ABSTRACT
This book was motivated by my desire to find out if my subjective sense of density aversion could be backed up by objective economic analysis. I have built up a chain of arguments to claim that we should not seek population growth, neither by natural growth nor by immigration: it will not be the road to increases in welfare of the incumbent population. With constant returns to scale and land with no constraint, population size is irrelevant to income per capita. An immigrant flow with the same composition of abilities, skills and drives does not change the income level per capita; with different skill compositions, the immigration surplus for the incumbents will typically be quite small. Empirical analyses point at best to very modest contribution of immigrants to innovation and income growth.
