Nobel Prize winner Gary Becker would dispute that.
My work on human capital began with an effort to calculate both private and social rates of return to men, women, blacks, and other groups from investments in different levels of education.
Also Julian Simon (whom I briefly made acquaintance with just before his death) :
It is your mind that matters economically, as much or more than your mouth or hands. In the long run, the most important economic effect of population size and growth is the contribution of additional people to our stock of useful knowledge. And this contribution is large enough in the long run to overcome all the costs of population growth.
And he connects your two terms in this :
The world's problem is not too many people, but lack of political and economic freedom.
