My, my. The growthist's above exude self-righteousness as they declare that all has been fine up to now and therefore always will be. The oil price may be low at the moment but, despite very high prices over a number of years the world was unable to increase production. Now that the high prices finally crashed the economy investment in new oil production has DIVED (e.g. down over 70% in the North Sea) which means that when the world tries to grow again it will slam into an energy ceiling due to the ongoing 6%+ yearly depletion in existing fields. The price will then skyrocket again. This will be the final hammer-blow that crushes the world economy. Wait and see what the food riots will be like then (if you think they were bad last year). Don't worry my dear growthists - you will not escape the coming food shortages and loss of your pensions. You will suffer like the rest of us and I will have NO sympathy for you because I know that you will never give up your silly fundamentalist neoclassical economic beliefs and will probably die hungry and embittered at a world that didn't quite turn out as you were expecting. (But we did try to warn you.)

The problem which will be caused by human population growth can easily be seen if we take a simple mathematical example – should the population of the World increase by just one person per annum, eventually every habitable square metre on the surface of the Earth will be occupied by one of us.
Currently, the problem is approaching us at a rate eighty million times as fast!!
We are not the only form of life on the planet.
We do not have the right to do what we are doing to the planet.
We cannot live anywhere else, and nor can the flora and fauna with which we share this planet.
None of the above axioms are too difficult to understand, and all are independent of race, religion, politics, money, or perceptions of human superiority over other forms of life.
The issue of human numbers on the planet should have been addressed before we rendered extinct the first animal or plant to suffer this fate at our hands. (anyone know what or when??)
There are only three basic differences between ourselves and those we regard as “lower” animals:
We are the only animal to communicate by means of both spoken and written word.
We are the only animal to make and use tools the sole purpose of which is the destruction of members of our own species.
We are the only animal to work, actively and continually, at destroying the only known place in the Universe where we can live.
We should, both as individuals and as countries, work to reduce the disastrous effect we are having on our planet, and one way of doing this is to reduce our numbers, rather than allowing an indefinite increase.

colinsett, nice job of cherry-picking quotes and data, and misrepresenting both badly!

Note that I said "exponentially AND without end": Population growth is steadily declining. As you pointed out, the current rate of growth is around 1 per cent. If you'd expanded your data a few decades each way, you'd see a different picture (but then, using short time-frames to distort trends is a favourite tactic of Malthusian doomsayers). The rate of growth just a few decades ago peaked at 2 per cent, and has been steadily declining ever since. It's expected that population will stablise some time in the next century.

Did you do your own math on the doubling time? I make it at around 70 years, but then maths wasn't my strong point, and what's a decade or two between apocalypses? In any case, as the population rate slows, that doubling time will surely move out further.

daggett: "humankind's finite endowment of natural capital, principally fossil fuels and metals, but also, soil, rainforest, fishing stocks, and bore water"

Um, rainforest, fishing stocks and water are not finite. Rainforest isn't even in serious decline. Fishing stocks and water need to be better managed, for certain, but the situation is nowhere as dire as dills like Ehrlich like to make out.

Fossil fuels and metals were supposed to have run out decades ago, according to the Malthusians, but we pesky humans just keep finding new reserves and better technology. It's estimated that, one way or the other, we have resources to last us at least centuries, if not millennia; although by then we will no doubt have moved on to better technology.

"The Stone Age did not end for lack of stones, and the Oil Age will end long before the world runs out of oil.”

Tough news for the Jeremiahs, who rightly object to the Vatican imposing control of fertility, but strangely have no problem with the state or the Cult of Gaia doing exactly the same.

Perhaps they should just work for what appears to be the best method of birth control of all: wealth and education.

The growthists are generalising from a tiny and quite atypical sliver of human history. Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, and others were wrong about famines in the 1970s because they were unable to foresee the success of the Green Revolution, which doubled or tripled grain yields. However, collapses are not uncommon in the historical and archaeological records. Some well known examples include the collapses of the Sumerian city states (after their irrigated fields were ruined by salinity), the Maya kingdoms, and the Anasazi, as well as the Irish Potato famine of 1848, where 1-1.5 million people starved and another 1.5-2 million had to emigrate. See, for example, Jared Diamond's 'Collapse' and 'Constant Battles' by Harvard archaeologist Steven LeBlanc. If human ingenuity always saves the day and always keeps ahead of population growth, it ought to be impossible for such collapses to occur.

It is also quite possible for enormous technological advances to occur with no lasting benefit to human welfare, because the advances simply result in more mouths to eat up any surplus. Scroll down to the graphs in this paper, and you can see a graph of real wages for building workers and agricultural workers in Tuscany, Italy from 1370 to 1860. It is obvious that the average person was far better off in 1400 after the Black Death than in 1860, despite more than 450 years of technological progress.

http://www.issm.cnr.it/asp/cv/malanima/dati/PILIt1agg.pdf

This paper has a graph showing real wages from 1400-1800 in a number of European cities

http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/faculty/sevket%20pamuk/publications/pamuk-black_death-final.pdf

If progress is always onward and upward, why did world grain production per person peak in the mid 1980s?

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1116809

How bizarre that there are people who freak out at the notion that we should think of ways of reducing population growth. Especially people who live on this very dry continent.

Not only is water in short supply, but our cities are becoming large and unwieldy. High density housing is becoming increasingly necessary. Living like ants as is done in large high density areas like Japan and parts of Europe is not desirable for a whole raft of reasons.

Absolutely we need to support reducing population growth in developing countries. Was there any suggestion that there shouldn't be? Anybody who thinks that the women in the third world WANT to have many children must be bonkers. Especially in these countries pregnancy and childbirth is seriously high risk. And consider the difficulty of trying to raise a child to adulthood.

Are any of you for real thinking that a call for reducing population growth is because of a hatred of humans? What an irrational conclusion.

Weird. I wonder how many of the contributors against this idea are the same who scream the loudest about child support and single parent pensions.

Divergence

You present some interesting data. That the black death resulted in a prolonged but temporary increase in living standards is well know and not especially surprising – if a third of the Australian population was wiped out tomorrow then, once they recovered from the shock, the survivors would have more houses, cars, roads, hospitals etc per capita at their disposal. This does not mean they would have been equally as rich had the dead third never existed – they just benefited from the accumulation of capital and infrastructure that was suddenly shared among fewer people. Also, the black death prompted significant societal and economic change (such as the end of serfdom in Western Europe) that contributed to economic growth.

The Northern Italy study is interesting but highly specific to a particular region and economy. There are problems using real wages as a welfare gauge in a period when few people were paid in cash, however. And most of your data point to events before the industrial revolution, when the really large improvements in living standards began.

Probably the most authoritative study of broader economic trends over the longer term is Angus Maddison’s “World Economy: A Millennial Perspective”

limited Google book access here: http://books.google.com.au/books?id=6D01BTuzScwC&dq=Angus+Maddison&printsec=frontcover&source=an&hl=en&ei=v7H2Seq0HY3qsgO268CcBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#

updated spreadsheets of key data available here:

http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_03-2007.xls

This paints pretty much the picture mil-observer describes – slow but positive progress up to the industrial revolution, accelerating sharply after that.

Grains production per capita may have peaked in the 1980s, but food production did not:
http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/food_production_index