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RE: Perhaps One Of Our Most Remarkable Achievements
Do you think we may see a reversal or stagnation of this chart's improvement as overpopulation becomes an issue in several decades time?
Do you think we may see a reversal or stagnation of this chart's improvement as overpopulation becomes an issue in several decades time?
No, I don't think so. Indeed, as @borntowin points out, doesn't seem to be an issue. In fact, I think it will become clearer during the next 10 - 20 years that humans are essentially multipliers and not only consumers. The more minds you have, the more things you will invent.
Here is a great quote from Economist Bryan Caplan expressing it aptly:
"The total number of people on earth and the average standard of living skyrocketed over the last two centuries. The world has never been more populous or more prosperous than it is today. Never. By historic standards, almost everything is cheap. You may wince at the price of gas, but have you looked inside a WalMart lately? They’re practically giving stuff away.
These would be amazing coincidences if population growth were an important cause of poverty. Indeed, it makes you wonder: Is our population a cause of our prosperity?
The answer is almost certainly yes. The main source of progress is new ideas. We are richer today than we were 100 years ago because we learned so much. We learned ways for one farmer to feed hundreds of people, we learned how to fly, we learned how to make iPhones. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Lucas puts it, the world’s expanding prosperity is “mainly an ongoing intellectual achievement, a sustained flow of new ideas.”
The magic of ideas is all around us. As a little boy, I typed my first words on my mom’s electric typewriter and corrected mistakes by hand. Now I use Microsoft Word, and I haven’t touched a bottle of Liquid Paper in twenty years. If you put this book down for a moment, the fruit of new ideas is probably right in front of your eyes. If you’re wearing contact lenses or had Lasik surgery, the fruit of new ideas is actually on your eyes.
The sweetest thing about ideas is how cheap they are to share. A million people—or 7 billion—can enjoy the latest discovery almost as easily as a solitary hermit. In fact, ideas often become more useful when more people use them. The Internet was so-so when only one person in 100 had a modem; now we can’t live without it.
Our future depends on new ideas. So how would you respond to a precocious five-year-old who asks: “Where do new ideas come from?” You don’t have to dodge the question out of embarrassment. Feel free to blurt out the scandalous truth: New ideas come from people—especially smart, creative people. When you get more people, you get more smart, creative people; and when you get more smart, creative people, you get more new ideas. In the words of economist Julian Simon, “the human imagination” is “the ultimate resource."
Overpopulation will not become an issue, in fact we might have the opposite issue in the future as people have less and less children. Basically if a country has a fertility rate of less than 2.1 children per woman, its population will eventually start decreasing exponentially.
The overpopulation "myth" as I see it doesn't take account of human ingenuity or the ability of technology to solve problems. It is also likely that population will start to fall off and within the next 200 years or so underpopulation may become a problem in certain places. Further moving off planet may become a reality within the next century or so.