I can add nothing to the article except praise for the author.

Instead of studying Jevrons or Malthus, Varie Yule should have glanced at Adam Smith, and at some very recent European agricultural history. For decades the European countroies, notably the French, protected their agricultural industries to the point where European farmers wildly overproduced on foodstuffs like butter and wine. (This has since changed but I'm not sure by how much.)

Poor people in disadvantaged countries are not hungry because of any imagined limit on agricultural production, but because they have no money to buy food. If they get money - just how they get is is another question - then food will come.

This has been happening with the long term reduction in poverty in India and China, with the subsequent additional demand temporarily reversing the long term decline in real (that is, inflation adjusted) food prices. Agricultural productivity growth has slowed which may complicate the resulting adjustment, but this counts as a boost to the agricultural sector. There is no sign of any limits on production. If people have money for food, farmers will produce it.

'As fast as new technologies make it possible to feed more people, more people are born to take up the slack.'

Maybe in the third world, but not in developed nations. It's been shown that the more secure people are and educated they are and the better the social security, the less kids they want to have

My experience with bicycles is that it is much easier to fall off when moving than when stationary. (The theory that gyroscopic forces keep the bike upright has now been discredited.) Perhaps the paradox should be updated to reflect the fact that we are no longer in the age of penny-farthings.

Valerie Yule,

It is hoped that those who have read this article will note that ‘Intuition’ more than often collapses under critical examination.

“How it is that people think differently from ourselves” We cannot know but it is some times marvelous and others un-nerving depending on the background and motives of the interlocutor.

As for “political discourse” it will go on inanely until we rent our power to penny-grabbing charlatans.

It is only when, under bond, we employ professional administrators and follow step by step the path of our tax dollar, that the rot of such discourse can be stemmed.