50 to 100 years ago, population was definitely a key.
As we embark on robotics, AI and emergent Tokamak technology, I really don't know what a lot of illiterate peasant bring to the equation, other than a shit load of liability and instability.
Would you rather have this:
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or this....
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when industrial manufacturing first took hold in Britain, and then Belgium and other parts of Europe and America, it was also said that population no longer mattered because industrialized labor force was so much more efficient. Indeed for a time tiny Belgium’s industrial output rivaled that of the German states (at the time germany was not yet unified). what was overlooked is the fact that in a world where there is relatively free commerce in products abd raw material, capital investment in economies that are approaching state of the art will necessarily generate less returns because the investments can only be directed towards the more difficult problems of generating further productivity gain in an already productive economy. So capital necessarily flow from more developed economies towards less developed ones, because making productivity gains in an undeveloped and undeveloped economy would be easier, so the returns promise to be higher.
So industrialization and automation is only a temporary advantage. Eventually, how much industrialized production and how many producing robots you are likely to have in total, trends towards how many people you have.
So in the long run, relative economic output will still trend towards relative population.
Actually to realise the potential of a big population, good governance is the key. And for good governance to occur, a set of conditions must happen or be enabled in the first place. So far, I have not seen India having the good governance to muster its human potential yet. You cannot just wishfully think that India somehow will bumble along and somehow magically everything will fall into place in the next 30 to 50 years or even in the next 50 to 100 years.
If population be the only criteria, then any nation that wishes to be a future superpower can just tell its citizens to go ahead and breed like rabbits.
yes, Provided you can continuously feed the rabbits, then you should breed like rabbits to out compete other countries. But of course breeding like rabbits is not much help if the rabbits die off too quickly from malnutrition, poor health care, social unrest or civil war. So you should breed as fast as you think the gain in your productivity can support your population.
Should. But the kicker is the richer people become, the less they want to breed, because the more it seems to be advantageous to invest a lot in a few kids than invest a little in each of many kids. And it seems generally speaking, you can‘t make them breed like rabbits if they are rich and they don’t want to.
Hence the population growth rate of all developed economies, whether they are in Europe, or the a,ericas, or on Asia, tapers off until it becomes negative.
China is already at this stage. This is also what make poorer country not yet at this stage, like India, more likely to catch up in the long run.
Good governance is important. But one should not be too sanguine about whether good governance is really a sustainable advantage in the long run from the perspective of economic development. One could say adaquate governance in the long run is a matter of trial and error. Give any country strong economic pressure, and a few decades to experiment, even if it don’t become a world beater, it general tend to find at least the least good government that would still allow them to gradually catch up economically. witness Italy.
