Every Human is a Lottery Ticket for Our Civilization
The more humans there are, the better chance we have.
Created with MidJourney
For decades we’ve been told about the world becoming overpopulated. Soon, we may no longer have enough drinking water, food, or space.
We listened and that led many of us to become pessimistic about the future.
However, lately, the narrative has begun to change and people have started to say that the world’s population could start to decrease. The first person I heard say this was Elon Musk.
Elon said that he’s more concerned about underpopulation than overpopulation. He also said that low birth rates are a much bigger risk than global warming.
Some criticized him, while others noticed that he might actually be right. It is clearly a touchy subject for many people.
Today, I want to explore if there could be any benefits to growing the population, instead of allowing the birth rate to lower until our population decreases.
As you’ll see, it turns out the benefits are substantial.
Economic growth.
The good news is, the higher to population, the higher the wealth per capita is.
It turns out that each person on average contributes more to society than they take.
“They are, on balance, productive. They consume and they produce—but they produce more than they consume. I think that’s true of virtually all human beings.” - David Deutsch
Why is that?
The higher population a country has, the more labour force they have. This means the country experiences higher economic growth.
Just look at China for the past 30 years. With a booming population, their manufacturing capabilities have become the best in the world, and now we see the majority of our products read, “Made In China” on the back.
China’s GDP has skyrocketed thanks to its large labour force.
Unfortunately for China, their population is officially declining which many say will hurt their economy. Unless they find a replacement for their workforce, they could end up seeing a decline in innovation and manufacturing capabilities which the world relies on.
So should we have more kids if we want to see our economy grow?
“If it’s not worth doing for moral reasons, as far as cold, hard economics goes, it’s probably better to do it” - David Deutsch
More people = more innovation.
This is the most straightforward part. The more people a country has, the more people there are to innovate.
Why is innovation a good thing?
Silicon Valley is a great example.
There were incredibly smart people who were in the right environment at the right time. They designed new products and created new companies. In turn, this created hundreds of thousands of new jobs and more value for the economy.
These new jobs not only help feed the people in the country, but they also end up attracting new highly skilled immigrants to move where the innovation is happening.
If you look closely, Silicon Valley consists of more than just Americans. It attracted the smartest people from all over the world. These people created more companies, innovation and as a result, wealth for the entire country.
Thanks to innovation, the USA has led the world in new technologies and has seen a rising GDP per capita for years.
The higher population a country has, the more people they have creating innovation, the better their economy will perform.
It should be noted that for a country to be innovative, you also need an environment that encourages that, like the USA had, and still has.
But there’s more.
The technologies that people are creating in these innovative companies are benefiting the entire earth’s population, not just their country.
Think about it.
Because of these new technologies, the average person’s life is far more luxurious than ever, and they have access to more information and knowledge than ever.
Just a few years ago, we didn’t have smartphones, and further back we didn’t even have access to the internet (and all the luxury that came with it). Now, nearly everyone does.
There is a direct correlation between having access to information and higher GDP per capita.
The average person’s life is far greater now than ever.
That is thanks to innovation.
We’re all lottery tickets
Every single person that is born is a lottery ticket for civilization.
“Actually, humans are capable of creating incredible knowledge. And knowledge can transform things that we didn’t think of as resources into resources. And in that sense, every human is a lottery ticket on a fundamental breakthrough that might completely change how we think of the earth and biosphere and sustainability.” - Naval Ravikant
Each person might be the next Steve Jobs, Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.
Now, you might be thinking, “I hate those people”. If that’s the case you haven’t considered what they’ve done for our civilization.
Steve Jobs created smartphones as we know them, not to mention tablets. His company employs over 150,000 people, brought incredible wealth to many people and put a camera and the internet in well over a billion people’s hands.
Elon Musk’s companies have close to 150,000 employees as well. Thanks to his work with Tesla, electric vehicles are all over the world and other companies are following suit.
And then his company Space X is researching how to make our species multi-planetary.
His companies have brought an incredible amount of innovation and beautiful possibilities for humans.
Amazon employs over 1.5 million people. Thanks to Jeff Bezos, you can now get nearly anything delivered to your door in 2 days for free. His innovations have changed all of our lives to make them far more luxurious and convenient.
These innovators are lottery tickets for our civilization because each one of them brought an incredible amount of wealth, luxury, possibilities, and opportunity to many many people.
Each person that is born could be the next Steve, Elon, Jeff or one of the other thousands of people who created something that revolutionized our lives.
What if we had 10 times more of them?
How much innovation would we have? How much better off would we be?
Conclusion
It’s easy to be optimistic about the future and look at the increase in population in a different way when we look at what innovation and humans in general, can do and have done.
The GDP per capita is rising, poverty levels are dropping and our lives are becoming more convenient and luxurious than ever.
We might not want our population to skyrocket, but would it not be in our best interest if it grew at a slow, steady, and sustainable rate?
Thanks for reading
To get more content, and additional life hacks - sign up for my free weekly newsletter.