By: dain

dain
Thu, 29 Jan 2015 13:39:09 +0000

This old myth of the 1960s and 70s needs to be put aside. It takes people to build complex economies and advanced civilizations...just look at history. The densest places such as Egypt, China, the Med, and tropical Latin America all produced advanced civilizations, and they were crowded. On the other hand, the Sahara dessert and the Amazonian rain forest produced scattered tribes that barely got past the use of stone tools. Small populations tend to produce bare subsistence, while large populations produce (over time) the opposite. The wellspring of creativity requires competition (today we would say 'markets'), and that means large populations.