In this ungated Wall Street Journal article, Matt Ridley gives a nice report on research by Michelle Klein and Rob Boyd on the idea that higher effective population size leads to better technology.  The important idea that higher effective population size leads to better technology is also reflected in

• powerhouse economist Michael Kremer’s paper “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,”
• Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs and Steel and
• Alex Tabarrok’s TED talk “How Ideas Trump Crises.”