this post was submitted on 12 May 2026
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The popular understanding of Malthus was that he was calling for a population crash / overshoot.
I think he was saying a more nuanced thing. What he said was that any material improvements that raise the standard of living will be responded to with human population growth and that the growth always increases population until humans are living in miserable conditions again.
He was claiming that technology cannot solve this issue, human behavior sabotages the technical advances. Every technological step that could lead towards a human utopia will be overwhelmed by population and progress was sort of paradoxically impossible.
This is very similar to Jevons who said that resource efficiency causes it to be cheaper to use that resource so humans will use more, not less, as efficiency advances, so technology steps backwards, not forward.
I think it's funny that we're no different than rabbits with abundant food and a lack of predators. The irony is human society gets this emergent property from billions of people working together like a super organism, kind of like ant hives, yet we're still so dumb as an aggregate and as individuals.