By which metric is it better with more population?
If you want your standard of living to improve, you want more people.
As technology improves, as we gain more knowledge, we have more questions. We need more brains to answer those questions, to fill all the new career niches that open up.
70 or 80 years ago, there were probably not that many jobs for people who liked computers. And the ones who did were experts in nearly every facet of computer technology - the hardware, the software, machine language, other programming languages, different operating systems, etc. There wasn't that much to know.
Now there is a lot more to know, and no one person, nor even a small group of people, could understand enough about the entire field of IT in order to reproduce all the capabilities that we have today.
We need more people to support the growing base of knowledge so that we can continue to advance as a civilization.
And no, not just intelligent people. For every intelligent person who excels in some specialized field, there are dozens of support people who maintain his plumbing, his air conditioning and/or heating, his food supply, and all the other necessities and luxuries that he consumes.
We need more people, not fewer. Because only someone who has fallen for the very stupid overpopulation propaganda would believe otherwise.
You're nuts man. A tiny weeny fraction of the people alive today operate in that knowledge base. We don't need net more people, we need less people overall and a larger proportion of above average intelligence people. Agriculture is heavily automated. Service fields are increasingly automated. The trades are critical of course, but you don't need that many tradesmen/construction workers per egghead to justify our enormous (for the level of our technology & resources) population. The whole coof boondoggle exposed just how unecessary a large percentage of our jobs really are.
There's an argument to be made for larger pops. producing more geniuses, but there's no indication that this trend is unlimited, nor that the potential for more innovation always outweighs the increasing costs of those larger pops.
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