Kevin Hurley and I have been debating the ethics of having children over at his blog. I am trying to make the argument that having children benefits existing people (at the margin). The point I have been trying to make is basically that ideas are the real scarce resource of the modern age, and more children means more ideas.
On a somewhat related note, I used Wikipedia's timeline of historic inventions to tally up a rude measure of historic inventions per year. I broke time into segments the same way as Wikipedia and averaged. The x-axis is the year, from 10,000 BCE to the present, and the y-axis is historic inventions per year on a log scale. To give an idea of the magnitudes involved, there were about 1,500 times more historic inventions per year in the 1950's than there were in the 9th century BCE (the lowest and highest points on the graph).
It appears inventions are decreasing. Shouldn't they be increasing according to the idea that more people = more ideas?
Hey there! I realize this is sort of off-topic but I needed to ask. Does running a well-established blog like yours take a massive amount work? I am completely new to writing a blog but I do write in my journal daily. I'd like to start a blog so I will be able to share my experience and views online. Please let me know if you have any kind of ideas or tips for brand new aspiring blog owners. Appreciate it!