Whether it's a politician trying to put one over on the public or an academic that uses the gravitas of their degree to support some half-baked theory, I take offense at being thought of as so stupid that I turn off my critical-thinking module in the face my educational or social betters.

So you can imagine my ire at the New York Times' Economix blog this morning. In his post "The More the Merrier: Population Growth Promotes Innovation," University of Chicago economist Casey B. Mulligan says that the recent study promoting the idea that one of the best ways to reduce global warming is focus more attention on population control is a bunch of hooey. (OK, he didn't actually use the word "hooey." It was implied.)

He says these arguments ignore the "significant economic benefits" of large populations. "The more people on earth, the greater the chance that one of them has an idea of how to improve alternative energies, or to mitigate the climate effects of carbon emissions. It takes only one person to have an idea that can benefit many. Plus, the more people on earth, the larger are the markets for new innovations."

Is he totally off is nut? No, of course not. Theoretically, a bigger global population does lead to a large pool of potential innovators. More people will buy more things.

But there are a few really big flaws in the thesis.

First of all, if it was true that a bigger world population leads to more technological innovations, we'd all be zipping around with jetpacks, have genetically modified washboard abs and be sporting full heads of hair. Or, at the very least, there wouldn't be more than a billion hungry people on the planet right now.  

Second, it assumes that the whole world is the West.

Innovation is not just a function of having a big pool of intelligent people. It means getting the right person into the right place at the right time with the right idea. The lion's share of population growth is occurring in the developing world. Say you're a freaky genius living in a slum in Rio or Mumbai or Karachi or Soweto. What are your odds, realistically, of climbing the social and educational barriers to the point where you can develop your innovative prowess? This is the counter-argument to Mulligan: the more people, the more likely brilliance will go unrecognized, because it will be buried under an avalanche of poverty.

Further, any time you commodify an innovation, you actually put it OUT of the reach of billions of people. While Mulligan cites research that "market size stimulates innovative activity, as in the case of pharmaceutical research that is especially intense for conditions that have more victims," that's more of a half-truth. 

Certainly there is a tremendous amount of altruism in the world, and there are a great many researchers out there with a genuine desire to help humankind, but most innovation is driven with an eye towards maximizing profits -- which means that everything from the latest diagnostic equipment to the hottest new game is directed to the economy in the developed world, where population growth is generally stagnant or falling. The rest of the world generally has to be content with knockoffs, bootlegs and hand-me-downs.

The negative impacts of population growth far outweigh the positives. Seven billion people are competing for the same food and the same clean water that they were struggling a half-century ago, when there were only three billion people.

And food and water are the bare minimums: how do we keep this burgeoning population healthy, how do we make sure they're educated, and yes, how do we keep them from emitting so much CO2? A good start would be to being easing off the procreative accelerator and taking a hard look at population control.

The nature of genius and innovation is a mystery. Intellectually, it's an interesting exercise to consider how many individuals in a given generation can come up with ideas that change the world. But we can't just sit around with a rabbit's foot in our hand, waiting for the Big Thing that's going to feed the hungry and heal the sick. We also need to work with what we've got, to craft the policies and allocate resources, to those in need. 
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