint on any other settlements.
-Clearing land outside a city and expanding outwards
-buying houses, demolishing them and building highrises.

I really don't see why this is so hard for some people to understand.

As Australia stands now- I'd imagine the capital cities would be feeling too crowded and congested, the small satellite towns are doing quite well and feeling they are satisfied with their size, as are many remote places. I'd imagine plenty of towns actually DO want people to come over- but no luck.

A population increase (inevitable- but it needs to be encouraged to be slowed a lot), can ONLY be managed by serious and inventive people plotting entirely new cities and somehow getting people (both new as well as those in existing cities) to move there. Existing cities would hopefully thin down to the point that many suburbs hugging roads that SHOULD be interstate motorways would have shrunk back to the point they could actually be converted into local farmland (with local consumer benefits)- instead of something that turns a highway into a 6-lane residential street with the travel speed to match.

The common point most people ignore in these discusssions is that our local population can't be debated in complete isolation from the rest of the world.

If our population stays constant or even grows modestly in the next couple of decades while the rest of the world population doubles, what we still have will be in even greater demand.

If miraculously we end up as a small army of pensioners guarding a pile of resources that everybody else wants then they will simply come and take it from us. We simply can't hold back the rest of the world.

Our Great-and-Powerful Friends (whoever they may be in the coming decades) won't save us - they'll be at the front of the queue.

Remember what happened to the Middle East over the last hundred years or to those various small nations who were unfortunately sitting on strategically important Real Estate - all brushed aside in the name of progress and the greater good.

The real problem isn't local population growth, it's global growth.