Balance in Numbers

This post is kind of a coherent development of an idea (100 for a perfect place) initiated by my fellow blogger totti.

A lot of times when I sit in a bumper to bumper traffic on a freeway, I wonder whether the world really needs to be this overcrowded ? How would our cities look, if instead of a population of 4 mn people we had only 400,000 ? Is there such thing as an optimum number of people in the world ? But then I realised that the word optimum itself is not absolute, but is subject to an objective function. For example, do we optimise to make everyone equally rich, or to have no dearth of natural sources, or to have adequate technology, or to make everyone happy. The objective function jumps the realm of science as some of the functions above, like happiness, can not even be expressed in numbers.

Since I definitely do not believe in intelligent design, lets say when human beings first evolved in their present form, there weren't very many of them. They were probably restricted to few isolated societies around the world. With time, man started his nomadic quest for riches and better life, and somewhere down the life the different societies became aware of each other. Some clashed and perished, some co-existed peacefully, but eventually the world became aware of various societies and after some negotiations, started trading globally.

Humans soon realised that division of labor and trading goods with each other made life much more rewarding and convenient. Hence, farmers in Ceylon could grow tea in excess and export it to their Europen comrades, while their Europeans counterparts exported their superior technology. Thus, the world got rid of unnecessary redundancy and humans started their pursuit of taming and creating the unknown.

There were some services which were critical and people filled them in first. For example, everyone needed farmers to grow and harvest crops. The world needed doctors to cure sick farmers, and the doctors needed engineers and architects to build their house and roads, while the engineers and architects needed rulers to rule and govern them all. But as the population grew, the society could not keep all the doctors, engineers and farmers busy. So people started diversifying and doing other things. Some became bankers to help people with their money, while some became entertainers to regale wary workers. Hitherto thought as pure pass time, sports now became a full fledged livelihood in itself, as people made a career out of it. Soon there were insurers, real estate agents, dolphin trainers, photographers and artists etc. The world now became a more enjoyable place courtesy the diversity wrought in by these new profession. In essence more people actually translated to more fun.

But the balance was never even in all societies. There were some societies which had just too many people tapping into strained resources. This lead to unemployment, poverty etc. On the other hand there were some societies with too little a crowd, which led to over dependence on other societies and in some cases paying a premium for their services. Globalisation continued to offset this disparity, but neverthless a balance could never be struck.

Inherently, I have always felt that more the people, more the number of occupations and fields of study that can be undertaken. So we can have, scientist studying the extinction of polar bears, or movie makers indulging in 3D graphics, or a lobbyist whose sole purpose is to perform propoganda for a particular subject. But our natural resources are limited and there in only so much oil or steel. But then again, necessity is the mother of invention, so shouldn't more people give rise to more technology - technology which helps us to understand mother nature better and thrive without exploiting her. The arguement soon falls into a vicious circle and I realise that there is no answer to the question that I am posing in this post. So should we just shun the idea of having an "optimum" number of people on this earth ?

ps: Totti, the word coherent, in the first line of the post was necessary!