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Is this too simplistic a view of demography? Assuming a similar amount of wars and scientific progress since the 1500s, if more people migrated to the New World, would the world have more population by the 21st century?

I wonder this because of a few things. The Western Hemisphere is extremely underpopulated compared to the Old World. It was only in the past few years that it even passed a billion people! Meanwhile, Europe by itself has just under 3/4ths of the population of the entire Western Hemisphere, and that ratio was historically far higher. The food resources will not necessarily suffer, since the world is easily capable of feeding billions more people (hunger being mainly political is especially obvious in today's world). Other resources are more questionable by the rate of consumption, but food is always there.

Possible PODs could have more dedicated efforts from Spain/Portugal for settlement, better management of Latin America (have Argentina opened up for settlement earlier), and above all, more European immigration as early as the colonial era, into lands opened to farmland through decisive defeats of the indigenous peoples at an earlier date. Probably this means a Europe more focused on colonisation than using colonial empires to fund their European adventures--more investment, basically.

So is the New World having more people a "free" way to having a world of 7 billion by 2000, and maybe even 8 billion by today or in the near future?
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