The People Paradox: Does the World Have Too Many or Too Few People?

by Stephen Davies, University of Auckland Stephen Davies, University of Auckland, Steven E. Landsburg

Overview

It’s one of the big questions of our time: Are there too many people in the world? Or too few? Whichever way, how would we decide? Here, economist Steven E. Landsburg, acclaimed author of The Armchair Economist and Can You Outsmart an Economist?, assesses the benefits – and the drawbacks – of having a bigger global population. The People Paradox is based on the transcript of his fascinating 2017 IEA Hayek Memorial Lecture, in which Landsburg details how the growth in the world population has brought immense improvements to our quality of life. He contends the planet still has plenty of room – and addresses continued calls for population control. Landsburg, professor of economics at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, draws on everything from modern history to everyday life (including the contents of his sock drawer!) to mount a thought-provoking, powerful – and often humorous – argument for continued population growth. With a commentary by Dr Stephen Davies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780255368094
Publisher:	London Publishing Partnership
Publication date:	07/31/2022
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.18(w) x 7.88(h) x 0.28(d)

About the Author

Steve Davies is Head of Education at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. From 1979 until 2009 he was Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Economic History at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has also been a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, and a programme officer at the Institute for Humane Studies in Arlington, Virginia. A historian, he graduated from St Andrews University in Scotland in 1976 and gained his PhD from the same institution in 1984. He is the author of Empiricism and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity (Edward Everett Root, 2019) and of several articles and essays on topics including the private provision of public goods and the history of crime and criminal justice.

Steven Landsburg is a professor of economics at the University of Rochester and the author of More Sex Is Safer Sex, The Armchair Economist, Fair Play, Can You Outsmart an Economist?, The Big Questions, two textbooks on economics and over thirty journal articles in mathematics, economics, and philosophy. He’s been hailed by Steven Levitt, co-author with Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics, as ‘better than anyone else at making economics interesting to non-economists’ and praised by political satirist and journalist P. J. O’Rourke for writing ‘funny, jargon-free, shocking, and true essays on our material circumstances’. He inaugurated the popular ‘Everyday Economics’ column in Slate magazine and has written for Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other publications.

Table of Contents

About the authors vi

Foreword viii

Acknowledgements xiii

1 Does the world have too many people? Steven E. Landsburg 1

2 Questions and discussion 23

3 How many people is too many? The Malthusian view of history and its implications Stephen Davies 33

References 51

About the IEA 54