[FooBarBizBazz]

> A larger workforce leads to more economic output, more innovation (there are countless innovations that have probably failed to be made over the generations due to the impact of women not working) that leads to quality of life improvements, productivity improvements, price drops, and other improvements.

You're thinking too short term. This logic does not work for more than one human generation.

Say you're playing Civilization. I give you a button in the "change civics" category. You click it, and two things happen:

1. You double the number of professionals in all cities, as a factor of your total population.

2. Your population growth rate goes from strongly positive to slightly negative.

Do you click the button?

Let's make the numbers easier: If you don't click the button, you have a 2x growth rate per generation, and if you do click the button you have a 1x growth rate, i.e. perfectly balanced replacement. Well when happens if you click the button? You get ahead for one generation. But your opponent catches up in the next generation. And in the generation after that, they have 4x the population and therefore 2x the professionals. Before long they're outproducing you on every dimension.