Abstract
The paper provides a rational reconstruction and critique of certain theoretical analyses by inter-war Australian economists of the impact of population on per capita income. It reviews and criticises the attempt by F.C. Benham in 1930 to apply the Wicksell-Cannan theory of optimal population to Australia. And it highlights Arthur Smithies’s novel model of 1938 in which increasing returns in manufactures is invoked to establish the existence of an optimal population in a two-sector framework. The present paper’s reconstructions indicate that the apparently simplicity of these ‘optimal population’ theories belied theoretical difficulties that Benham and Smithies did not fully acknowledge.
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