The Rational Optimist (P.S.)

by Matt Ridley

Thus the extraordinary change in technology and cultural tradition that seems to have flourished more than 30,000 years ago in western Asia and the Near East – the so-called Upper Palaeolithic Revolution – may be explained by a dense population. Fed by an increasingly intensive and vegetarian hunter-gathering lifestyle, and with close contact between tribes, the people of south-west Asia were in a position to accumulate more and more skills and technologies than any previous human populations. A large, interconnected population meant faster cumulative invention – a surprising truth even to this day, as Hong Kong and Manhattan islands demonstrate. As the economist Julian Simon put it, ‘population growth leading to diminishing returns is fiction; the induced increase in productivity is scientific fact’. And one of those inventions was farming,