Hari accepts the notion that, "It will be easier for 6 billion people to cope on a heaving, boiling planet than for nine or 10 billion." But eliminating three to four billion human beings may not be such a clever solution after all. In fact, it may actually doom the rest to suffer.

Human creativity is neither finite nor predictable. We cannot survey the population and say, for example, "The second-born son of THIS man and THIS woman will be a great artist (or physicist, or biologist, or writer)." When we eliminate human beings, we are eliminating their potential for creating the solutions which would allow people to not only survive in greater numbers, but to prosper.

Would you choose abortion or infanticide if you knew that the person being destroyed was the potential savior of his(her) species? That is what Johann Hari suggests.