Pericles,

All that I can suggest is that you read the O'Sullivan article to which Wm Trevor provided a link.

More people do increase total GNP, at least until you get into the situation of grossly overpopulated Third World countries. No one disputes this. You are just assuming without evidence, however, that population growth is a big contributor to GNP per capita. Yet the 2006 Productivity Commission report says that immigration (i.e. high population growth) is a very minor contributor to GNP per capita. Since mass migration is such a small contributor, the fact that GNP per capita has been going up could be due to any number of other factors, such as technological progress and terms of trade. As I keep pointing out, other countries are doing very well even though their populations have grown very little or not at all.

That extra 9.6% for needed infrastructure spending may largely just represent an addition to the infrastructure backlog. Any extra infrastructure spending that does take place might well show up as a positive gain to GNP per capita, even though it doesn't make existing residents any better off, while the cuts to public services used to divert money to it are not taken into account. How much for having to wait 30 minutes on hold? GNP per capita has long been criticised as an imperfect measure of human welfare,among other things, because it includes defensive spending (on burglar alarms if crime has gone up in a suburb for example) or rebuilding after disasters. Nor does it have anything to say about how wealth is distributed. See the O'Sullivan Economic Affairs paper and the Ralph Musgrave paper that I linked to earlier for the UK.

Mining and agriculture are big contributors to our export earnings, but don't employ a great many people, about 1.5% of the work force for mining. There is a skills issue, largely due to neglect of training.

What Jane O'Sullivan is saying isn't controversial. This is what Ross Gittins, the Economics Editor of the Sydney Morning Herald had to say on the infrastructure issue:

"As economists know - but don't like to talk or even think about - the reason immigration adds little or nothing to the material living standards of the existing population is that each extra person coming to Australia - the workers and their families - has to be provided with extra capital equipment: a home to live in, machines to use at work and a host of public infrastructure such as roads, public transport, schools, hospitals, libraries, police stations and much else.

"The cost of that extra capital has to be set against the benefit from the extra labour. If the extra capital isn't forthcoming, living standards - and, no doubt, quality of life - decline.

"If we don't build the extra homes - as we haven't been doing for some years - rents and house prices keep rising, making home ownership less affordable. To build the extra public facilities, governments have to raise taxes and borrow money. But they hate raising taxes and both sides of federal politics have sworn to eliminate government debt."

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/punters-well-aware-of-economic-case-against-more-immigration-20101123-185ij.html#ixzz2CYbtierr

I am aware of that, Ludwig.

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

But the answer is substantially the same.

Over both periods - 1950s to here, and the start of the mining boom to here, our GDP and GDP per head have risen steadily. Although I would not be so silly as to ascribe causality, you have to accept that logic - and an understanding of how business works - indicates very strongly indeed that population growth and GDP growth are related.

The reasons are not hard to determine. Without talented and qualified people on hand to provide both the engineering and mining expertise as well as the grunt work required, the majority of the wealth that we have created over the past fifty years would have stayed underground.

Some would say that this would have been a good thing. They would however have been required to go without a great deal of the quality of life that they currently experience here. Not to mention the very real possibility that we would right now be in the same financial nutcracker as many European countries, who were unable to do what we have done.

>>...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.<<

Absolutely not. Wealth doesn't create itself, you know. It is nonsense to pretend that we could all be better off just by standing around, waiting for the iron ore to jump itself out of the ground, load itself onto ships and earn us some dollars.

>>Remember, it took me several attempts to get you to justify your agreement with the current level of immigration.<<

I know. You're such a saint to put up with it.

But you may also recall that I am not advocating a change to the status quo; you are. Asking me to justify a non-decision is like asking me to justify why I prefer the sky to stay blue.

Here's an article that you will appreciate, Ludwig.

http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/7146

"By luck or superior adaptation, a few species manage to escape their limits, at least for a while. Nature’s success stories, they are like Gause’s protozoans; the world is their petri dish. Their populations grow exponentially; they take over large areas, overwhelming their environment as if no force opposed them. Then they annihilate themselves, drowning in their own wastes or starving from lack of food."

...and

"If we follow Gause’s pattern, growth will continue at a delirious speed until we hit the second inflection point. At that time we will have exhausted the resources of the global petri dish, or effectively made the atmosphere toxic with our carbon-dioxide waste, or both. After that, human life will be, briefly, a Hobbesian nightmare, the living overwhelmed by the dead."

I strongly recommend that you read it all the way through. It should give you some idea of the scale of the real challenges that exist, and put the issue of Australia's penny-number immigration statistics into some perspective.

Think of that petri dish, Ludwig. Then ponder the power that would be needed to stop it spilling over. As Mr Niebuhr put it...

"...grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference... that I may be reasonably happy in this life".

I am of the opinion that the resolution to the problem lies in our ability as a world to alleviate the poverty that drives people to multiply mindlessly. Also, that the population stability that you wish to impose upon our tiny corner of the world will have absolutely no impact on the bigger picture - that petri dish - and only serve to trash our own lives to no overall purpose. In short, I strongly believe the answer lies in the self-regulating mechanisms of global economic management. (And definitely not the gonzo economics of an agricultural scientist.)

But then, what do I know.

It’s Monday morning, and Pericles is still arguing for protracted population growth, from a position whereby it is automatically a good thing and needs no justification, while any lower level of growth needs rigorous justification… which it has been comprehensively given by other posters on this thread…. and then dismissed as bunkum by the wondrous all-knowing perfect Pericles.

Oh how depressing! ( :>(

He is coming from such a laughable position, and yet continues to entertain the discussion in a more or less serious manner! Well, it would be laughable, if it wasn’t so sad!

And now for his latest bizarre offering:

Strong population growth in the early years of our country’s history and up to the post-war era of the fifties to about the seventies was a good thing for the establishment and development of the nation. Therefore high, in fact considerably higher, population growth through the nineties, noughties and teenies and beyond is just as good.

What a load of cods!

Yes it was arguably a net positive thing up to approximately 1975, after which it would have been advisable to head gently towards a stable population.

Now, GDP has indeed risen all along with population growth. But, wait a minute; all the economic activity generated by population growth, both good and bad, adds to GDP. So all the work needed to maintain or improve services and infrastructure that is stressed out by ever-increasing demand, which is one of the big negatives of high population growth, actually gets counted as positive within that stupid measurement called GDP!

So, the steady increase of GDP is a highly fallacious indicator of our wellbeing, and we really should drop any further mention of it.

And then there's another bizarre offering – the notion that we have needed record high immigration in order to extract our mineral wealth and make the mining boom a boom, is a complete wallop in the cods!

continued

We needed a tiny fraction of that level of influx. Something around net zero immigration would have been good!

And if we’d had this, we could have slowed down and stretched out the scale of mining activity AND provided a considerably better return to the average citizen as well, instead of spending a great deal of it to duplicate all the services and infrastructure for ever-more people.

I wrote:

>> Remember, it took me several attempts to get you to justify your agreement with the current level of immigration. <<

He replied:

<< I know. >>

Aaaaah haaaa hahahaaaa!

Yes, not even he could find some way of denying or sidestepping that one!

I made many attempts to simply take the debate forward with a totally pertinent and very basic point, and he ignored, then ducked and weaved, obfuscated and sophisterised…. and eventually said that it didn’t need justification!

That’s classic Pericles!

But wait, it get even more bizarre….

He’s gone off on another wild tangent, all about global population and exponential growth.

What’s the point?

Yes the global situation is looking grim indeed. But is he suggesting that this is a reason to not address population growth in Australia?

<< "...grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference... that I may be reasonably happy in this life". >>

Yes!

And in Australia the issue could be dealt with very easily indeed, with one decision to lower immigration to net zero.

But of course, as enormous as the issue is, Australia should be doing what it can to help on the global stage. And one very significant part of this would be to demonstrate that we have got our own house in order.