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A comment on The New Population Bomb: Four Mega Trends That Will Change the World.

Re:The New Population Bomb: Four Mega Trends That Will Chang... by CWuestefeld on Wednesday January 27, 2010 @03:07PM (#1081554)
Only read half so far, but so far it's interesting.

It's NOT just a return to Malthus and Ehrlich, although the latter is cited several times as a sort of parallel. Even so, I think they miss the point of why Ehrlich lost his wager with Simon. While it's true that prosperity is helped by constant increases in manpower, it's not the biggest factor.

Our climbing prosperity is primarily due to improving know-how. And barring really extreme circumstances, we're not going to forget the technology that has allowed us to feed more with less work, and other feats.

That technology will still exist into the future, and because IP isn't rivalrous (claims of Disney and RIAA notwithstanding), it'll be available the whole world.

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Re:The New Population Bomb: Four Mega Trends That Will Chang... by billswift on Thursday January 28, 2010 @01:38PM (#1084598)
>due to improving know-how

The biggest factor is educated manpower. That is more important than any other factor by a fairly large margin. Not least because increasing manpower even without education increases market size, which is an independent benefit of its own.

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