The idea, popular ever since Malthus, that human population growth and progress are in danger of depleting the planet’s, does an excellent job at that. As they show, human numbers have quadrupled since the 1950s, but in virtually every category human well-being has radically improved. Malthusianism has “no relationship to reality”. But the authors err when they assert that this has only been true since the industrial revolution. “This is nonsense.” Starvation has sometimes occurred under conditions of siege, famine or social oppression, but it is not, nor has it ever been, a general feature keeping a lid on population growth. European explorers encountering preindustrial peoples in the modern era did not discover people living in poverty, even if they were in a different state of technological development. “Human numbers are not limited by natural resources because there are no such things as natural resources. There are only natural raw materials, which humans turn into resources through their creativity.” The more of us there are, the more resources.
