> You are right that it doesn't guarantee anything, except to those who carefully apply scientific principles to their management of resources, folks otherwise known as 'farmers'.
Wouldn't science suggest we model based on the systems as they are instead of past performance? Let me hypothesize for a moment here to create a situation where the past performance may fail for predicting the future: (1) Assume that plants have traditionally been nutrient limited. (2) We are no longer nutrient limited. (3) We are now insolation to stored energy limited. We don't have a good way to increase insolation, so we'd better come up with a way to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. (Not to say that there aren't plenty of ways around this. Maybe we'll use solar cells to power chemical sugar making plants.)
> For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over.
You quoted me, but I'm having a hard time interpreting your response in the context of you understanding me. I was stating that we might be better off with less population, not simply that the standard of living can increase with an increasing population. To state it again, we could have X% increase with double the population, but with our current population we might have Y%. Is Y > X?
Wouldn't science suggest we model based on the systems as they are instead of past performance? Let me hypothesize for a moment here to create a situation where the past performance may fail for predicting the future: (1) Assume that plants have traditionally been nutrient limited. (2) We are no longer nutrient limited. (3) We are now insolation to stored energy limited. We don't have a good way to increase insolation, so we'd better come up with a way to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. (Not to say that there aren't plenty of ways around this. Maybe we'll use solar cells to power chemical sugar making plants.)
> For at least the last 200 years, the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people has been raised, again and again, over and over.
You quoted me, but I'm having a hard time interpreting your response in the context of you understanding me. I was stating that we might be better off with less population, not simply that the standard of living can increase with an increasing population. To state it again, we could have X% increase with double the population, but with our current population we might have Y%. Is Y > X?