Labor is absolutely the bottleneck. You can come up with as many billion dollar ideas as you like, but without people to pay for them, where does the income come from? Economies grown because money flows, it gets invested, and that investment creates income, which goes to the workers and owners, and gets spent again. With fewer people, it doesn't matter how rich some of them get, the entire economy will slow down, because there is nowhere to productively spend that money in that economy -- it flows out.
Question: Europe has had an open door migration policy since at least 2015 and taken millions of migrants, especially Italy and Greece. Why haven't all those migrants turned EU's or Italy or Greece's economies into a powerhouse and built US big-tech competitors here? Same question for Canada. When is that magic economic growth from population growth coming?
Answer: Because US invests more money in high growth sectors than EU and Canada combined, and because people aren't fungible cogs in a machine, that you can swap in and out and get the same economic output it's agrarian labor. Attracting the handful of the smartest people in the world with money and resources like the US did, is more important and ads more value to their economy than attracting millions of desperate unskilled laborers like EU and Canada did.
>but without people to pay for them
Yes, people to pay for them, as in billionaire VCs pay for them, not millions of poor uneducated people, those can't even pay their rent without government support let alone boost economy. They aren't gonna boost anything except Amazon fulfillment center and Door dash delivery rates.
So NO, I don't agree with you at all. EU has enough local skilled college educated people since university is free here, but it has no VC money to amplify their labor into economic output as proven how many EU's top minds choose to work for US companies. Adding even more random people to a stagnating economy just means lower wages and bargaining power with higher rents, not more wealth growth per capita. Your comment does not disprove any of this.
I was responding to a specific aspect regarding population and labor, I am not an expert on Europe. I would like to say, though, that starting with a conclusion and working backwards from it is a really terrible way to proceed with a hypothesis.
>I was responding to a specific aspect regarding population and labor
Like which example are you referring to? Be specific. Because you haven't provided any reproducible arguments or specific facts to support your opinion, and I gave you a real life example that disproves your hypothetical one.
>I am not an expert on Europe
You don't need to be one to argue on this, if you have other arguments that can be substantiated with proof or facts to disprove mine.
>I would like to say, though, that starting with a conclusion and working backwards from it is a really terrible way to proceed with a hypothesis.
I'm not starting from the conclusion, I just picked the best real life example at my disposal that contradicts your point and chose to narrate it from that end, but it doesn't change the start condition or the outcome, it's still the same no mater from which way you look at it.
> Like which example are you referring to? Be specific. Because you haven't provided any reproducible arguments or specific facts to support your opinion, and I gave you a real life example that disproves your hypothetical one.
Your first paragraph, specifically.
> Same how the US's economy isn't stronger because Americans have more kids because we're not talking about agrarian civilizations here where every pair of hands on the farm ads proportional labor output. In service based economies, a smart person with a wealthy VC behind him can generate the GDP growth of tens of thousands of traditional labor jobs so population growth isn't the bottleneck.
> You don't need to be one to argue on this, if you have other arguments that can be substantiated with proof or facts to disprove mine.
I am not arguing with you about anything, I am stating why population is an important factor in economic growth. Are you disputing that this is the case?
> I'm not starting from the conclusion
You are starting from 'the US economy is better than Europe's because Europe is stifling high tech growth' and working backwards from there. It is incredibly obvious that is what you are doing.
