(Untitled)

[spendocrat]

Dr. Albert Bartlett (Professor Emeritus, Physics Department, University of Colorado):

Can you think of any problem in any area of human endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?

This seems

Comments

[spendocrat]

More seriously: What you say is not necessarily the case. One large city can deliver its services more efficiently than three smaller towns with the same total population. Advances in technology also allow us to consume less resources with the same or similar standard of living (recycling, for example, or LED lamps in place of tungsten bulbs, and gas lights before that).

I understand what he was trying for with the question, but there are obvious examples that answer his question directly. Some things are better with more people. The economy is much better when people are specialists than when they are generalists -- our ability to command the labour of others (by trading our labour for theirs) depends in great part on that type of efficiency. To take one of Adam Smith's examples, a generalist would be hard-pressed to make a couple of pins in a day, while specialists with their training and custom tools can make hundreds. You might argue that they use more metal this way, and that's true, but the amount of food and fuel they use per pin made becomes much, much less. That kind of specialization requires a certain size of population to accomplish.

It's not useful to set up a dichotomy where we either care about the sanctity of nature or the benefit of humanity. They are not separate things -- people need nature and are part of it.