The World Needs Fewer Not More People To Innovate

A rebuttal of the idea that the world needs more people to accelerate innovation and solve our challenges.

Among technology utopians it has become common to challenge the idea that we need to get population growth under control. You can hear this sentiment expressed both by technology icons such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Their idea is that the world will be saved by technology and to produce more innovation we need more people.

Elon Musk will allude to this at times when complaining about having a shortage of engineers to realize his vision. His rather banal response is that the world needs more people. But even the most minimal reflection should expose how broken that idea is. If 20 million more people are born tomorrow in Congo, it will not give Elon Musk any more engineers.

In so far as Elon Musk lacks enough engineers it is not due to lack of people. It is due to widespread poverty where hundreds of millions if not billions of people don’t get enough opportunities. Before talking about expanding the human population we should give all these poor people a chance.

This brings me to an important point about human development. Very little development happens in a population where people are just scraping by doing their best to simply survive from one day to the next. Innovation and technological progress tends to happen in societies with some form of abundance.