… is from page 411 of Marian Tupy’s and Gale Pooley’s brilliant 2022 book, Superabundance:
[H]umans are a unique kind of animal, one that has developed a cooperative culture that allows for the accumulation and sharing of knowledge. That knowledge, in turn, helps to make our society gentler and more prosperous. Population growth and freedom are crucial parts of that positive feedback loop. It is free people, not machines or deities, who generate new ideas, and it is free people who test those new ideas against other people’s ideas in the marketplace. The process of knowledge and value creation is at the heart of humanity’s moral and material progress.