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That's fair. As I said-- I understood your point about the double counting, but I don't think we have an object-level disagreement. Let's replace the [ΔGDP PPP + ΔAvg. Wages] with a [value of services directly provided by immigrants to natives + inflation avoided - compensation native workers fail to receive because immigrants did their jobs for them] term. It's harder to quantify that exactly-- but I think we can both agree that it's almost certainly highly correlated with ΔGDP PPP. We might have to disagree on the last term if you think it's negative though. I think "avoided compensation" rounds out to ~0 after taking into account the increased demand for services immigrants require and the fact that in an immigrant-heavy economy native workers are still advantaged when it comes to management and high-skill roles even if skills are exactly the same.
There are political decisions that intentionally restrict density-- nimby zoning laws, for example, but they're ineffective at totally preventing density. My city has recently been growing, and as a result I'm seeing empty lots get built up into 4-over-1 apartment buildings. That doesn't just mean more residents, and more traffic-- it means more businesses being supported in the same amount of space.
Look-- do you actually live in a city? Not a suburb-- and actual city? Because it sounds like your experience is just completely at odds with mine.
Not really. There's no fundamental difference between types of immigration, whether the borders being crosses are municipal, state, or national. People aggregate into similar spots for all the same reasons the world over.
Yeah, I think the best approach here is to find some multiplier for GDP to estimate total surplus, maybe with detailed economic study of some sample branches, and then just use that multiplied ΔGDP - his wage. GDP already includes native wages as well, so well never need a decision on that effect in isolation.
The entire country of Austria has 8M inhabitants. Our biggest city is Vienna, 2M. The others are all below 0.5M. So, I would say I live in a city, but its propably Bumfuck, Alabama by your standards. But I dont think the facts here are especially inaccessible to outsiders. Really, smaller cities usually densify more from growth than large ones.
...and that is why the entire US population lives in one contiguous metro area. Or does it? What you initially described was something pretty specific: an entire industry concentrating in one place, benefitting from a unified pool of workers. That effect is real, if IMO not very strong at the relevant margin, and really does require international immigration, because the US alone couldnt produce tech workers for the whole global tech industry without serious quality loss.
Meanwhile, there are great returns to urbanisation if you start out evenly distributed, but that doesnt mean of anything in our actual situation.
Apparently it's 9m now, but wow my general assumption based on size was off by about 3x. Didn't really get how much of the southwest is pure mountain until I checked a map.
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