I knew that, Divergence.

>>The problems due to population growth are appearing in environmental deterioration, quality of life issues, and long waiting lists, which mainly affect ordinary people and don't show up in the national accounts<<

As I have been trying to explain, the economic facts do not support your arguments. Even your friend Dr. Jane knows it, as she points out on page 5 of her submission:

"There is no correlation between growth in GDP per capita, and growth in population, among OECD countries"

So there is no point in waffling on about how population increase impacts GDP per capita; your own evidence says the opposite.

And you won't find any defence of, or explanation for, her infrastructure costs. Here's what she says:

"...using Thurow’s indicative capacity expansion estimate of 12.5 % of GDP per percent of population growth"

In other words, she unquestioningly uses a figure that she read somewhere... here's the narrative associated with Figure 6.

"Capacity expansion is provisionally assumed to have a cost of 12.5% of GDP per percentage of population growth."

In your wildest dreams, you couldn't call that rigorous, could you?

It is an assumption that she couldn't even be bothered to justify, let alone measure against its real world impact. By ignoring the flip-side of the same "assumption" - that a stable population would somehow magically grow by 12.5% - she invalidates her entire economic argument.

Incidentally, where did you get the idea that she is "a qualified economist"? As far as I can tell, she is an agricultural scientist and a prominent member of the Stable Population Party. Her contribution would not pass muster in any group of economists I have ever come across.

But maybe I just don't get out enough.

No disrespect to Dr Jane O'Sullivan, Divergence… I'm certain her 18 soil science papers focusing as they do on yams are exemplars of specialist scientific rigour – though I choose not to read 'Crop Development and Root Distribution in Lesser Jam (Dioscorea Esculenta): Implications for Fertilisation' because I know I wouldn't understand it.

http://www.uq.edu.au/uqresearchers/researcher/osullivanjn.html?uv_category=pub

But an economist? No. As Pericles has noted.

As for her 'The downward spiral of hasty population growth' which you cited, amongst its other claims, I find myself especially confused with this paragraph:

"So, if we’re currently growing at 2 per cent per year, then 25 per cent of our GDP is currently being used to expand capacity to accommodate the people who are not yet here (or will have to be spent eventually to catch up). This means that the GDP available per capita to serve current residents is 25 per cent less than the advertised per capita GDP."

Meantime (no paywall BTW), I've downloaded her 'The Burden of Durable Asset Acquisition in Growing Populations'

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0270.2011.02125.x/pdf

In the hope there is some clarification – unless you wish to offer some?

You missed the glaring error in my post Pericles!

I said:

<< The mild weather with low humidity has continued right up to the middle of spring >>

‘cept the middle of spring is the middle of October, not November.

Just sayin.

BTW, twas a wonderful day here in Cairns. Beautiful beaches, blue skies and bikini babes abounding ( :>)

.......

I wrote:

>> So um, in the interests of trying to regain some sense in this discussion, would you care to proffer a sensible response to this statement from my last post….

No doubt if we’d had a much lower rate of population growth through the years of the mining boom, we would have seen MUCH better average per-capita economic growth. <<

You devoted a whole post to this. Thankyou!

‘cept you went off on whacky tangents and completely didn’t address it!!

The obvious point inherent in my question is that if we’d had a much lower growth rate over this period, we would have had far fewer people to share the wealth amongst and hence the average per-capita wealth would have been considerably higher.

But of course you entirely avoided this. Could it be because you know it is true, irrefutable, and that it absolutely cripples your high-population-growth advocacy?

Average per-capita GDP, notwithstanding the terrible measure of wellbeing that it is, would have been a whole lot higher. And services and infrastructure would have been in much better condition, as would koala habitat and the rest of our natural environment. Our overall quality of life would have been considerably higher.

Now, this is neither hard and fast fact nor pure conjecture. It is somewhere in between.

But can you refute it?

Again you have asked me questions without meaningfully addressing my previous query. So give me a meaningful response and then I’ll be happy to address your questions.

Thanks to Wm. Trevor for finding an open link to the Jane O'Sullivan paper in Economic Affairs. I have seen her referred to as an agricultural economist, but am not sure if that is the case. In any case, she has published in an economics journal and would have had to meet the same peer review standards. If you look at her paper, Pericles, you will see that she has referred to Lester Thurow, but also done her own calculation.

Pericles is attributing arguments to me that I never made. It is Pericles who has been claiming that there is a significant economic benefit from mass migration, not me claiming that there is a significant negative effect on GNP per capita. If you look at the 2006 Productivity Commission report that I linked to above, you will see that they claim a very small positive effect on GNP per capita from immigration, but find it far less significant than the other factors involved (see graph on p. 155) This is consistent with Prof. Rowthorn's "close to zero or negative" and the opinion of former federal Secretary of the Treasury John Stone (who is an economist) in Quadrant (quoted in O'Sullivan submission): "we could not show that it [immigration] raised per capita GDP—the average Australian’s living standard". It is the distributional effects that make ordinary people worse off, according to the Productivity Commission report, because the high immigration depresses wages, not because it decreases GNP per capita. To this I would add, among other things, environmental deterioration due to the bigger population, crowding and congestion, overstretched and crumbling infrastructure and public services, and inflated housing costs.

Wm Trevor, I am all for unselfishness. Perhaps the rich people who are enjoying enormous profits from development and other benefits of the current arrangements might care to lead the way and set an example for the rest of us. I don't hate anyone or want revenge. I just want Pericles and his friends to stop using mass migration as an instrument of class warfare.

I have addressed this, Ludwig.

>>The obvious point inherent in my question is that if we’d had a much lower growth rate over this period, we would have had far fewer people to share the wealth amongst and hence the average per-capita wealth would have been considerably higher.<<

And the obvious point in my parallel question was that without the fourteen million people who joined us on this island since 1950, Where would the wealth have come from? Who would have dug up the coal, mined the ore etc? The pixies?

In the meantime, the facts are clear. GDP has grown. GDP per head has grown. Not a single "if" in sight.

Everything else can only be conjecture.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

On to Divergence.

>>Pericles is attributing arguments to me that I never made.<<

Oh really? Who was it who posted this?

>>The economist Jane O'Sullivan (see Feb. 2012 Economic Affairs) has calculated that the 1.4% population growth that we had last year cost us 9.6% of total GNP, She based this on a very conservative estimate of $200,000 cost per person. Others are up to twice as high. Infrastructure Australia estimates a $770 billion infrastructure backlog. The American economist Lester Thurow estimates a cost of 12.5% of GNP to support 1% population growth.<<

The numbers simply do not make sense, as I have pointed out. The mirror scenario - that the economy would grow by massive amounts with a stable population - makes no sense whatsoever. I struggle to imagine how anyone could believe otherwise.

And once again, the only empirical evidence is that of GDP per capita growing alongside overall GDP growth.

Everything else can only be conjecture.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

<< And the obvious point in my parallel question was that without the fourteen million people who joined us on this island since 1950, Where would the wealth have come from? Who would have dug up the coal, mined the ore etc? The pixies? >>

That is a complete non-answer to my query.

Pericles, I specifically said; through the years of the mining boom.

So I’m still waiting for a meaningful response.

At the moment it is looking as though you cannot address my query and that you have in effect ceded that if there had been a whole lot less immigrants since, say about 1990, then the average per-capita gains from the mining boom would have been very significantly higher.

Remember, it took me several attempts to get you to justify your agreement with the current level of immigration. You just avoided the query time and time again. And then the answer you gave was just terrible – that it doesn’t need any justification!!

Come on, are you in this discussion for sophistic reasons or to genuinely debate the subject?

If it is the latter, then give me a real answer….please.