While I tend to agree with you, I find the Japanese are incredibly innovative and they are not growing. Maybe I should look at the rate of innovation and see if that has stalled out with population growth?
replyWhich major disruptive innovations have come out of Japan lately?
replyNot major disruptive innovations, but the gadgets that do all kinds of little quality of life things. They have innovative solutions to so many of the small things in life. And a society where you can invent and bring to market quirky little products that do cool stuff.
replyPerhaps.
replyTo me it feels like their most rapid period of innovation was post World War II as the population was growing very rapidly.
I have heard this before...in what sense would adding population result in more innovation rather than having a more supportive environment for the people we already have (healthcare, education, financing, etc).
replySimply more nodes for experiences to bounce through, so long as they have ways to communicate enough to copy, recombine, and incrementally improve on their activity. The more people copying, recombining, and improving on stuff, the more innovation.
replyOften easier to consider this in terms of competitive sports, though you could check seshatdb or something to see if it holds at scale. For example, YouTube really changed a lot with sports.