Population and major innovations | Seth’s Website

It is tempting to embrace the meme that the best way for humans to resolve the major complications in front of us is to increase the populace, perhaps significantly. The considering goes that individuals are the kinds who can solve challenges, and extra people give us additional problem-solvers.

This does not keep up to a reductio advert absurdum analysis: plainly, a populace of 10 folks is not as good at resolving challenges as a single with a billion, but at the same time, if there ended up a trillion people on Earth, that would not very last extensive. There should be a quantity that’s exceptional, but it is likely not the most important range we can maybe make.

And reviewing the data on Nobel prizes per capita, or patents for each capita, we see that there is not a correlation concerning population density and successful breakthrough innovation. It appears to be like innovations are additional very likely the outcome of a civil culture, enough sources, plenty of efficiency to permit shelling out on R&D and a culture of investigate and engineering.

We also see geographic hotbeds of innovation more than time (physics in Germany a hundred yrs in the past, or community innovations in Silicon Valley a 10 years back) that are the outcome of information exchange and cultural anticipations, not population density.

We really do not get these final results by stretching the carrying capability of our one and only planet. We simply cannot shrink our way to likelihood, but we likely can not get there by using exponential enlargement both.