Here is David Henderson in the Wall Street Journal with some very nice observations on Nobel Laureate Edmund Phelps. My favorite:
In 1968, long before Julian Simon popularized the idea that population
growth is good, Mr. Phelps made the same argument: The more people
there are, the more ideas are developed, and ideas, once developed, can
be transferred to others at almost no cost. He wrote: "One can hardly
imagine, I think, how poor we would be today were it not for the rapid
population growth of the past to which we owe the enormous number of
technological advances enjoyed today. . . . If I could re-do the
history of the world, halving population size each year from the
beginning of time on some random basis, I would not do it for fear of
losing Mozart in the process." Thomas Alva Edison is an even better
example, but the point is clear.
