Thanks to thundara for inspiring me to actually post this.
I've been thinking over the past couple days about specialization in the labor force, population growth, and the exponential nature of progress, and I had this idea-- my description might end up being pretty brief, but that's because I'm still very much thinking about this, and I haven't really come to a conclusion. I decided to post it now because I want your input, Hubski. Please, agree, pick it apart, tell me why I'm stupid or why it's a great idea, anything. Let's discuss. Anyway, here's the idea:
I think most people would agree that specialization of laborers tends to correlate with increased progress. I think most would further hold that this correlation is actually a causation, and that as fields progress, laborers tend to become more and more specialized by virtue of there being more overall to know. What I propose is that there is a causation underlying this relationship, but in the opposite direction: as people become more and more specialized, fields tend to progress. Focusing the same amount of time on a smaller section of information, knowledge, practical skills, etc. allows fields to progress even more.
So if progress doesn't lead to specialization, what does? Population growth. In a theoretical population with just one doctor, for example, society can't afford for said doctor to have any real specialization, simply because all of the doctor-y work in the population has to be done. But when you scale that up to, say, 400k doctors, each individual doctor can focus on one area of their practice with no issues (or at least fewer issues). The growth of the population (of doctors) allows greater specialization because specialists can take care of the same number of patients, just in different groups. (I'm not explaining this bit very well, but I think it's pretty intuitive. Let me know if you don't understand.)
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. So we're forced to conclude that continued population growth is necessary in order to maintain the incredible rates of progress that we've seen across the board in the past couple centuries.
I've got some ideas about what this would mean for the future of humanity, and when I get a chance I'm gonna try and examine some historical data to compare pop. growth with progress, but for now I just want to know what y'all think. Does this make sense? Do you think it's true? And if so, what do we do about it?
Congratulations for discovering one of the principle tenets of Guns, Germs & Steel. That said, Diamond draws the link between resources and progress, with population growth being positively correlated with resource growth and unrelated to progress. Jared Diamond is definitely a populist. "Serious" anthropologists love to throw shit at him. Still, it's the populist book on the subject, so you probably oughtta read it.
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.