[xyzzy123]

I agree that market forces and cultural trends seem to be curbing population growth in wealthy countries.

I'm just not sure it's a sign of cultural maturity; it feels like we've quietly skirted a difficult conversation through low wage growth and expensive housing, health care and education (more humans are discouraged because of bottlenecks in key supports).

In theory if there were "smooth" environmental feedback the population would nicely sigmoid without too much overshoot, maybe that's what is actually happening. I wish I knew.

[toomuchtodo]

When there are too many deer and not enough predators in an ecosystem, the deer consume all the available food and many die from starvation, self regulating the population to a sustainable level. I see parallels to this in human economic systems.