Monday, Feb. 13, 2023 | 2 a.m.
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The Feb. 3 letter “Growth can’t go on unfettered” makes the same mistake as comic book villain Thanos and biologist Paul R. Ehrlich, who wrote “The Population Bomb.”
While we live on a planet with a fixed number of atoms, growth is not about the number of atoms but about knowledge. We convert atoms to resources when we add knowledge to them.
Thanos and Ehrlich also assume that observations about insects, rodents and chimpanzee populations can be applied to human beings. This is a categorical error. Only human beings innovate. The more people we have, the more prosperity we enjoy. The empirical evidence we have to support this idea is overwhelming.
Research for the book “Superabundance” found that every 1% increase in population corresponded to a 3%-4% increase in personal resource abundance. This sounds counterintuitive until you realize that human beings discover and create and share valuable new knowledge. There does not appear to be any limit to the knowledge we can discover. Just as we can create an infinite number of songs with only 88 keys on a piano, we can create an infinite number of new arrangements of atoms. Your iPhone beautifully illustrates this truth.
The world just reached 8 billion people. We should celebrate this and the potential for creating exponential prosperity.
To understand the true relationship between resources and population, think in knowledge, not atoms.
The writer is an associate professor in the College of Business and Government at Brigham Young University Hawaii and co-author with Marian L. Tupy of the book “Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet.”
