[dirtyid]

Your broad point seems to be problem will fix itself, but that's not very illuminating. Self correction spans the spectrum of manageable to disastrous. Carry capacity / resource availability has temporal element and is not stable, allocation today may not be sustainable or available tomorrow. Mismanaged environmental cycles means feast or famine i.e. fisheries / soil poorly managed and becomes increasingly unproductive or oil / water reserves tapped faster than new discoveries or replenishment. Disaster when you cannot efficiently distribute what's no longer there due to poor planning and foresight. Self correction could be preemptive population management or feast or famine cycles. One is more preferable than other for stable society. IMO free market is not capable of planning on such long timelines. Some problems become sufficiently large and long spanning that only state can handle, i.e. national defense is state directed, even if frequently poorly optimized in terms of resource allocation. Private military / industry could exist under free market but works within superstructure set by state.

[betwixthewires]

My broader point is that there is no problem to fix, human population cannot possibly exceed the carrying capacity of the earth.

Looking at recorded human history, the long term trend consistently is that the population has risen. This means resource availability has increased, either due to discovery of new sources, invention, efficiency increase. Shocking decreases in some or other resource have had little effect on this trend.

Unavailability of some resource just means reduction in standard of living, for everything except food and water. And again, the net biomass on earth does not increase the more humans are here, and so the demand for food and water does not change whether that biomass is humans or buffalo. There can be no food or water shortages from overpopulation, only mismanagement and natural disaster.

The free market is the only thing capable of handling shocks, no other system is flexible or agile enough to quickly resolve a change in resource availability or demand. And sudden change of resource availability is not what we are talking about, we are talking about resource shortage due to overpopulation. A shock decrease in resources would result in disaster no matter how many people exist, so trying to address it by managing population levels is pointless.

[klmadfejno]

> Looking at recorded human history, the long term trend consistently is that the population has risen. This means resource availability has increased, either due to discovery of new sources, invention, efficiency increase. Shocking decreases in some or other resource have had little effect on this trend.

I've been filling this bucket with water, and it's never overflown. Therefore the bucket can contain infinite water.

Free market economics don't work so well when the biggest players decide to augment their value proposition with the barrel of a gun. Available biomass is not the relevant metric when determining the carrying capacity of the earth, with the obvious caveat that by carrying capacity, we mean some definition that includes the continuation of modern society.

[betwixthewires]

>I've been filling this bucket with water, and it's never overflown. Therefore the bucket can contain infinite water.

I'd say a more apt comparison to the point I'm making is "I've been filling this bucket with after and it's never overflown, and it appears that there is no way to overfill the bucket and exceed it's carrying capacity." I never said anything about continuous population growth, in fact, my point is that it is not possible to grow the population beyond the carrying capacity.