The Arguments for More (or Fewer) People

“as potential parents, most of us have decided that putting a lot of effort into raising one or two children is better than spreading those efforts over three, four or more”

I think there are an awful lot of people having none. Certainly in the UK, house prices are so insane that what has been called “affordable family formation” is increasingly out of reach for many people. If you live in London and aren’t on a City salary , you almost HAVE to have a bed partner to afford a single room, let alone somewhere to raise kids.

As a result babies born in the UK are increasingly born to parents from poorer countries, where perhaps expectations around family formation are different. Brits have tended to see the three-bed semi as a potential family home.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/bulletins/parentscountryofbirthenglandandwales/2023

37.3% of live births were to parents where either one or both were born outside the UK, increasing from 35.8% in 2022. India remained the most common country of birth for non-UK-born mothers and fathers, with Pakistan remaining second.

“the political complexion of the government doesn’t seem to make that much difference to birthrates” Agreed, Hungary and Italy are in line with the general trend. Their natalism doesn’t make a difference either way but their anti-immigrant policies make the situation worse. I think however that the general rise of fascism and toxic masculinity – which is not restricted to countries like Hungary – does have an impact on the life choices especially of young women, and that the observed marked decline in birth rates over the last 10 years is related to this.

This, and much more, is explained in Adam Becker’s More, Everything, Forever, which should be required reading for understanding where these people are coming from and why they are all completely insane. That the intellectual capability of the population at large has been so crippled that these maniacs retain the slightest shred of influence is simply tragic.

I haven’t really thought this through but I think there may be a potential slippery slope, or dodgy guardrail, between “numbers don’t matter for creativity“ and “redistribution doesn’t matter for creativity”. If a tiny population of flourishing humans will get you to Jupiter (I mean the symphony, not the SpaceX colony), why not a tiny cultured elite within a sea of drudges (and isn’t the second what really gave us Mozart anyway)? Ofc there are other reasons to be an egalitarian but traditionally at least aesthetic flowering wasn’t just yielded to the other side.

engels 10: This is easy. The way to foster creativity and innovation is not to increase the number of people, but to provide everybody access to education and opportunity. More egalitarian, diverse and inclusive societies are superior for that reason alone.

The way to foster creativity and innovation is… to provide everybody access to education and opportunity

I agree, but the logic behind this sits a bit uneasily with the “better fewer, but better” strategy for Nachtmusikalisch flourishing of #5—and the general anti-natalist ambivalence towards the teeming millions (or so it seems to me).

(not the same person of MrMister 11)

While I agree that education should be accessible to everyone, I don’t think that education in general is a necessity to reach one’s “potential”, I think that this is a way of thinking that comes from the fact that most people here have high education and are socialized into thinking that it is a big necessity, but e.g. Native Americans before the arrival of whites didn’t have formal education and i wouldn’t say their lives were wasted for this reason.

@TM 6
I have no idea why you think toxic masculinity is worse today than in 1980, I’d say it is obviously the opposite. The reason birth rates are falling is that today people marry later, due to increased educational needs, and that women in particular marry later, and that women work: this isn’t a particularly difficult or controversial question.
Then, it is probably a good thing because 1 lower infant mortality means that if we reproduced like in 1700 Earth would explode 2 there are already too many of us 3 it is better that women work because a career can be fulfilling and even if it issn’t, it means they aren’t completely dependent on the husband, who might be a piece of shit.
But this isn’t a reason to make up stuff about toxic masculinity.

@laban 15
Counterpoint: Florence had a big growth spurt starting from around 1200 (I think) when it became dominant economically and culturally, was more republican, arguably more egalitarian (serfs who managed to escape into the cities could cut their feudal ties) etc.; then this growth went on until Florence (like other italian communes) became increasingly “signorie” (lordships, that is basically dominated by one singular very rich family, in Florence case the Medici) and in 1400 we see the big high profile artist stuff, which is what people mostly think about when they speak of Renaissance. But inreality 1400 was already quite close to the end of the parable, and in fact Florence (and other italian comuni) where wacked by a french invasion which started a pair of centuries of continuous wars and foreign dominations, a rather bad period for Italy.
So there is a good chance that the big cultural jump happened before, when Florence was (comparatively) more egalitarian and inclusive.

The same logic applies to the industrial revolution: one of the possible explanations of why the industrial revolution happened in the UK and not, say, in France, is that UK wages were comparatively high, which made investiment in machinery worthwile; then after the industrial revolution started the share of income that went to workers felt down (so called Engel’s pause).
So here too the increased inequality is the consequence of previous success, but the cause of the success is previous comparative egalitarian conditions.

Laban 15: “How egalitarian was Renaissance Florence?” More egalitarian than most other societies at the time? Also having a comparably high literacy rate? I don’t see the point of this type of objection (also 14). The starting point is the thesis that more people are good because they create more innovation. I argue this is bullshit, that if anything, we need to make sure that the existing people have the educational and economic opportunities to exercise their creativity, rather than increasing the number of people and then not being able to “properly feed and educate” (OP) them. Renaissance florence is not an objection to this argument and certainly it’s not an argument in favor of the “more people needed for innovation” theory.

MisterMr: “I have no idea why you think toxic masculinity is worse today than in 1980, I’d say it is obviously the opposite.” There is an intense backlash going on against the emancipatory progress made in the postwar period and the rise of fascism threatens not only to turn the clock back but to make things far worse than at any point in our lifetime. I would also argue that while toxic masculinity no doubt existed in the 1980s, it wasn’t publicly celebrated and promoted by powerful politicians and even governments the way it is celebrated today. There is also intense resistance against this backlash, which gives hope. But I think it’s palpable that the political atmosphere in Western societies is darker, more pessimistic, than at any point in the postwar period. I hasten to add that this is just one of many factors influencing people’s life decisions.

What Jonathan said. Also, if you live in London and aren’t part of the LIBOR rigging class there’s a de facto two (or fewer) child cap on the size of your insecure, privately rented rabbit hutch.

“My impression, and I haven’t done the stats, is that countries or cultures where ‘toxic masculinity’ is a thing tend to have higher total fertility rates”

They may have higher fertility rates, or they may have fewer young women who are allowed to make their own decisions. I wouldn’t know which it is. (Maximum big surprise — I haven’t done the stats either.)

Why do you treat availability of education as being in tension with number of children? It takes people to educate people, and if there are more people to do the education, then we can educate more people. Why think that the number of people that can effectively be educated is constant (or at any rate, completely independent of the growth rate)?

“Why do you treat availability of education as being in tension with number of children?”

Because that’s the way it all too often works out in RL? Because schools with low class sizes usually get results which are better than those of schools where are packed in 30 to 40 to a room, with the controlling factor apparently being not the number of teachers but the number of kids? Because while the thinly-attended schools of no-horse towns form a partial exception, the exception is not so partial that some parents still aren’t willing to say goodbye to most of the other aspects of their lives so that they can enroll their kids in a school which is guaranteed not to be very large? Because one of the arguments which is reliably brought up WRT homeschooling is that when the teacher is a parent the student can rely on individualized attention? Take your pick.

One could turn the question around and ask how much innovation (in the sense that this word is used in the pronatalist argument) has recently come out of China, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Brazil or Bangladesh (the world’s most populous countries apart from the US). No doubt some, especially the increasingly advanced and well educated China, but compared to the US (pre Trump) and Europe on a per capita base I don’t think anybody is willing to argue that poorer more populous countries have beaten the less populous but wealthier and better educated societies in the innovation game. The argument that innovation is essentially a function of population size is indefensible bullshit. Research and innovation rely on educated people and capital expensive infrastructure, both are made possible by economic development, and economic development is not a function of population size (as evidenced by comparing the GDP per capita of Bangladesh with that of Switzerland). I wonder wehther any of these observations are really in dispute.

Pronatalists could now argue that we should both increase innovation per capita (by improving access to education and economic opportunity) and population size to increase total innovation. Although afaict they don’t ever actually make this argument! But these goals are in tension because educating more people requires more resources, and also there’s the issue of diminishing returns. However you look at it, there’s no way in which this argument makes any sense, which is probably why our delusional tech overlords are totally enamored with it and the broken media can’t publish enough illogic propaganda pieces arguing for destructive policies for the sake of it.

most of us have decided that putting a lot of effort into raising one or two children is better than spreading those efforts over three, four or more. What is true for individual families is true for the world as a whole.

and

“Why do you treat availability of education as being in tension with number of children” Because that’s the way it all too often works out in RL?

I don’t like to throw around the phrase “fallacy of composition” but…… If only N% of the population can get the kind of education necessary to join the overclass it might make sense for breeding couples to cease sprog-popping when they no longer have $$$ to buy them in but that logic doesn’t apply to societal debates about the population level (leaving aside the obvious and unnecessary repugnance of such a system).

Chetan Murthy – this is getting way off topic, but outside of AI research “Silicon Valley” is not so creative these days – many of today’s software giants got there not so much by being better than the competition, but by gaining the critical mass (as the user base expands) to become the de facto standard – think back to Facebook eating MySpace’s lunch or Excel killing Lotus 1-2-3. (I’ve spent 35+ years in software development, including working with Indian developers). The original SV more or less invented today’s digital world – by starting with simple integrated circuits (I remember as a 1960s child my father showing some to me) to cramming more and more transistors onto less and less silicon, making personal computers and mobile phones possible.

If creativity was linear to population growth we’d have 12 Shakespeares walking around, 6 or 8 Beethovens, 2 0r 3 Einsteins. We do not.

We do, but they’re all working for Google Adwords increasing click through rates.

In terms of Laban: in terms of how egalitarian was Renaissance Italy: didn’t the Italian and Mediterranean Renaissance begin after the Black Plague drastically reduced the population, and more importantly redistributed the wealth downwards due to monies from very wealthy suddenly being distributed among multiple heirs, some of who died and left wealth to still other heirs. Horrible reasons; but it was both a reduction in population and a more equal if far from egalitarian distribution of resources among the survivor, Real estate especially was cheaper for some time after. A quotation that is anachronistic in this context and whose source I forget goes: “Bohemianism requires cheap rent.”

It’s think it’s at least possible that excessive competition can make it harder for talent to be actualised and not just stand out (not that that’s the only “enemy of promise” operating today).

Shorter Bekabot (25): under capitalism resources are distributed to people for arbitrary reasons, which is great because it pisses off people think they’re entitled to them for different arbitrary reasons.

Matt @ 37: Andrew Odlyzko addressed this head on in his paper “The Decline of Unfettered Research”. He pointed out

(1) the first Solovay conference, you look at the attendees picture, and there’s, like, a massive percentage who went on to get the Nobel prize. Look at it today, and that’s just not the case (haha)

(2) Look at xerography, or photography, where the original inventor was able to patent all manner of nearby applications of his discovery. Then compare it to anything recently invented/discovered (e.g. high-temp superconductivity), and you see that competitors are six months behind the leader in the field. Sure, the leader got there first. But was society really benefited by not having to wait six months?

His point is that unlike a century ago, the distance between the leader and the also-rans is a few months, not years and years. So the argument that by reducing the number of scientists we’ll deprive ourselves of some indispensable mind that would have solved some really important problem …. just doesn’t wash.

Pushing my point @20 a bit further, think about forgers like Han van Meegeran.

Hans van Meegeren.

Only caught, IIRC, because he confessed when he was accused of selling national treasures to the Nazis.

Wikipedia confirms your (and my recollection):

… He was remanded to the Weteringschans prison as an alleged Nazi collaborator and plunderer of Dutch cultural property, threatened by the authorities with the death penalty. … To prove that the “Vermeer” sold to the Nazis was actually a Van Meegeren rather than a priceless Dutch treasure, Van Meegeren painted his last forgery between July and December 1945 watched by reporters and court-appointed witnesses: Jesus among the Doctors, also called Young Christ in the Temple, not a copy but in the style of Vermeer.

So the argument that by reducing the number of scientists we’ll deprive ourselves of some indispensable mind that would have solved some really important problem …. just doesn’t wash.

From your lips to Trump’s ears…

Suppose you dumb down “Shakespeare” to mean “anyone who creates entertainment”. So, Benny Hill is a Shakespeare. (Crooked Timberites, it has come to this.) Half of the people uploading to YouTube are Shakespeares. Anyone who tells a joke is a Shakespeare. And so on.

Under this definition, shakespearean creativity is not linear to population growth, it EXCEEDS population growth. Why? Because such creativity is mostly dependent upon freedom from subsistence toil. Freedom from subsistence toil is dependent upon the standard of living. The standard of living is somehow correlated to the rate of economic growth. But the rate of economic growth generally exceeds the rate of population growth. So creativity growth exceeds population growth. Thus the pro-natalist argument that more population is required for more creativity is still wrong. Natalism is unnecessary. In fact, creativity would be able to increase within a stable population, even one reduced in size.

However, I doubt whether Michaels, Wolf, Cameron, Scorsese, Spielberg, Oates or King would want to be caught dead comparing themselves to Shakespeare. If not, in their eyes, they already suspect at the very least that creativity is not linear to population.

Einstein is usually described as “revolutionizing our understanding of the basic nature of the universe, space and time and all that” and these people have been exceedingly rare. Suppose you dumb down “Einstein” to mean “anyone who revolutionizes a field of scientific endeavor.” The same question arises: Shouldn’t the rate of production of these Einsteins already exceed the rate of population growth, due to the increase in standard of living?

Then in this case, there would have been others who would have stumbled upon the Theory of Relativity, in lieu of Einstein, or upon other similar revolutionary developments across science, because science is an independent rigorous process and the truth will be outed by whomever. (Note that this does NOT make a good pro-natalist argument, if what happened, was going to happen anyway.)

But if there are more such Einsteins all the time, appearing linear to population growth, why are there not increasingly more such revolutions, coming again and again within every field of science?

Certainly this touches upon deep issues about the nature of science itself, and about how all its Vermeers will be painted. But even if you say, “First the laws are discovered, then a paradigm ensues, then discrepancies and anomalies must be detected,” and so forth, I’m not sure how you would prove that this process is accelerated necessarily by population growth.

Freedom from subsistence toil is dependent upon the standard of living.

Guys it’s time for some anthropological economics…
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781315184951/stone-age-economics-marshall-sahlins-david-graeber

The original argument was that more people create more “innovation in medicine, engineering and science” (to which I have objected that such innovation depends more on education and infrastructure than on population size). Now we have gotten to the question of how many Shakespeares and Beethovens we may have missed. As 43 alludes to, we have no way of objectively determining artistic genius. There may or may not have been any number of literary geniuses since Shakespeare, opinions vary (and was Shakespeare really so great? Most people alive probably haven’t read anything of him). But this line of argument is silly. Artistic recognition depends on an audience and on social conditions.

No doubt there are today a great many good, even excellent artists in all kinds of fields. But most of them don’t get much recognition (and therefore don’t have much impact on soiciety) simply because there are so many of them. There are so many writers, musicians, artists who can’t make a living from their art (this is not new of course, but today it’s a mass phenomenon). So it’s probably true that a larger population produces more artists, just as it produces more doctors or software engineers (provided that the educational infrastructure is in place). So what? A larger audience provides a larger market both for doctors and artists, but there’s a big difference: artistic work can (in most cases) be reproduced. A bigger population needs more doctors but not necessarily more musicians or writers.

But what about the rare earth-shattering geniuses? They are only earth-shattering geniuses if they are recognized as such, if they have the kind of impact on the audience and on the development of art that Shakespeare or Beethoven or maybe Picasso have (arguably) had. For whatever reason, this kind of recognition doesn’t happen in contemporary culture any more, maybe because the audience is just too big and diverse.

tldr: The whole line of thinking is just silly.

thank you to lfc @ 53 for the knapp recommendation; after posting this i will run, not walk, to the website of my local library to reserve it. and yes, naturally, in my usual way i am making my point with a bit of a jest. of course the first folio was published quickly – that too was a sign of commercial success, not a recognition that shakespeare was the greatest playwright ever to live. we learned the full heights of shakespeare’s importance not in his lifetime but a century after, and a century after that and a century after that. thus, i argue, it makes no sense to look around and say “where are the shakespeares”; we don’t get to decide that, the people of 2125 and 2225 and 2325 will get to decide that. We, however, are the first people to get a glimmer of the Shakespeare-ness of the commercial/popular artistic efforts of of (say) the 19th century through to the early 20th. Can you name some? I have a few in mind. I even have some in mind from the 1940s and 50s! I suspect our lists would overlap. And a hundred years from now our successors’ lists would be smaller and overlap more. Less and less of the revolutionary past survives into the present the further ahead in time we are; eventually it boils down to one or two, with the rest ready to be rediscovered and re-revolutionize us.

Tm@50 raises a good point, there is some political salience to who is recognized in their time as great, or even superlatively great. certainly goethe, beethoven and shakespeare all did their share of kissing up to the powerful, who then promoted them for their own reasons. so could we identify some in the past who were considered simply commercial successes (or perhaps not even that) but have been given greater credit in the centuries since? This happened routinely in the 19th and 20th century… here is my list:

h.p. lovecraft – in his lifetime, seen as a “weird tales” guy, just some weird dude writing pure garbage for sick perverts. he didn’t even have great commercial success! yet today his work is incredibly influential on generation after generation.

w.e.b. dubois – in his lifetime, derided for being a (long string of furious, screaming racial slurs inserted here), though (grudgingly) recognized as an organizer; his black revisionist historical work on reconstruction revived and expanded by eric foner and other academics and now considered at least part of the mainstream view of the period if not the dominant view, at least before the critical race theory ban prohibited teaching about it.

edgar allan poe – a divisive figure in his lifetime – some loved his work, others thought it was chintzy and repulsive. certainly had some commercial success but not massive. championed by baudelaire after his death, turned out to be foundational to not just one but two major genres of popular literature.

henry david thoreau – the absolute pinnacle of “guy who couldn’t make it” during his life, recognized afterwards and championed by – again, looking to Tm’s thinking here – a political movement!

franz kafka – i mean i guess it’s kinda cheating to pick this one.

otis redding – while considering this one i actually started to recognize a different flaw in my argument which is the pipeline. his biggest hit records were actually “in the pipeline” when he died. just by chance he never got to experience that success. but i can’t imagine a world where they weren’t hits. so does this even count?

who will emerge as 21st century versions? perhaps bukowski is our first? nick drake? there will certainly be many more.

One example that comes to mind of an author who was not particularly successful, either commercially or critically, in his lifetime, but is now recognized as a genius, is Melville.

60, does anybody compare Lovecraft or Thoreau (or Melville) to Shakespeare? Afaict the names on your list are not widely recognized as exceptional geniuses, maybe Kafka comes closest.

Darwin and Einstein’s contributions to science were recognized not because they sucked up to the powerful but because they really made great contributions, and this isn’t just a matter of cultural taste, as in the case of Shakespeare. But if Darwin and Einstein hadn’t been around at the right time and place to make these discoveries, no doubt somebody else would have made them at about the same time. Again, the “we need more geniuses” theory of pronatalism is completely bullshit.

Since I’m a comic and anime lover, I’ll note that Walt Disney in the west and Osamu Tezuka (who was a big disney fan) in the east should count as revolutionary geniuses, we just don’t count them because comics and cartoons tailored for kids don’t count as serious literature.

The problem is, someone is hailed as a “genious” because he revolutionizes a field, so for example Dante Alighieri revolutionized italian literature because he was one of the first of writing in vulgar and not in latin; there were earlier vulgar poets, but not as gifted as him, so the quality of his work is part of the reason he (and not the earlier ones) is recognized as a genius, but there is also the fact that he lived in the period of that specific transition.
It is a bit like winning the olimpics: the winner will certainly be a gifted and well trained athlete, but because the olimpics are a competition even if everyone is gifted and well trained there will still be just one winner.
Disney and Tezuka, in my example, lived in a moment where the media landscape changed a lot, and society changed a lot, so their impact was very revolutionary: they were personally very gifted, each with a strong personal artistic view, but they revolutionized their fields because the times were ripe for that kind of revolution.

TM @64
I must take some issue w your argument that the greatness of Shakespeare or Melville or etc. is merely a matter of “cultural taste.” The idea that everything is totally subjective and some 17 year old kid scribbling mediocre poems or stories in a notebook is just as good as Shakespeare is absurd. Just because your own expertise is in math or statistics or hard science doesn’t give you carte blanche to reduce literary scholarship and criticism to the status of “I like vanilla, you like chocolate.” Shakespeare did amazing things w the language, and if you’ve never read e.g. Hamlet or Lear or Henry IV pt 1 or the Sonnets, you won’t appreciate that. The point is not that there shd be some Authority of the Canon decreeing that everyone shd bow down before any particular author, but rather that there are ways of talking about the quality of an artist’s work that attend to the specifics or style and linguistic innovation and power, and that because it’s not hard science doesn’t mean it shd all be dismissed as “cultural taste.” Melville btw is most definitely considered a genius, as many consider Moby-Dick the greatest English-language novel (I’m not sure it wd be my own pick for that but that’s beside the point).

John Q #55: “Only if there is an infinite supply of undiscovered and revolutionary questions.”

Yes. Although it could be that human cognitive limitations prevent the unveiling of new ideas until they are somehow ripe to be discovered, by development of the art or science, or perhaps by accidental or rare events which suddenly pose the question. So discovery is naturally slow. And this can be combined with either of the two main theories on the total amount of supply of questions:

Exhaustion: All the basic scientific laws will be discovered in a finite period of time. I vaguely remember that Richard Feynman wrote that this is true of the basic laws of physics, in The Character of Physical Law (1965).
Endlessness: Science never stops developing; rather its history so far only demonstrates a progressive “deepening and erasure.” I think this phrase is attributed to Jean Cavailles, remarkable French philosopher (and member of the resistance killed by the Nazis in 1944). Bateson remarks that there will always be a wider question to be investigated, in Mind and Nature (1979).

And there is another possible condition that, like the limitations of human cognition, combines with either #1 or 2: Science becomes impossible to do. This might happen because of A) increasing complexity, or B) higher costs and/or current technological limitations (e.g. the need for more powerful particle accelerators). See Nicholas Rescher, The Limits of Science (1999), a great, wide-ranging book.

Of course, none of this would argue for the natalist position that more people brings more creativity. Any more than natalism is supported by arguing that there are lots of Shakespeares and Einsteins walking around, but their achievements and innovations no longer stand out to us, or else they are not actualized due to faulty education and infrastructure. You would want to fix the education and infrastructure first.

MisterMr @ 66 raises a good point, which is that the object of “genius” is indeed socially determined. as much as disney’s actual legacy is financial and corporate, artistically he was at the helm during some of the most influential and lasting changes in a form that has existed for centuries. similarly, it really is a joke to say that there haven’t been any “shakespeares” revolutionizing a field of art in our lifetime when grandmaster flash invented style, sound and techniques that have now conquered the entire globe. ah, but, naturellement, we cannot assign any bigbrain genius qualities to a barbadian immigrant, no matter what they do. find a nation on earth today and their dominant modern musical form will be directly, not indirectly, traceable back to something grandmaster flash did in 1978.

Just to note that the examples of scientific discovery and artistic creativity aren’t remotely alike. Restart human history in, say, 1492, and someone will discover calculus and Newtonian mechanics, but nobody will write Hamlet or Don Giovanni (although they might, in such a parallel world produce some works of similar quality).