Quite the contrary, Squeers

Historically, people outbreed their resources and overexploit their environment, so living conditions tend to deteriorate. A graph of living standards vs. time would would be a decreasing curve with some sharp spikes where new crops or new technology have expanded the carrying capacity, or where some disaster has pruned back the population. The good times never last, however, because they always result in more and more mouths to eat up any surplus and restore the accustomed level of misery. Curmudgeon, Cheryl et al. are living in such a spike, so they believe it is typical.

The physical anthropologist Lawrence Angel examined a great many human bones from different periods in the Eastern Mediterranean and found sharp declines in average height and life expectancy from the Palaeolithic. There was some improvement during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but after that, it was downhill all the way to the Industrial Revolution.

Prof. Paolo Malanima has some very good articles on real wages in Italy from 1270 to 1913.

http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_file/Articles/Wages_%20Productivity.pdf

Figure 10 in this paper shows it all, but here are two quotes.

"Over a long period, an inverse correlation between population and wage rates dominates: at least from the beginning of the series until 1820. Wage rates increase only in times of population decline, such as the golden age for workers between 1350 and 1450, and the 1630-1750 period."

"From the ratio of the cost of the basic requirements for survival - the poverty line - to the average hourly wage, we deduce that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries workers had to work 500-1000 hours per year simply to survive, whereas in the nineteenth century about 1500 hours were necessary."

Our politicians and the media are trying to tell us otherwise, because the elite are more concerned with total than per capita
GNP, i.e., population growth is good for them, but not for the rest of us.

Concerns about food security, even in Australia, don't just come from wild eyed Greenies. Those who believe otherwise might take a look at this 2010 report on food security from the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council.

http://www.chiefscientist.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/FoodSecurity_web.pdf

"The likelihood of a food crisis directly affecting the Australian population may appear remote given that we have enjoyed cheap, safe and high quality food for many decades and we produce enough food today to feed 60 million people. However, if our population grows to 35-40 million and climate change constrains food production, we can expect to see years where we will import more food than we export."

Among the threats they identify are vulnerability to climate change and climate variability, slowing productivity growth, "increasing land degradation and soil fertility decline coupled with loss of productive land in peri-urban regions due to urban encroachment", and increasing reliance on imports of food and of food production inputs wirh "susceptibility of these supplies to pressures outside our control".

Curmudgeon skates over the economic effects of lower energy returned over energy invested, feeding into the prices of almost everything, making life very much harder for ordinary people, and encouraging them to find scapegoats. He also ignores threats from fracking to the environment, and to water and food security in particular. France has now introduced a moratorium on exploration for fracking because of these concerns.

http://www.energydigital.com/sectors/oil-and-gas/france-bans-drilling-fracking-exploration-shale-natural-gas

Divergence,
I agree with you completely apropos the powers that be: "population growth is good for them, but not for the rest of us",
but the flaw in the comfort you take from Malinama's thinking is in terms of nationalistic models. Australia (for example) draws it's wealth from the global system. So while, as Malinama says, "wage rates increase only in times of population decline, such as the golden age for workers between 1350 and 1450, and the 1630-1750 period", planned population decline in Australia would be more a sign of naive decadence than competitive advantage, and certainly not a case for complacency or increased wage rates. Cheap exploitable labour remains in ready supply around the world. The only thing that affords us the luxury of even speculating on population stability is the fact that we're resource rich. And even supposing the world was confronted with a shortage of labour, long before then it would be the market that was wanting.
We surely cannot expect wage rates to increase by emulating population decline? As if population decline was a trigger for higher wagaes..?
That would be great if it was true?

All Pyramid schemes eventually collapse. Its their intended purpose.

The LOUDEST voices for the Labor-run Ponzi or Pyramid immigration scheme that's inflicting our NATION are mostly from desperate souls who THINK they are high enough up the pyramid to make squillions off the evil ponzi trickle-up mechanisms.

The desperation in their totally unsubstantiated rhetoric reflects the fact they are facing hard times too and falsely believe that speeding up immigration, the sell out of Australia to PONZI, is the only way things will improve for THEM.

Many would rightly say these people should be lynched for this treason. But spare a thought. They are being screwed by Labor just as surely as everyone else in this Nation. People like DonkCurmCheryl probably think immigration imparts wealth through shares, property prices or direct marketplace Growth.

But Labor knows all too well its Ponzi is all about GST. And the DonkCurmCheryls will never get their grubby mitts on that Top of the Pyramid motherload. Poor bastards, they'll just get the odium, the blame and the fall-out as GFC#2 and civil disorder crunchtime get ever closer - as the Pyramid begins its inevitable collapse.

I tend to be exceedingly suspicious of so-called ‘paradigm shifts’, but in terms of population growth, there’s good reason to believe the 2nd half of the 20th century is genuinely sui generis.

Worries about a ‘population explosion’ in the 50s and 60s were very real. Data indicating exponential growth leading to Malthusian catastrophe was ... unassailable. There simply weren’t any good counter-arguments. The science was well and truly settled. Today’s AGW crowd would rejoice to be on such solid ground.

But it didn’t happen. All of a sudden, we discovered new wheat strains which prevented famine in India. New rice strains followed. Chemical fertilisers reached the 3rd world: food production increased dramatically, while the amount of land required to support a given population decreased. Developed countries began to make good use of cheap labour in undeveloped countries. DDT reduced the incidence of malaria. Infant mortality decreased.

Yet, contrary to all expectation, the rate of population growth slowed. China’s one-child policy has been dropped, because it’s no longer needed. Populations in developed countries are shrinking to the point where immigrants are needed to sustain a 21st century workforce. If current trends continue, human numbers will be shrinking in 40 years.

How did scientists and policy-makers miss all this? They assumed, based on unassailable historical evidence, that increased population decreased prosperity, and vice versa. Somewhere in the mid-20th century, though, the sign of this equation changed: increasing prosperity now decreases population growth. Why? Technology, probably, but that’s a pretty vague answer. We need to do better.

Still, 'sustainability' in the long term, means a stable, preferably shrinking, human population. Over the last half-century, we’ve come a long way to achieving that. We’ve also learned to do much, much more with much, much less, especially with regard to food production. If we humans can slow, then reduce, population growth, that plus technology is what’ll save the planet — not immigration policy, not tax policy, and not Ross Garnaut or Dick Smith.

Squeers I would be very much appreciative if you could actually explain how a larger population increases a standard of living;
"Environmentally sustainable populations are economically unsustainable. " Like most of Europe, apparently- whose countries despite being low pop and stagnant for a very long time remain on the highest economic brackets- in fact, even large countries with stabilizing populations perform better than those with rapidly increasing ones.

"I despise the indignant, spoiled brats out there who rail against overpopulation and other forms of environmental degradation, but would run a mile before they'd accept a material sacrifice. "
Why? If the option is there that allows both, take it I say.