The long-run relationship between per capita incomes and population size
Maya Eden (University of Zurich) and Kevin Kuruc (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
GPI Working Paper No. 29-2024
The relationship between the human population size and per capita incomes has long been debated. Two competing forces feature prominently in these discussions. On the one hand, a larger population means that limited natural resources must be shared among more people. On the other hand, more people means more innovation and faster technological progress, other things equal. We study a model that features both of these channels. A calibration suggests that, in the long run, (marginal) increases in population would likely lead to (marginal) increases in per capita incomes.
Other working papers
The asymmetry, uncertainty, and the long term – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
The Asymmetry is the view in population ethics that, while we ought to avoid creating additional bad lives, there is no requirement to create additional good ones. The question is how to embed this view in a complete normative theory, and in particular one that treats uncertainty in a plausible way. After reviewing…
Consciousness makes things matter – Andrew Y. Lee (University of Toronto)
This paper argues that phenomenal consciousness is what makes an entity a welfare subject, or the kind of thing that can be better or worse off. I develop and motivate this view, and then defend it from objections concerning death, non-conscious entities that have interests (such as plants), and conscious subjects that necessarily have welfare level zero. I also explain how my theory of welfare subjects relates to experientialist and anti-experientialist theories of welfare goods.
Dispelling the Anthropic Shadow – Teruji Thomas (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
There are some possible events that we could not possibly discover in our past. We could not discover an omnicidal catastrophe, an event so destructive that it permanently wiped out life on Earth. Had such a catastrophe occurred, we wouldn’t be here to find out. This space of unobservable histories has been called the anthropic shadow. Several authors claim that the anthropic shadow leads to an ‘observation selection bias’, analogous to survivorship bias, when we use the historical record to estimate catastrophic risks. …