re: You know better than that
All you need for economic growth is a population that is creating real wealth. It's irrelevant how large or small that population is. A thousand middle-class people can support a much larger economic base than ten thousand poor people.
You have to get past the idea of "growth" in terms of sheer numbers of people.
I've been listening to the Malthusians all my life. I can see which countries have prospered, and which ones haven't, and population and native resources had little to do with it in most cases.