The renowned economist David Friedman, author of Machinery Of Freedom, is currently on a European speaking tour. He is presenting three talks for three hosts on successive nights; I plan to attend all three (he’s been a hero of mine since I read the above book at University in the mid-1980s). The first talk was on ‘Global Warming’ and externalities.
David first talked about population growth and externalities associated with it, outlining the premise that although it has typically been thought to be a bad thing, due to the negative impacts brought by it, it also has positive impacts. As these positive impacts don’t often fit our mental model and preconceptions (prejudices) about population growth, we usual ignore them. His early economic work 40 years ago looked in detail at this issue and attempted to quantify the net positive and negative impacts. What he found was that most factors…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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