Caplan's argument is that increasing population yields increasing gains to scale. More people make more good ideas which make us a more complex and robust society. More people can even coexist with a welfare state.
Problem number one, our national government does not even have constant gins to scale, irregular gains to scale are written into the constitution, and the transaction costs to fix this problem have to be negotiated first. We are barely understanding the problem but we know it to e a problem because our national government cycles on eight year boundaries.
His second problem is humans may not have unlimited ability to consistently increase gains to scale. The human is after all, finite in place and time, it has a positive and relatively fixed uncertainty in its every day activities. We can only fit so many humans in LA before we get a conflict between transportation and housing. The new ideas we need to improve that balance has an uncertain arrival and we end up with poor people bunched on the street while we get stuck on old bottlenecks.
In the long run, evolution may make his theory correct. But even that is not guaranteed. Mass immigration results from the bunching of people in economies suffering war and poverty, sort of prima facie evidence that consistently getting increasing gains to scale via more people does not always work.
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