[nonameiguess]

Not sure why this has gotten so much backlash. Sure, growth is generally a good thing and plenty of places are badly underpopulated, notably all of North America. I don't think this is the case with China. Much of the country is the fairly uninhabitable Gobi Desert and Himalaya Mountins. They've got a very large number of people crowded into a fertile river valley and the coast and it isn't all that great ecologically. They're seemingly well past the point nationally where the tail chance of producing more Einsteins and Teslas is worth it, even if the entire world isn't. I don't see how Matt Yglesias arguments apply here. Matt is making that argument for the United States, which outside of I guess Australia is by far the least dense of all developed countries. He wants the US population in another 80 years to still be 2/3 of what China's population is right now and they're roughly equal in land mass.