(2) MAKE LOVE NOT WAR

 

The hippies were right! Well, half right – make babies, not war. War isn’t purely a population numbers game, but it’s hard to beat a big population (and ideally the land area to go with it). At the very least, you have reserves.

Also, there’s nothing quite like a population change in your favor to tilt the balance of power your way without firing a shot. Historians will probably always debate the causes for the fall of the Roman Empire (or even when and if it fell), but at least one factor was its declining population, particularly as opposed to the increasing population of German tribes. And so the Roman Empire slowly became…German (or more precisely the western Roman Empire slowly became a number of German kingdoms).

History never repeats but sometimes it rhymes, and in the modern era, France was eclipsed as the predominant power in Europe when the more populous Germany was united under Prussia – and even more so with France’s declining birthrate and demographic demoralization between the world wars.

There’s even a theory that proposes a high proportion of young males as a leading cause behind conflict or war – the population bulge theory.

Population growth can basically be your baby BOOM…

 

USA! USA! USA!

 

Again, war is not purely a population numbers game, so it’s hard to be definitive about it, but it is no coincidence that the rise of the United States to superpower was linked to its rise to the most populous Western nation. Even in its origin, one hypothetical example might be whether the United States could have effectively won the American Revolution without firing a shot by just waiting until its population outgrew that of Britain – or indeed, if it had secured parliamentary representation instead of revolution whether it would have ended up running Britain and the British Empire.

However, there is one cold, hard example that has recurred throughout history whenever hunter-gatherers have come up against agricultural societies, which can feed more mouths (and have more resistance to diseases) – the Indian Wars. The United States basically steamrollered its manifest destiny from coast to coast over the Indian tribes as a function of population growth – while most of its population barely noticed.

So population helps, but there is another set of numbers that usually counts for even more in my next entry.