Divergence

I got my data from the world bank site that I linked to.

The Norwegian government’s statistics website gives this table, indicating 1.3% population growth in 2012 and also an annual average of 1.3% growth over the 5 years to 2012:

http://www.ssb.no/english/subjects/02/02/folkendrhist_en/tables/tab/00.html

I agree that well-performing economies tend to attract migrants, but this is just an effort to shift the goalposts on your part. You proposed that high population growth causes a loss of welfare, and you quoted some statistics that you think proved your case. The evidence you used does not in fact support your argument, and indeed is more supportive of my view that a positive rate of population growth is beneficial. You may believe that countries with positive population growth would do even better if population growth was lower, but you have no evidence to support that.

It is not surprising that countries that rank highly on the WEF competitiveness measure also do well economically and in terms of broader human development. It’s just that the causal link has nothing to do with population. These are the top 10 factors that the WEF cited as impediments to Australia’s competitiveness, in order of importance:

Restrictive labour regulations
Inefficient government bureaucracy
Tax rates
Tax regulations
Access to financing
Poor work ethic in national labour force
Policy instability
Inadequate supply of infrastructure
Inadequately educated workforce
Insufficient capacity to innovate

http://reports.weforum.org/global-competitiveness-report-2012-2013/#=

Unless you can link these causally to population growth, the data are irrelevant to your argument.

I agree that not all arable land is equal. Nonetheless, we do have an awful lot of it, and we do produce a lot more agricultural product than we could possibly consume.

Jay

Ok, so Europeans created modernity, but we are not the only ones capable of benefiting from it. If migration threated the economic and social systems that make societies thrive, we'd expect developed countries with a tradition of high migration to score relatively poorly in the human development rankings. The success of Australia, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Norway and the USA demonstrates that migration has not caused development to be retarded.

Jay of Melbourne,

That isn't really fair. It is true that Europeans invented systematic science. The ancient Greeks produced the first real scientists, and there was no technology equivalent to the Antikythera device (an analogue computer) anywhere in the world for a thousand years. Nevertheless, other people have made extremely valuable contributions to science. This is a list of Japanese Nobel laureates. Some of their contributions have been enormously important.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Japanese_Nobel_laureates

Rhian,

Growthists frequently claim that high population growth is vital for economic performance, so the Competitiveness Index is very relevant. All that I wanted to show was that countries can have very low or no population growth and still be competitive, as well as giving their people a good quality of life.

Growthists also assume that the future is going to be just like the present. I believe the warnings from the scientific community about what we are doing to the environment, that carrying capacity may be less in the future. Even purely natural changes, long bad droughts or new plant diseases, can bring about a collapse, especially if people are living at the limits of their carrying capacity. See Jared Diamond's "Collapse" for just some examples. Perhaps our motto ought to be "prepare for ill and not for good", not "let the good times roll".

Rhian,

I have shown that high population growth reduces welfare, but not from these rankings. Here are some of the factors I have mentioned.

Gouging on the cost of residential land feeding through into house prices and rents, from 3.5 times the median wage for an average house in 1973 to 7-10 times now. This is not primarily due to "young people wanting to have it all", but to the skyrocketing cost of residential land, from 30% of a house-land package to 70%. Do you seriously believe that house prices could have been jacked up to such an extent without population growth increasing demand?

Water, electricity and gas prices. Desalinated water is 4 to 6 times as expensive as dam water and a huge consumer of electricity. Far more infrastructure has to built than is needed for the existing population.

Wage depression and other forms of labour exploitation, such as casualisation and unpaid overtime - supply and demand, not Marxism. This graph from the State of Working America shows the decline in real US male wages for most families in the US since 1979.

http://stateofworkingamerica.org/chart/swa-wages-figure-4c-change-real-hourly-wages/

While a number of other factors are involved, Prof. George Borjas (Economics, Harvard) estimated in 1999 that half the loss of real wages among the least skilled workers, the ones in the US facing the greatest competition from immigrants, could be attributed to immigration.

http://www.cis.org/BookAdaptaion-HeavensDoor

Divergence,
For a start look at the right hand column on that Wiki link and note the Number of European co contributors to those projects, where was Japanese science when the foundations of those theories were being formulated in Europe?
I refuse to play the "Who's white?" game, we all know who among the ancients most resembled ourselves, the "Islamic" scholars inherited the achievements of the Hellenic then the Byzantine thinkers and the medieval academies of the Near East relied as much on European thinkers as they do today.
There is no "That was then, this is now" when it comes to race and exchange of ideas, based on the close ties and mutual interests of thinkers today we can safely say that there would have to have been a consistent rate of cultural, philosophical and technological exchange between the West and the East over the last two or three millennia, if not longer. People don't change, race determines the pace, the form and consistency of philosophical and technological developments.

Pardon me, I'd like to add that the racial dimensions and implications for technological and philosophical development are not a source of shame among anyone but anti Racists and self hating Whites, Japanese, Indian, Chinese and Korean students work their butts off to get into programs at top Western universities. The foundations for a "better life" for an enquiring Asian mind is never sought in Harare, Port Moresby or Islamabad.

individual “What is the optimum for non-whites?”

Survival.

Rhian “correlation does not necessarily signify causation.”

Aren't you the guilty one? (“population growth = high development”)

More believable (since many White high HDI countries have *low* immigration), to conclude “White = high development”

“Europe was the home of the industrial revolution, birthplace of modern capitalism, the first to adopt..."

Why the home, the birthplace, the first, a massive head start?
Accident? Luck? Fairies' blessings?
No, *who* we are!

If every race is equal there would be no “head start” for anyone, and it wouldn't be Europeans, since we were latecomers historically.

"(Japan, Korea)”

By mimicking Whites, not being "Asian".
East Asia was stagnant for centuries until “Dead White Males” applied the defibrillator.

“the former communist states of Eastern Europe – as having significantly lower levels of development than the Western democracies.”

And... significantly higher than most non-White countries that were *never* communist at all!
Less than one century of communism, millennia of Whiteness. Bullseye!

Note also, the two Latin American countries.
The Southern Cone having the *least* mixing.

“Being white is neither necessary (Japan, Korea), nor sufficient (Albania, Armenia).”

But it sure doesn't hurt.

“Having lots of oil can also help (UAE, Qatar).”

Yes, let's see those rankings drop along with the oil supplies, eh?

“It is policies and resource endowment, not genetics"

A lie told often enough becomes the truth.

I'm afraid your own cited reference shows otherwise.
It's gold, gold, gold for Whites!
The rare exceptions prove the rule.

But let's ignore the bleeding obvious, since it rocks the ideological-fantasy boat.

“Ok, so Europeans created modernity”

And either created or more effectively utilised everything else.

“the success of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Norway and the USA demonstrates that migration has not caused development to be retarded.”

A tradition of high migration, from *where*, of *whom*?
Mostly from other White populations. Mostly.

Pete Townsend “We must race the race so we can face the face.
We got to race the race, we got to.”

Can you face our face, Rhian? Got to.
Or we lose the race (in both senses).