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Comment by silvestrov | Hacker News Reader

If "more people" was always better then India and Africa should be much richer than Europe.

A lack of people can be an innovation driver: "hiring people is too expensive, so we have to automate everything", i.e. innovation is a must for survival.

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Your reasoning is just historically uninformed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio.... There are at least a few generations of lag time between a population boom and economic effects, but Europe's former population size (and density) was the key to its current prosperity.

France would likely be more populous and therefore richer than Germany, had it not secularized earlier and thereby reduced its fertility rate. With all of Europe being highly secular and extremely low fertility, it will (sadly) lose much of its prosperity and cultural significance. Negative TFR societies are simply not sustainable - they will by definition collapse unless they aggressively revert the trend.

See https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t...

Industrial revolution was the key to Europe’s current prosperity. Without it, it was going in the direction of mass starvation, because old farming methods weren’t able to sustain the growing population. The increased population would have been a disaster without the industrial revolution.

It’s the reason England crushed China, even though England’s population has always been microscopic in comparison to that of China.

Your first link is for 1900 but that is way too recent to explain why some contries got rich in the industrial revolution.

It also has British Empire as #1, but this includes India. On its own Britain was much smaller.

When you seperate "overseas territories" out, then you are still left with Asia (incl India) as #1

Where did industrial revolution start? In Britain or in India?

On this page you can go back to 1700 and see that Europe was way down the list: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1006557/global-populatio...

So your own method of arguing leads to the opposite result than your conclusion.

Also if people are starving or otherwise suffering, they probably aren't innovating.

We already have plenty of people. We have a lack of people with the means to live comfortably and invent stuff.

Is not necessity the mother of invention?

At some point you also need resources. A lot of the invention necessity + nothing can lead to already exists.

You can "invent" a lever or pulley out of random objects that you already have. It may make your task easier, but it won't be world changing.

Necessity (read, pending starvation) may lead to a desperate search for Other People's Money to bring a concept to fruition, but it's not quite the same thing.

Then why are a huge portion of people that are attributed with inventing stuff from what would be middle to upper middle class of their times?

It's also the mother of war.

Have you noticed how many Indian and Chinese geniuses there are? They are making the whole world better for everyone. Africa needs better education systems and we'll all be able to benefit from the abundance of African geniuses too.

Europe is much more densely populated than Africa.

It's interesting how wildly different numbers are offered for Europe's population density on high profile web sources.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/europe-phy... 188 persons/km2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europe 72 p/km2

https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula... 34 p/km2

I think it has to do with the inclusion/exclusion of Russia. I looked at your source Worldometers, and they included Russia as part of Eastern Europe.

I think that the inclusion/exclusion of Greenland could have a big effect as well.

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