It’s tempting to embrace the meme that the easiest way for people to unravel the massive issues in entrance of us is to extend the inhabitants, maybe dramatically. The pondering goes that individuals are those who can resolve issues, and extra individuals give us extra problem-solvers.
This doesn’t maintain as much as a reductio advert absurdum evaluation: clearly, a inhabitants of 10 individuals isn’t nearly as good at fixing issues as one with a billion, however on the similar time, if there have been a trillion individuals on Earth, that wouldn’t final lengthy. There should be a quantity that’s optimum, but it surely’s most likely not the most important quantity we are able to probably create.
And reviewing the information on Nobel prizes per capita, or patents per capita, we see that there isn’t a correlation between inhabitants density and productive breakthrough innovation. It seems like improvements are extra probably the results of a civil society, ample assets, sufficient productiveness to allow spending on R&D and a tradition of analysis and engineering.
We additionally see geographic hotbeds of innovation over time (physics in Germany 100 years in the past, or community improvements in Silicon Valley a decade in the past) which might be the results of data change and cultural expectations, not inhabitants density.
We don’t get these outcomes by stretching the carrying capability of our one and solely planet. We are able to’t shrink our strategy to risk, however we most likely can’t get there by way of exponential growth both.
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