On the day that Office for National Statistics announced that the UK population has passed 61 million for the first time I thought the following quote from Robert Engelman, writing in the recent Economist debate "this house believes that the world would be better off with fewer people" was appropriate...
"Wh
at, in short, is not to like in a world made less crowded by women's free choices to become pregnant only when she wants a child? The only possible argument runs along the lines of "more people means more innovation." But it's hard to document even the correlation between human numbers and good ideas—let alone a causal connection from the first to the second. World population has quadrupled twice or a thousand times since Bach, Buddha and whatever woman it was who invented the clay pot walked the planet's surface. Who can compare to any of them today?""In a crowded World, the children we have are our gift to ourselves; the children we don't have are our gift to society." Roger Martin (Chairman of OPT)
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