CeilingCat
Posts: 2363
Joined: Dec. 2007
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Hey! er,... I mean COFFEE!! Denyse reads Uncommonly Dense! Hi Denyse!
She evidently read my post (Hi again, brighteyes!) and checked out the National Post columnist who advocated reducing the world's population. Of course, she got a few things a little wrong ...
| Quote | Hers would, of course, be a disastrous policy because there would not be nearly enough people to fulfill all the roles in society that make for modern progress, comfort, and longevity.
Population bombers have always failed to grasp this fact: If there were only 2 million people in the world, the pace of innovation would be very slow. |
Actually, the lowest figure the columnist mentioned was 3.43 Billion people by 2075, but 2 million vs 3.43 billion is well within Denyse's usual margin of error.
You see, Dense explains, "With a low population, you don’t have enough people to draw from a large pool of highly specific attributes." Actually, if our planet encountered such a catastrophe that our population was reduced to 2 million by 2075, finding people with the right attributes would be the least of the problems for the scattered remants of humanity. But 3.43 billion, not so much.
Nevertheless, a low population is evidently the reason that "...Stone Age people went from one millennium to the next with few advances." Luckily, we have a high and rapidly growing population today so that, "By contrast today, there must be tens of thousands of nerds in India alone. Advances are so swift, I can’t figure out what the kids are doing with those new devices they stare at or yak into on the transit."
Actually, not everybody in the world has that particular problem, Denyse, but keep trying. You might also consider that the stone aged problem may not have been quite as severe as you remember it, since they did eventually invent civilization, which included agriculture, writing, copper, bronze and iron smelting and a whole host of other advances.
But Denyse worries that the grandmas of the world might take over in a future low-population scenario: | Quote | Also, a slow pace of advancement feeds on itself.
If nothing has changed since Grandma’s day, Grandma can be the authority even if she doesn’t know very much beyond the subsistence survival skills she passes on – but does not add to.
So lore becomes doctrine, and the response to potential advances is, “Our people do not do things that way.”
No. But maybe they should. Still, it would be impossible to discuss. People caught in this bind feel they are desecrating Grandma’s grave when they move ahead. |
Kind of reminds me of ID.
Meanwhile many have noted that the world population was at the 3.43 billion mark sometime in the sixties and we had a bit of innovation back then. I seem to remember space flight and travelling to the moon, the invention of integrated circuits and microprocessors and a whole host of other advances back then. In fact, if I remember correctly, we were riding pretty high back in those low-population days
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