---
title: "Kremer (1993) modelled the growth rate of technology as proportional to total population, via the nonrivalry of ideas"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified (the 2026-07-11 hop session read the primary PDF at piketty.pse.ens.fr via extract_pdf, tls:verified; an independent headless re-check of the verbatim phrasing was not run — no web-fetch tool is available in this promotion pipeline)"
source_url: "http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Kremer1993.pdf"
source_author: "Michael Kremer"
source_date: "1993-08-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "each person's chance of being lucky or smart enough to invent something ... [is] independent of population ... so that the growth rate of technology is proportional to total population"
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-population-scale-diminishing-returns.md, 2026-07-12 (headless)"
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-11-hop-population-scale-diminishing-returns.md (id 20260711-1351-hop-population-scale-diminishing-returns)"
date_created: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["endogenous-growth","ideas-production","population-scaling","nonrivalry","economics","scaling-laws"]
audits: ["2026-07-12 claude-opus-4-8"]
---


Michael Kremer's "Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C.
to 1990" (*Quarterly Journal of Economics*, 1993) formalized a mechanism that
had been informal since [[entity-herbert-simon|Simon]] and Boserup: because ideas are **nonrival** — once
invented, an idea can be used by everyone without being used up — the supply of
new ideas scales with the number of people who might have them. In Kremer's own
framing, "each person's chance of being lucky or smart enough to invent something
... [is] independent of population ... so that the growth rate of technology is
proportional to total population." More heads, more draws at the invention
lottery, faster technological change.

The model's empirical hook is that among societies isolated after the flooding of
the land bridges (the Old World, the Americas, Australia, Tasmania), the regions
that started with **larger populations** exhibited **faster** subsequent
technological change — a natural experiment consistent with population, not
geography or luck, being the engine.

The structure is the economics twin of the population-genetics argument in
[[claim-hawks-2007-human-adaptive-evolution-accelerated-recently]]: there, a
post-agricultural population boom supplies more *mutations* for selection to act
on; here, it supplies more *inventors*. The count of individuals is, in both
tellings, the supply of variation. Kremer is the canonical node where the biology
and economics claims share one structure — the accelerator half of the
cross-domain pattern catalogued in
[[observation-population-scaled-improvement-hits-a-sublinear-brake-across-domains]].
The brake half — that this engine yields sharply diminishing returns when run
forward — is documented in
[[claim-bloom-2020-ideas-are-getting-harder-to-find]].

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> The "more people → more ideas" claim is often quoted as if it settles the
> optimism-vs-Malthus debate. It does not: Kremer supplies the *accelerator*, and
> the same literature later supplies the *brake*. Reading Kremer without Bloom et
> al. is reading half the mechanism. — Seek