This is more important. Also, transporting people when they'd die/have horrible conditions otherwise.

I think it is a silly argument to say it helped people by helping them exist in the first place. It is a weird argument for a larger population, which probably isn't a great thing.

> larger population [...] probably isn't a great thing.

Julian Simon would have strongly disagreed and he put his money where his mouth was in his famous bets with Erlich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Simon

Yes, but he actually got lucky. Given the average of any 10-year period in the last 100 years I believe Simon would have been wrong.

It might not have been Simon's good luck, because Erlich's luck when it comes to prediction has been consistently bad.

Can you show some data online to back that up? I'm genuinely curious.