[daniel-cussen]

Malthus was aware of increasing agricultural progress, but the argument he made was that it would increase arithmetically (linearly f(x+1)=f(x)+c), whereas population would increase geometrically (exponentially, f(x+1)=f(x)*c).

It's a hugely important, contentious, and complicated issue (here's a thought: populations can't actually grow exponentially even given unlimited resources, with a loose, but strict, upper bound at the speed of light. The tight upper bound is unknown, probably multifaceted, but I don't see how anything beyond cubic growth is possible). Anyway. When speaking of grey whales, for instance, we say that the population is limited by the "carrying capacity." OK. But they aren't inventing new ways of getting fat nearly as fast as we are.

It boils down to there being a very real Malthusian limit on population. "History" (which is code for "1929 to 2007 or so" because for many economists history began that year, with a vague notion of there being time before that when Americans lived in some sort of Garden of Eden in which nothing ever happened), "history" proved Malthus wrong. Well, yeah, definitely, the food supply didn't grow linearly, which you figure it could have, nor did population increase exponentially, because it can't. But at any rate, he had a point in that there is a Malthusian limit at any given time, and there is a world population level at any given time, and humanity can move them up or down independently. And that's what the article is about, is unwittingly moving the limit down, by, say, turning whales into butter until they're barely any left. For much of the 20th century, we've been so successful at moving it up faster than the population level that we've come to think there is no such limit. And hey, what about Mars?

Just because we haven't hit the Malthusian limit recently doesn't mean it's not there.

[hx87]

I don't think people here (or anywhere) dispute that here is a hard upper limit on the maximum population the Earth can support at any given time. The dispute is in the proposition that population is fated (or probabilistically likely) to grow faster than agricultural production. That may have been true when pro-natalist dogma held sway and agricultural technology was stagnant, but that's no longer the case--people who advocate having as man kids as possible no matter are seen as crazy in most parts of the world today, and for good reason.

Birth control is likely and is effective if you don't try to actively suppress it.

[mseebach]

Population growth is slowing down rapidly, there's even a chance that the global population will peak in the next century (and this is due to people living in industrialised countries having less than 2 children per woman, not due to any global calamity). We may have one more doubling of the global population, and then it's pretty much flat, even decreasing. Very, very far from exponential growth, that's for sure.

On the other hand, technological improvements aren't exactly stalling. In food alone there are huge benefits yet to be reaped from GMOs and hydroponics, just to mention two. It may not be exponential growth anymore, but there's little to suggest that it will just stop.

So no, the Malthusian limit may very well not be there at all.