People have been saying this ss far back as 1798
I don’t see your point. Malthus’s argument was that as population grows exponentially and food production linearly, population will be kept in check due to food shortages etc. But food production growth isn’t linear, which has been known for over a hundred years already, therefore your reference to Malthus seems to serve no purpose.
What resource is capping human population growth?
Global warming.
The world’s population spends more natural resources in about 7 months than is renewed per year. So basically for the last 5 months of each year, we’re spending money we don’t have.
true but how big is our bank account. i could have a deficit of 100k per year, but if i have bank account of a billion. its really de minimis.
innovation solves all problems. even if we make low quality people. but imo if we want to be efficient. we should focus on better quality.
population growth can continue for a very long time for a place like canada. not the world, but canada yes. we can probably grow our population by 4x before running into any sort of density issues but by that time places like NYC and LA will have solved those density problems.
maybe the basis for my rationale is something that only those who live here, or in middle america, understand immediately. this place is crazy inefficient from a transportation point of view. we only really have like 3-5 true cities and rest are basically towns by global standards. i live in a city/town that probably needs to grow 3x before public transport is even close to viable and i’m in the 10th largest “city” in the country. my property taxes are 2.5x higher than toronto and its surrounding cities due to this inefficiency.
the cost of time and energy to get people and things from place to place is extreme. this is the case for the majority of the canadian population.
add in better sustainability of social institutions and i’m all for highly skilled immigration.
So this is slightly all a bit offbase. It doesn’t really matter what the physical constraint is because based on the current trend global population growth should peak in 2040, Europe and Japan have peaked, China owing to 1 child should peak around 2030 and the US is probably on a similar timeline clouded by immigration. It’s simply becoming the case that in developed economies people are having fewer babies. So this could all be a somewhat tangential debate about physical constraints.
The reality is most likely that we are going to be in a declining population soon globally. I’m not saying that Canada can’t or shouldn’t grow or that immigration is bad, I was simply pointing out that pursuing GDP growth for the sake of GDP growth doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. I’m not sure that using density metrics makes a good argument because A) the correlation simply isn’t there that this implies a better economy per capita and B) boundary lines are somewhat arbitrary. Canada has a bunch of northern land that will basically always be undesirable for living and unoccupied so including those regions in infrastructure arguments is kind of missing the point, these sorts of things need to be evaluated more by populated region if at all to have meaning.
I don’t think there’s a realistic immigration or fertility policy that sees Canada go from like 4ppl per km^2 to 30 without causing mass chaos with major externalities over any reasonable timeframe. If anything you could much more effectively address this principal by promoting urbanization. I’m not really taking a strong stance, I don’t have a dog in this fight, I’m just talking generally.
Right, so US is number 11? LMAO. Like, what even is this list? Why aren’t Nigeria, Turkey and my homeboy Chad on this list. Analysis fail!
It’s 1M km^2 is the filter, the first one missed a zero. The longer list is above 10,000 km^2. Also Chad is on the list at 21. Reading fail!
Anyhow, the lack of correlation between density and per capita GDP remains the same. At any group above 10,000 km^2 which eliminates city states. So sad, Franky has nothing to add!
Nah, was talking about AF owner Chad, obviously 
.
LMAO, nice filter…I guess Pakistan, Nigeria, Turkey, Ukraine and France are “city states.”
110 years at our current population growth rate of ~1.5%, of which 1% comes from immigration currently, would grow canada’s population from 35 million to 175 million. sounds crazy but the US grew similarly from 1860 to 1960 so it wouldn’t be unprecedented. canada already is one of the top destinations for immigrants from china and india. is there a reason why toronto, vancouver or montreal can’t grow to be the same size as NYC or LA? its a matter of public will really. the only thing stopping growth is a choice to stop growth. though i will admit that the quality of immigrants would decline over time and this would naturally affect the public’s perception of immigration.
Hmmm, interesting Franky, struggling with your density again I think you’re getting confused between the two lists I posted.
There are two versions. I filtered it once to 1M km^2 and once to 10km^2. Both found no correlation, you’re welcome to look at the public datasets like Kiplinger did and ultimately reach the same conclusion.
The list you’re referring to is the >1M km^2 which takes a more summary list and reaches the same correlation. THAT list does not include those countries, which were never called city states.
I said >10,000 km^2 filters city states, that list, referenced above but at 160+ names was too long to post has no correlation and that list DOES include France, Pakistan, Turkey, etc. In this full list, there is still no correlation and the top 10 were posted earlier, extending to the Top 20 as even you can see, 12 of the Top 20 have GDP per capita below $10k which is very sad!
Country Density GDP per capita
Bangladesh 1105 1,745
Taiwan 657 24,971
Lebanon 656 9,257
South Korea 511 31,346
Rwanda 479 791
India 416 2,036
Burundi 414 307
Israel 410 41,644
Netherlands 409 53,106
Haiti 406 857
Belgium 378 46,724
Japan 336 39,306
Sri Lanka 325 4,068
Philippines 316 3,104
El Salvador 307 3,924
Vietnam 291 2,551
United Kingdom 278 62,606
Jamaica 268 5,392
Pakistan 246 1,555
Qatar 244 70,780
I guess I should have specified “reasonable amount of time” lol.
But here’s where you completely miss the point by ignoring the fact that literally everything you just described can happen pretty easily through urbanization policies vs mass immigration which was mentioned in that exact quote. You don’t give a reason why adopting some uniform distribution is better or why populating to compensate for Nunavut makes any sense whatsoever.
["> " />](<iframe%20src=) " />Wow, look at all the correlation!
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-density-vs-prosperity
what urbanization policies? canada, the us, the uk, france, germany and probably almost every other western country has near identical rural/urban mixes of about 20% rural and 80% urban. seems like your angle may simply be the result of a canadian stereotype that we’re all living in igloos.
the key difference between canada and ths us is that Canadian cities are smaller and geographically separated. the only way to solve the small cities problem when the rural/urban mix is at or near equilibrium is to promote immigration.
That’s not a good graph. It’s not an apples to apples comparison. The city in US will be much better than a city in a shithole country. You will prolly get a much better correlation between cities within a country. Lower density poorer people.
No crap, you just described density being uncorrelated to national gdp per capital which was the point, making it a perfect graph.
MLA, cmon man, you’re somewhat better than this. I don’t know if its because you’re dug in for some fictitious fight on Canada or willfully ignoring what I’m saying but you’re repeatedly ignoring what I’m actually saying in favor of what you want to argue.
Yes, you are right, the urban rural mixes are the same, what is not factually are the large northern regions that are essentially dead land that warp the Canadian pp/km^2 figures. Earlier you made the misguided point that you could or should get to similar (like 30 pp/km^2) figures through immigration. My point is this makes no sense since even under that situation you’re still not populating the northern regions which make those comparisons meaningless, it really needs to be a habitable density to habitable density comparison. Does this make sense so far?
In that light you can arrive at similar effective densities in Canada if you adjust out the northern regions despite the overall national average being lower (for the reasons discussed). So you really need to step back from these national stat type things because its a unique landmass.
So then you started talking about LA, etc. My point is, you can get there much more efficiently by just promoting urbanization even if it means Canada goes to a higher skew vs the other countries. I don’t know why you would even bring them in as a benchmark because its a non-sequitur. Again, for the literal millionth time, I’m not saying immigration is bad, but trying to push up the average (and ignoring the fact that Canada has a large suboptimal mass) instead of using a more targeted approach of urbanization doesn’t really make sense and uses sort of blunt policy were more targeted could be used with the population you have. A similar case is Russia at 75% urban given Siberia, and Australia. Australia for instance has also very successfully moved to a 70% rural mix so you have large world class cities and large unused outback, their aggregate stats are warped, but filling the outback doesn’t really improve things for them, infrastructure is great and they just adjusted their optimum mix. In this regard, comparing similar geographies, Canada is significant trailing some of its best compares.
It’s worth looking at that chart above and seeing how far AU and CA have outperformed and wondering if pushing up aggregate density really accomplishes anything.
If you visit HK and Singapore you will know instantly the housing dilemma in HK vs SG. Hong Kong is mad hilly, so building on it is both an engineering marvel and nightmare. Also, SG has excellent urban planning with leafy parks all about and public use water fronts. In HK, the waterfront is often privatized, and thus we reserve +60% of the land for country parks. Finally, HK land policy is a sad joke completely corrupted by property tycoons, but you can read the paper about the current protests to learn more.