Marginal Revolution: How many people are needed to maintain current living standards?
What is the minimum number of people you need in order to maintain (not necessarily to extend) our current level of technological civilization?
I’ll treat this as a steady-state question and not commit to any particular time frame. Stross wrote:
I’d put an upper bound of about one billion on the range, because that encompasses basically the entire population of NAFTA and the EU, with Japan, Taiwan, and the industrial enterprise zones of China thrown in for good measure. (While China is significant, more than half of its population is still agrarian, hence not providing inputs to this system).
I’d put a lower bound of 100 million on the range, too. The specialities required for a civil aviation sector alone may well run to half a million people; let’s not underestimate the needs of raw material extraction and processing (from crude oil to yttrium and lanthanum), of a higher education/research sector to keep training the people we need in order to replenish small pools of working expertise, and so on. Hypothetically, we may only need 500 people in one particular niche, but that means training 20 of them a year to keep the pool going, plus future trainers, and an allowance for wastage and drop-outs by people who made a bad career choice.
My casual, seat-of-the-pants estimate is that a world of one billion pe
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