It is equivalent to claiming that the economic interconnection of a larger population all most always results in increased prosperity compared to a smaller population on a normalized basis.
"Generally" is obviously true, "almost always" is pretty well supported as well, as long as everything else is equal.
But for most products and technology, a country of 300M could most likely do just as well as a planet of 6B.
A country of 300 million, esp. 300 million wealthy people (by world standards, I'm not saying everyone in the US is what we would consider wealthy, far from it), can if needed produce most of what they need for themselves. But that doesn't mean that there is no benefit from a larger market. You can have economies of scale even in things much simpler to produce than aircraft, and probably more important than economies of scale (at least in many cases) are focus on comparative advantage, and increased specialization.
Many economic metrics for the USA have not been great for the last couple of decades
Real income per person has increased, income distribution has gotten more unequal but not massively so. Americans can afford all sorts of things that they couldn't in the past.
In any case a couple of decades in one country doesn't show the full benefit. The US isn't the only country that has benefits from the trade, you have to look at the world as a whole (one point to notice is the countries isolated from trade tend to do much worse), and a couple of decades isn't really the long run in this context.
and all attempts to show attribution which I've read look downright amateurish compared to the level of sophistication in climate science.
Economics can be very sophisticated, but in many ways the more sophisticated elements can be less reliable (complex equations and models, that may not adequately reflect the real world, in this sense its like global warming). The basics (concepts of supply and demand, price signals, etc. are really solid, and the next level up from that comparative advantage, benefits from trading etc., have hundreds of years of real world evidence behind them. |
