twenty of mouths
and minds

The Virtue of People

At the Central Drug Research Institute, a team of scientists has developed a drug that has the potential to improve the lives and health of diabetics. The drug shows promise in both controlling blood sugar and insulin levels and in preventing the cholesterol abnormalities that frequently come with diabetes and that can lead to heart disease. Twenty-six million Americans suffer from diabetes. The U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control have described it as an epidemic.¹ In 2010 diabetes was the seventh-leading killer of Americans, and caused more than $200 billion in damage to the U.S. economy.

The team of scientists who’ve come up with this new potential treatment for diabetes is led by Dr. Atul Kumar. The Central Drug Research Institute isn’t in the United States. It’s in the city of Lucknow, India.² India’s rise in wealth and education may soon pay dividends for Americans in the form of lower health costs and longer lives.

We live on a world with more than seven billion people on it. Only one billion of those people live in the rich world. But the remaining six billion are rapidly rising in wealth. That’s happening most notably in China and India.

How are we to view the rise in wealth of other countries? Are they competitors? Are they allies? Does the growing wealth of consumers in Shanghai or Mumbai reduce our own wealth, or does it increase it?

There is no doubt that rising wealth in the developing world contributed to a surge in prices between 2008 and 2011. Worldwide production of steel, copper, food, coal, and a host of other commodities has risen continuously to new records, yet their prices also soared due to ballooning demand in the developing world, and especially from China.

Yet in the long term, in the absence of physical constraints, demand creates supply. In the case of oil we may truly be up against physical constraints. In the case of all other commodities, production has kept increasing at a rapid pace, and investments to bring more supply onto the market have also soared. And in the case of energy, the one physical resource that can do the most to liberate other resources, we are nowhere near the physical constraints. The lesson of history is that, as resources rise in price, innovation will lower the cost of producing almost all of those resources, find substitutes for others, and overall bring the supply up and the prices back down.

At the same time, ideas created by people in China, India, or anywhere else, have a nearly unlimited ability to enhance the lives of people in the United States, Europe, or anywhere on Earth. The richer those countries become, the richer all of the developing world becomes, the greater the likelihood that they’ll produce new innovations that benefit us.

The six billion people in the developing world represent a huge untapped force. The entire population of Europe during the Renaissance was less than 100 million. If we can unlock the potential human capital in the developing world, then it’s a potential source of the next Leonardo da Vinci, the next Albert Einstein, the next Norman Borlaug who’ll kick off the next Green Revolution. The next Thomas Edison or Bill Gates or Steve Jobs of clean energy, food, or water could emerge from Africa or India or China, if those places see their human capital rise.

There are excellent, simple, and profoundly human moral reasons to want to see the world’s developing nations continue to rise out of poverty and into affluence. Virtually every religion on Earth emphasizes helping the poor—that theme unites Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. The overwhelming majority of men and women alive would regard a world with less hunger and less poverty as a better world, purely on the basis of an innate sense that suffering, hunger, and poverty are bad, and that everyone deserves at least a chance at well-being. From a purely moral and compassionate standpoint, we’d like to see the poor grow richer.

But there is an entirely separate reason. From a purely selfish standpoint, we should want to see the poor grow richer. Properly empowered with adequate nutrition, education, and access to the fruits of modern civilization, minds anywhere on the planet become a huge potential asset for you. An Indian chemist could be the person who develops a drug that saves you or a loved one from cancer. A Chinese physicist could be the one who finds a way to produce super-strong and light plastics at cheap prices—a discovery that would enrich your life in myriad ways. An African biologist might be the person who develops a vaccine against HIV or a cure for the common cold.

Or, to the point of resource usage and the environment, that Indian chemist could be the one who develops a new process for creating solar fuels cheaper than gasoline. That Chinese physicist’s new plastic might make wind turbines lighter and wind electricity cheaper, and reduce the fuel consumption of cars and planes. That African biologist might invent a new strain of wheat that produces more food with less need for water, fertilizer, or pesticides.

Innovations add to our wealth and well-being. Innovations multiply resources, allowing us to grow richer while using less. Innovations, once created, have no nationality. They may bring their inventors revenue, may make them fortunes, but the knowledge itself, if it’s useful, will find its way to every corner of the world given time. Indeed, the only way an innovation can bring wealth to its inventor is by its dissemination to others.

The Chinese invented rag paper and block printing, but it was in Europe that those two inventions, along with others, combined to make Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press. Ultimately, the whole world benefited from those inventions in China and the new idea they helped create in Germany. Penicillin was discovered by the Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming. The first functioning technique for sterilizing food was produced by a French man, Louis Pasteur. The first practical electric light was produced by an American, Thomas Edison. The first solar photovoltaic cells were created by a trio of Americans working at Bell Labs. Fiber optics were developed by a Chinese scientist, Charles Kao, during his time in England. The Green Revolution wheat varieties and breeding techniques were created by American Norman Borlaug while working in Mexico, his research funded in part by the Mexican government and in part by an American foundation. All these innovations spread to the world, bringing benefit to millions, if not billions. In some cases, their inventors grew rich off patent rights or through savvy commercialization of the idea. In all cases, the benefit to the world was far greater than the benefit to the inventor.

In the long term, it doesn’t matter where an innovation comes from. The best of them will spread. What matters most is that we encourage more innovation, period. And the best way to do that is to see the developing world rise out of poverty and into wealth. We should think of the rising wealth of China and India as a great future blessing for Americans. We should view the task of reducing poverty and growing nutrition, health, literacy, education, and wealth in the developing world as not just a humanitarian cause, but a selfish cause. The more innovators there are in the world, the better off we will all be.

Nor is the effect limited to innovators. More consumers also help make the world better, by increasing the incentives for innovation. Consider this. If you’re diagnosed with a disease, would you rather it be a rare disease that only a few people suffer from? Or would you rather it be a fairly common disease? The fairly common disease will have had more effort put into curing it. The incentive to innovate is proportional to the financial rewards of innovation. And that, in turn, is proportional to the size of the market. The more well-off consumers in the world market there are, the greater the rewards of producing a new idea, and the greater the fraction of the world’s resources that are turned to innovation.

If there are only five potential buyers for a new idea or a product based on it, the potential rewards are smaller than if there are 500 or 5 million potential buyers. Perhaps that, in part, explains the increase in innovation in developed countries. Economist Charles Jones has calculated that in the combined economies of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Japan, the total number of people working in research and development has risen four to five times faster than the population has increased since 1950.^{3 A larger market has increased the rewards for innovation, drawing more people and resources to it. And growing wealth for the world means a larger market for any new innovation. As economist Alex Tabarrok has pointed out, “If China and India were as rich as the United States is today, the market for cancer drugs would be eight times larger than it is now.”4 And that larger market for new goods of all sorts would draw more people and more resources, and produce more innovations. As the poor world gets richer, the rewards for innovation anywhere in the world will grow, continuing that trend, and further fueling innovation.}

Is More Better?

Innovators are good, and innovators are people. A larger market encourages even more innovation, and markets are made of people. So would having more people on the planet be better? Of course, there’s huge untapped brainpower in the world already. There are billions of people who haven’t had the opportunity to meet their full potential and contribute to the world’s store of ideas. Fixing that has to be the top priority when it comes to increasing the planet’s brain power. Addressing poverty and boosting education in the developing world should be a top foreign policy priority for the United States and other rich nations.

But what about beyond that? How many people should the world have on it? It’s a given in most environmental and natural resource discussions that overpopulation harms the planet and increases poverty. I was educated to believe that overpopulation was a great ill, and that population growth was at the heart of most of the world’s problems. But is that really true?

Consider this thought experiment. Would your life be better off if only half as many people had lived before you? For fairness and simplicity, assume that those people were evenly removed from history from all corners of the world. You can’t pick and choose which ones lived. It’s a random reduction.

Would you be better ofl?

I’ve asked this question to dozens of people over the course of writing this book. The answers vary wildly. But those who think about the benefit they’ve accrued from science, medicine, and inventions of all sorts invariably answer that their lives would be worse off if fewer people had lived before. There would be fewer medicines, less food, fewer symphonies and books. There might be no such thing as antibiotics or telephones or automobiles. We owe past generations a debt for their production of ideas that enrich our lives today.

There’s an American Indian saying that we do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children. The proverb is an exhortation to leave the world in good shape so that future generations can prosper. It’s a wise saying, and one that we haven’t lived up to. In numerous ways, we’re leaving the planet’s air, land, and seas worse off than when we found them. We’re depleting one-time resources. That needs to stop. We can and should protect our shared, common resources. We can and should transition to sources of prosperity that can be maintained nearly indefinitely.

Yet in other ways, we’re leaving future generations an inheritance richer than the one that we received. We’re leaving them a richer store of knowledge about the world—knowledge that enhances and enriches their lives. Isaac Newton once wrote, in a letter to his contemporary Robert Hooke, “If I have seen farther, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” In a sense, we all stand on the shoulders of the generations before us, the discoveries they made, and the innovations they produced. That’s true for those, like Newton, who developed revolutionary future ideas atop those of the ones who came before them. And it’s also true of those of us—all of us, really—who reap the benefits of those past ideas.

So, if we are better off for having had more people before us, what does that say about our population today? What does that say about what’s best for future generations?

The Knowledge Commons

The phrase “The Tragedy of the Commons” comes to us from an essay that ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote in the journal Science in 1968. Hardin saw, perceptively, that common resources that were open to unlimited use and exploitation without cost would be degraded. He failed to grasp the many ways in which small-scale commons are regulated by the social webs between people, the study of which won Elinor Ostrom her Nobel Prize in economics. But for large, anonymous commons like the world’s oceans and its atmosphere, the problem he saw exists.

Hardin’s prescribed cure was to hold down the number of people on the planet. “Freedom to Breed is Intolerable,” he titled one section of the essay. Yet as we’ve seen, there are other ways to protect the commons, by making it in everyone’s personal and direct self- interest to deplete them less and to restore and improve them more. In areas where we’ve enacted regulations or changed our economic system to reflect the value of the commons—like the sulfur dioxide emissions that cause acid rain, or the CFC emissions that deplete the ozone layer—things are turning around. Those commons are improving. Acid rain is no longer a scourge of North America. The ozone hole is recovering more quickly than expected. The physical commons we share can be protected and can, in some cases, be repaired.

The complement to the physical commons is the knowledge commons, the sum set of knowledge that humanity has created. While physical commons can either be depleted or restored, the knowledge commons changes in only one direction—toward a greater wealth of ideas.

And knowledge, unlike physical resources, is non-rival. It can be used in as many times and places as we care to, without depleting it. Its value to us is multiplied by the number of people who put it to work. In 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter that “[h]e who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”⁵

Economist Paul Romer puts it less poetically, but more plainly in the context of population. Do more people hurt our prosperity, or increase it? He says, “If everything were just objects, like trees, then more people means there’s less wood per person. But if somebody discovers an idea, everybody gets to use it, so the more people you have who are potentially looking for ideas, the better off we’re all going to be.”⁶

Even for those ideas that are still in their twenty-year patent lifetime, and even with the many ways in which the patent system should be improved, the unique qualities of ideas lead to their spread, intersection, and continual improvement. Edison patented his light bulb, but that didn’t prevent electrified lighting from spreading. By 1899, the last year of Edison’s patent, millions of people in the United States, Canada, and Europe were using electrified light. And new advances such as tungsten-based bulbs were on the market. Those new bulbs were informed, in part, by Edison’s carbon-filament bulb. His patent prevented others from producing the same bulb, but in the process of filing it, Edison, as all other inventors who file patents do, was forced to reveal its construction and design. And that knowledge, loose in the world, enriched the knowledge commons, and led to the creation of newer and better bulbs, even during the lifetime of Edison’s patent.

Physical commons can go either direction—toward degradation and destruction, or toward restoration and improvement. Knowledge commons almost always grow richer over time. Each additional idea is a gift to the future. Each additional idea producer is a source of wealth for future generations.

If we can improve the ways in which our economic system regards the commons, we can protect and restore them. We know that the physical resources of the planet are abundant. The key is to make use of them efficiently, while minimizing or eliminating the collateral damage we do along the way. Enriching the knowledge commons with new ways to use resources more efficiently, multiply their value, and replace the scarcest of them is the ultimate way to go about that. And the knowledge commons is the fruit of human minds. More minds—when they’re empowered to innovate, and encouraged to improve rather than destroy the commons—means more ideas and more wealth for us all.

The Shrinking Global Brain?

Yet in many parts of the world, the number of minds that actively contribute to innovation is set to shrink in the years ahead.

As a fraction of population, the number of people of working age is already shrinking in some parts of the world. In Japan, in 1990, 70 percent of the population was of working age. Today that number is 65 percent and shrinking. Europe and China will start seeing their working age populations decline as a percentage of total population in this decade, putting more pressure on pensions and safety nets for the elderly, which must be funded by those who are employed.

But the decline will not just be as a percentage. It will come in absolute numbers. The only major economic powers in the world that will have larger workforces in 2050 than today, if current trends hold, will be the United States and India. The total number of working-age people in the other economic powers of the world—Japan, Europe, and China—are all declining or about to decline.

In 1995 Japan had a working-age population of around 85 million people. Today it’s less than 80 million. By 2050, it’s projected to be only 55 million people.⁷

Europe today has a working age population of around 310 million people. By 2020 that population will be 5 million smaller. By 2050, on current trends, Europe’s working age population will have shrunk to around 260 million people, 50 million less than today. And a largest-ever fraction of those will be workers in their fifties and sixties, rather than the most innovative workers in their twenties, thirties, and forties.⁸

China will fare little better. China’s working age population, in both absolute numbers and as a percentage of the country, is peaking right now. Demographers expect it to reach its all-time high in around 2013, just shy of 1 billion people, after which it will begin to shrink.⁹ In 2050, China will have just over 800 million people of working age, 200 million fewer than today. The country will have 1.6 working-age people per retiree, down from its present ratio of 5.4 working-age people per retiree.¹⁰

Is that the world we want? Much has been written about the challenges of having more elderly per worker. Pensions, social security, and health care for the elderly don’t come for free. They’re paid for by younger men and women still in the workforce. As the number of retirees grows and the number of workers—the absolute numbers—shrinks, fewer workers will be supporting more retirees. That poses huge challenges to the world.

But even if the remaining workers didn’t have to support retirees, it’s not clear that a shrinking number of people producing new goods, services, and ideas for others would be a better world. With fewer people alive, working, and innovating are we more or less likely to produce a cure for cancer? A cure for Alzheimer’s disease? A new technique for harnessing more of the abundant energy from the sun at a lower cost?

Less, of course. People are the ultimate source of innovations, and innovations are the source of our present prosperity.

Can those innovations compensate for the ecological damage that we’ve done? Contrary to what Malthus would have expected, it appears that the innovation people produce routinely outstrips the ecological cost of those additional people. Evidence from both ancient civilizations and modern civilization suggests that, as the number of people in an area rise, their total rate of innovation rises faster than the population and faster than consumption.

The Anti-Malthus

In 1993, economist Michael Kremer published a paper provocatively titled “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1900.”^{11 Kremer was interested in the idea, recently promoted by Paul Romer, that people, by producing innovations, were the primary source of human wealth.}

Kremer set out to test this by looking back in history at civilizations that had no contact with each other, and thus had access only to the ideas they produced internally. He chose five: The Old World, comprising Europe, Asia, and Africa; the New World of North and South America; Australia; Tasmania; and the tiny civilization of Flinders Island.

He then reasoned that, all things being equal, a larger contiguous area should be able to support a larger initial population. That larger population should then produce more ideas, which would show up as more advanced technology and the ability to support higher population densities.

What he found supported that conclusion.

By the time Columbus discovered the Americas, the Old World, with a larger starting land area, had a substantially higher population density and greater technology. Europe, which had benefited from ideas originating in China and Africa, had the highest technology level on the planet—steel, firearms, ocean-going ships, the wheel, and so on. It had a population density of five people per square kilometer, at least twice that of the Americas, and possibly far higher.

The Americas, the second-largest land area, came in second in both population density, at perhaps one to two people per square kilometer, and second in technology, with agriculture, stone tools, writing, and calendars among the Maya of Central America.

Australia, the third-largest land area, came in third in population density, with a third of a person per square kilometer. The Australians, despite having reached their home at least 20,000 years before the residents of the Americas, had never developed agriculture. With fewer minds, there had been fewer innovations.

Australia did have some powerful tools—the spear thrower, the boomerang, fire-making, stone tools with handles, and bone tools like needles. Australia’s smaller neighbor Tasmania, an island the size of Ireland, lacked even these. And on tiny Flinders island, the population had gone extinct soon after rising seas had separated it from Tasmania.

Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel, articulated that European progress came so much faster than that in the Americas and Africa because of Europe’s greater endowment of useful plant and animal species that early humans could domesticate. He may well be right. Kremer’s thesis, however, is even simpler. More land area means more minds can be supported with the most primitive technology. Having more minds means faster progress.

The notion is provocative. The greater the population, the faster technological innovation occurred. And that innovation increased the effectiveness with which people could harvest resources from their land, letting more people live on the same area of land, in greater wealth. The presence of more minds in a region increased the carrying capacity of that region, through their innovations.

It makes one wonder—would the Easter Islanders still be alive if their island had been larger? Would the added brainpower have allowed them to innovate their way out of their problems? Would it have allowed them to find ways to use less wood? Would they have created the social and economic systems necessary to protect their forests and use them sustainably?

Metropolis Earth

The notion that as populations grow, the rate of innovation rises faster than population is a challenging one. Yet the evidence of it comes from more than just ancient history. We can see signs of it today, all around us.

In 2008, humanity hit a pivotal milestone. For the first time ever in our history, more people live in cities than in the countryside. We’ve become an urban species. Call us homo urbanicus.

In 2002, a physicist named Geoffrey West set out to try to quantify the behavior of cities in a way that would allow scientists to predict and understand it. West had made his career in physics. He’d started and led the high-energy physics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory and had become one of the lab’s ten Senior Fellows. In 1993, when Congress killed funding for the Superconducting Supercollider that would have shed more light into the behavior of fundamental particles and forces of nature at high energies, West decided to leave the field. He ventured into biology, where he and his colleagues wrote a seminal paper that is now one of the most cited in the field.

That paper showed that, in general, the larger an organism is, the slower everything in it runs. An elephant, for example, may weigh 10,000 times what a guinea pig does, but it needs to eat only 1,000 times as much food. Building on research done in the 1930s by Max Kleiber, West and his colleagues showed that just about everything about animals is “sub-linear” with respect to size. That is to say, just about every measure you can take of an animal goes up less rapidly than does its size. In general, for every 10 times multiple of size, total metabolism goes up by a factor of just under 6. While a few animal species are exceptions, the vast majority follow this rule.¹²

Seeing how universal this rule was, West wondered if it would apply to other systems. And so in 2003, he turned his attention to cities. Would they behave like organisms? Would they be governed by simple scaling laws?

What West and his colleague Luis Bettencourt found was a deep similarity between cities and biological organisms in some ways, and a surprising and far-reaching divergence in others.

In some ways, cities also slow down as they get larger. A ten-times increase in the size of a city means a roughly six-times increase in the number of gasoline stations and the amount of gasoline sold. That means that, per person, a ten times larger city is only using six-tenths as much gasoline as a city one tenth its size. Similar patterns apply to the total amount of road surface in a city, the total length of electrical cables, and so on. All of these show increasing efficiency and decreasing per-person consumption as cities grow. The larger a city, the less of many resources it uses per person.

But in other ways, cities behave quite differently. As the size of cities rises, their economies and their rates of innovation rise even faster. Increasing the size of a city by a factor of 10 increases the number of patents it produces each year by a factor of 19 and the size of its economy by a factor of 18. They increase faster than the size of a city. Innovation and economic activity don’t show diminishing returns with respect to size at all. They show accelerating returns.¹³

It wouldn’t be so surprising to find that innovation scaled at the same rate as a city’s population. After all, human minds are the source of innovation. A city with ten times as many minds should, we’d think, produce roughly ten times as many innovations. But why does it produce nearly twenty times?

Computer scientist Manuel Cebrian’s simulations may show an answer. Attempting to build a model of a city that explained West’s results, Cebrian found that as the population of a city rose, the number of connections between people in the city rose faster than the population. It rose at a rate nearly identical to the rate at which West and his colleagues saw innovation rise. The implication is that innovation isn’t just about the number of minds. It’s about the connections between those minds. It’s about the speed with which information flows between minds. And it’s about connections that are formed from the bottom up, through diverse individual choices rather than a central plan.¹⁴ And all of those things are amplified inside a city.

Some of the effects Geoffrey West found in cities appear to exist in whole nations as well. In 2002, Francisco Alcalá and Antonio Ciccone found that, after controlling for trade and other variables, increasing the number of workers in a national economy by 10 percent produced a 2 percent rise in GDP per worker. A ten-times multiple of workforce produced a sixteen-times larger GDP overall. Larger economies generated more wealth from each worker.

The whole world is becoming a city now. The technology of the Internet, mobile phones, and a million spinoffs of that are networking us all together. We’re drawing more connections, exchanging more insights, innovations, and information. Minds are the source of wealth and innovation. But their production isn’t linear. It scales with the number and quality of connections. And so, the more minds we have—educated minds, empowered minds, interconnected minds—the more each produces.

Our planet is like a giant living brain. Each mind added to it is a neuron. Each connection between those minds is a synapse. As we grow larger, we grow denser in connections, and so we grow smarter, more able to innovate, at rates faster than we consume.

And this brings us back to Malthus. Malthus said that population rises geometrically while production of food rises linearly. But what we’ve learned from recent history, from ancient civilizations, and from the nonlinear behavior of cities and economies is something else. As population rises, consumption rises. But it’s innovation that rises geometrically with respect to population. A world with twice as many people may consume more. But its innovation will rise faster than its consumption. And in that lies a tremendous amount of hope, and a reason to revisit our views of population.

We should hope to reduce population growth rates in the poorest parts of the world, as those nations are under the greatest ecological stress and are the least well equipped to accommodate and empower new children. At the same time, we need to rethink what we want for population worldwide. We may very well want to work to at least maintain the population of developed countries, if not slowly grow it. We have the natural resources to support more people, so long as we keep innovating. And the evidence suggests that more people, so long as they are educated, empowered, and connected to one another through the webs of technology and the market—innovate more rapidly than they consume.

On the event of the seven-billionth person being born, William McGurn wrote in the Wall Street Journal that we should view it as an opportunity rather than a cost. “Malthusian fears about population follow from the Malthusian view that human beings are primarily mouths to be fed rather than minds to be unlocked. In this reasoning, when a pig is born in China, the national wealth is thought to go up, but when a Chinese baby is born the national wealth goes down.”¹⁵

People aren’t just mouths. They’re minds also. Each of us is both.

Left in hunger, poverty, and without education, we are primarily mouths. Adding people to the poorest nations, where human capital is least developed, helps no one.

Fed, educated, empowered, and guided by a future iteration of capitalism that values all of our resources and aligns incentives to protect them, our minds produce far more than our mouths consume.

If we fix our economic system and invest in the human capital of the poor, then we should welcome every new person born as source of betterment for our world and all of us on it.