Population and Welfare: The Greatest Good for the Greatest Number

That is a new paper by Peter J. Klenow, Charles I. Jones, Mark Bils, and Mohamad Adhami, reject its implications at your peril:

Economic growth is typically measured in per capita terms. But social welfare should arguably include the number of people as well as their standard of living. We decompose social welfare growth — measured in consumptionequivalent units — into contributions from rising population and rising per capita consumption. Because of diminishing marginal utility of consumption, population growth is scaled up by a value-of-life factor that substantially exceeds one and empirically averages around 2.7 across countries and over time. Population increases are therefore consistently the dominant contributor, and consumption-equivalent welfare growth around the world averages more than 6% per year since 1960, as opposed to 2% per year for consumption growth. Countries such as Mexico and South Africa rise sharply in the growth rankings once population growth is incorporated, whereas China, Germany and Japan plummet. We show the robustness of these results to incorporating parental time use and fertility decisions using data from the U.S., the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea. The effects of falling parental utility from having fewer kids are roughly offset by increases in the “quality” of kids associated with rising time investment per child.

If you worry about fertility rates, do you not have to accept something like this framework?  Mexico — underrated!

In general, I think people should visit the high population countries more.  For the pointer I thank Oliver Wang.