I'm not really knowledgeable enough to comment on recent (>2009) discussions on the topic of crowd control (Feel free to share any resources you know), but I can forward both you and elizabeth to Malcolm Potts, the guy whose name I forgot last night. He's big on increasing accessibility to planned parenthood resources in Africa and has a lot of well-informed ideas to share on the topic. I'd link a video, but I've only seen him talk in person, so I don't know of good online presentations. That said, I agreed with what you wrote up until... I don't know at this point if more heads are necessary to solve the various challenges facing humanity today. To some extent, smart minds will be limited by sparse money. Take biomedicinal research for example: scientists are increasingly leaving their fields because NIH's funding has stalled in recent years, and unless you have a pitch to DOE, DARPA, or another organization, you're just going to be fighting over the same pool money as everyone else, and more minds can only increase the competition and decrease the ability of any one person to hold a stable career and investigate risky subjects. Independent economies certainly helps with that problem, but then you start asking yourself how many modern engineering problems are starting to center around "we don't have enough resources for everyone on this planet, how can we squeeze more from what we already have?" I'm increasingly more fascinating by the products of separate cultures and how different countries come up with different solutions to the same problems (in everything ranging from politics to agriculture to social philosophies). End poorly directed comment. I'm hungry!One can extrapolate, therefore, that growth of a population at large, which leads to population growth in most professions relatively equally, allows for increased specialization, leading (going back to the 1st paragraph of my idea) to increased progress.
That's true, I hadn't really thought of that. I suppose it's also eminently possible that funding imbalances will skew the relationship between general population growth and growth in a particular sector... But I do still think some level of pop. growth is necessary to maintain our current rates of progress. As different fields get more and more complex, specialization is necessary, which must eventually lead to a need for more laborers.I don't know at this point if more heads are necessary to solve the various challenges facing humanity today. To some extent, smart minds will be limited by sparse money. Take biomedicinal research for example: scientists are increasingly leaving their fields because NIH's funding has stalled in recent years, and unless you have a pitch to DOE, DARPA, or another organization, you're just going to be fighting over the same pool money as everyone else, and more minds can only increase the competition and decrease the ability of any one person to hold a stable career and investigate risky subjects.