I can't know Sarah's reasoning. But there is a school of thought whereby more people mean a greater likelihood of brilliant ideas, the best of which will be solutions to our global problems that more than offset the burden of what's ultimately not so many extra mouths to feed.
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I just don't see this as indefinitely true. And I think we have the ability to make existing people more productive and generate good ideas. We don't need to make more people to do it. Potentially brilliant people who could with many years are dying of malnutrition.
I don't know how many people have to be born to get a Thomas Edison or Norman Borlaug, but insofar as it's possible to arbitrarily generate world-changing people, we still don't know how to do it. And that's OK, if the world is populous and diverse enough to do so organically.
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It's relatively small groups of people that end up generating massive global increases to productivity and quality of life, and thusfar we've had to cultivate a lot of other people and their ideas to make those gains, because failure is the default.
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But that's my point. We may have many of these people already but they live in poverty, or forced to have babies. And you can say as a % of world population its a lot less, it's still more people suffering everyday than the total population, what, 100 years ago. That's a lot.
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Yet the rate of technological progress has accelerated alongside population growth, as I'd predict, and I'd predict it to slow with a decline in population for the same reasons. It's still very hard to capture human potential in many parts of the world, but that's shifting, too.
End of conversation
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