As the United States edges closer to the 300 million mark, there will probably be lots of stories like this one exploring the benefits and drawbacks of having such a big population:
In the past 39 years, the United States has added 100 million people - the biggest population spurt in its history. At the same time, America has sustained greater economic growth than any civilization before it.
Is there a link?
While it's hard to prove that population growth spurs economic growth, experts say, the two often go hand in hand. That helps to explain why, by virtually any socioeconomic standard, most American workers are better off today than they were in 1967, the year the population reached 200 million.
While there are certainly advantages to being in a political unit with so much people -- economies of scale make so many things possible -- nobody actually lives in anything that big. Our everyday lives are on a much smaller scale, at the neighborhood level. Probably the best way to live, in fact, is to be near a large population center so as to get all the benefits, but not so close that we have to put up with all the negatives involved. That's why the automobile spurred suburban expansion. And it's why annexation is such an emotional issue. People who are in the to-be-annexed areas have made the most rational decision possible, and everybody knows it.
