Half of global GDP growth is simply population growth.
You could be in place like Japan where you have lower population, but still productivity growth such that incomes don't decline.
You could also be a place like pretty much everywhere in the world before the Industrial Revolution when the Malthusian Trap was a popular thought - and your population grows but productivity declines. GDP goes up, but you get more miserable. Not great.
I don't think anyone imagines falling incomes as awesome.
Additionally, even if productivity and population decline - the Fed can always devalue money such that your income goes up - even if your situation is getting materially worse.
I don't know why people obsess over population growth. We already don't want to invest in the people we have.
Productivity growth should be the thing we all want. There's not a lot of people that are like: Damn those tractors that stole all the agricultural jobs!
For the most part - we're happy 90% of the population doesn't have to work in agriculture.
Doubling someone’s commute diverts more of their money into commuting expenses, which removes that exact amount of money from some other category of spending.
If diverted from savings, this grows current GDP. If diverted from some other category of spending, it’s likely neutral. (If diverted from higher velocity domestic spending into the importation of energy [and exporting of cash], it could even shrink GDP.)
I think of it more like "what if all the effort resources put in to things like making funkopops and microtransaction heavy child addiction simulations for mobile phones were used for good things. What if we weren't all forced to drive into the officeif it wasn't truly necessary."
The neoliberal version is basically "cost of living goes up, manufacturing of instant waste goes up, the common man gets nothing."
