A Billion US Americans?

There is a certain thread of Cornucopian who believes that if we just had enough people, way more than now, we could solve all problems and build the Utopia.  Matt Yglesias is now proposing 1 Billion US Americans.

Science and Technology get better and better as you have more people, they claim, making this inevitable.

Meanwhile, in the world we actually live in, science and technology hasn't kept up with making the vast global human population more sustainable than it was in the past with fewer humans.  For sure, as the human population gets larger, the problems get more and more intractable.   In large part, we rely on natural processes to clean up our wastes and "accidents," and generate the oxygen we need to live, pollenate our crops, etc.  As the human population gets larger, we squeeze these natural processes that make our lives possible into dysfunction if not collapse.

And there's also an assumption here that natural species have no claim on the earth's resources.  We can just take over the planet and snuff all the species that don't fit into our technology into extinction.  We've already created one of the largest extinction events in the history of Earth, and it' just getting started as we "develop" or despoil all the planetary space from the deepest ocean depths to the stratosphere.

So, in short not only do the problems get worse and worse, they get exponentially worse even with linear increases in human population.

Meanwhile, does science and technology get better and better with more people?  Well, if so, why hasn't it "kept up" with making the technology and human population of Planet Earth more sustainable than it was, say, 500 years ago?

I fail to see that science and technology are even doing more now than 120 years ago.  Sure, there may be a billion scientific papers written per year or whatever.  But all of them combined may well be qualitatively less important than the 5 papers written by Einstein in 1905.

Back between 1850-1950 major breakthroughs were made in "time saving" technology.  What we invent today might better be described as "time wasting" technology.

It's not even clear to me that progress in science and technology grows linearly with linear increases in population.  Imagine this: larger classrooms, more distracted students getting less personal attention, larger and larger and increasingly politicized committees determining which scientific projects to fund, more and more crap for scientists and technologists to read through to find important ideas, more and more channels to present it in diverging shades so as to favor different competing interests.

In no way do leaders seem more and more wise or even intelligent as the human population increases either.

I would rather guess that "true" progress in science and technology grows way slower than the growth in population--if at all!  It may be simply proceeding more or less at it's own timetable, more like eclipses and other astronomical events.  

What's needed is one good observer to see and report the eclipse, little or no additional scientific benefit is added by having 10 billion observers report it.  And when you have the 10 billion scientific reports, how do we end up highlighting the best ones?  We might well end up highlighting the worst reports, so it would have been better if there were few enough reports that everyone could read them all to find that one good one.

Beyond a certain level, additional human population doesn't add wisdom or even useful intelligence.      Diminishing returns proceed to become negative returns, as the entire human project becomes mired in it's own amplified idocy, after the cost of coordination and similar factors have eaten more than the whole cake.

The reckless race to catastrophe we are now part of is not just the result of bad luck of having peculiarly evil people in charge (though that is true) but by the intersection of problems caused by overpopulation and wisdom lost to overpopulation; that's how those peculiarly bad people came to be in charge in the first place.

What full blown Cornucopians have is hubris.  And where this leads is hell, even quicker than the slightly less hubristic path we're already on--aided by hubristic neoclassical economics which relies upon pure fantasy assumptions.

We'll be lucky, if enough good people through better organizing can wrestle the rudders of civilization out of the hands of the sociopaths and sociopathic forces that rule the world today quickly enough to prevent our own extinction--the otherwise fitting climax to humanity.

When we finally do, if it's still necessary, we would be well advised to set a course for human degrowth to the sustainable levels that cause no excess extinctions to other species and the promote the optimal development of human wisdom and avoidance of social idiocy.