Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer

Re:Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer by rubber_duck on Monday June 29, 2020 @02:50AM (#23675043)

>Fixed resources. For instance US has a limited amount of farmland. You cannot scale farming up. From one perspective there are a fixed amount of farming jobs. From another perspective people will go hungry if population is too high. The higher population California has, the more carefully it has to save water.

That's sort of related to zero sum thinking - if arrable land ever became scarce there are alternative methods that become viable at higher cost , same for water. (also with additional manual labor and R&D it's easier to solve those problems)

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Re:Zero-sum thinking on immigration will make America poorer by Retric on Monday June 29, 2020 @05:01AM (#23675754)

Increasing total food production at higher costs to support a larger population is fine if the goal is a larger GDP, but it’s lowering per capita GDP. That extends to taller buildings and more congested cities etc. The curve is almost flat at +/- 5% population, but unlimited immigration could have seen the US population reach several times it’s current levels.

Innovation isn’t a meaningful difference because global population is not changing.

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