Malthus was essentially correct, but wrong about the when and how. Industrializing societies can play whack-a-mole with constraints that limit their population growth, successfully so far.
What saved us was the surprising phenomenon that those societies tend to have quite low birthrates. Multiple possible reasons for that:
* high cost of living and raising children,*
* availability of birth control,
* waning social pressure of getting many children,
* no immediate economic benefits of raising children (in agrarian societies, they are essentially free labor on the farm, and a huge young population makes it easier to bootstrap an industrial economy). Of course, eventually there will be a problem when a huge percentage of the population is too old to work.
We will be fine as long as we can sustain agriculture:
* oil must be a-plenty to run farming equipment. It will be a long time before electricity has taken over
* we need farmland with intact soil and water
* we need fertilizer (phosphorus is running low soon, and oil is required as well)
* we need pollinators for many crops. Hand-pollinating is expensive
* We must not run out of pesticides to maintain yields
And probably some more requirements. If any of them is not fulfilled, society collapses and things can get ugly quickly. These things partly contribute to recent wars in Africa, the Middle East, and other places.
Edit:
*: low child mortality makes it necessary to actually support most children all the way to adulthood
It's only surprising if you (like Malthus and Erlich) had the intellectual arrogance to believe you could predict the future.
I cannot predict humanity's future, but I can look at our past, and our progress looks excellent so far. Betting against our continued success seems to require serious mental gymnastics.
What saved us was the surprising phenomenon that those societies tend to have quite low birthrates. Multiple possible reasons for that:
* high cost of living and raising children,*
* availability of birth control,
* waning social pressure of getting many children,
* no immediate economic benefits of raising children (in agrarian societies, they are essentially free labor on the farm, and a huge young population makes it easier to bootstrap an industrial economy). Of course, eventually there will be a problem when a huge percentage of the population is too old to work.
We will be fine as long as we can sustain agriculture:
* oil must be a-plenty to run farming equipment. It will be a long time before electricity has taken over
* we need farmland with intact soil and water
* we need fertilizer (phosphorus is running low soon, and oil is required as well)
* we need pollinators for many crops. Hand-pollinating is expensive
* We must not run out of pesticides to maintain yields
And probably some more requirements. If any of them is not fulfilled, society collapses and things can get ugly quickly. These things partly contribute to recent wars in Africa, the Middle East, and other places.
Edit:
*: low child mortality makes it necessary to actually support most children all the way to adulthood