not quite there yet

Malthus based his belief that human populations would outgrow their resource base on two assumptions, that "geometric population growth is the innate result of healthy living" and that "food production arithmetically increases". he failed to take into account several factors, at the time of his writting this we had not yet truly populated the new world of the old for that matter with the degree of proficiency that we later achieved, and more importantly perhaps that "the last two centuries [..] show that increases in food depend on land availability and technical progress". and here we get to the key of the matter. In Malthus' day the impact of fossil fuels on our ability to expand unencumbered by traditional restraints was unimaginable, and to be fair also the impact of birth control and of the demographic transition achieved by prosperous states is also an important factor, but i would argue from where we stand at this crosspoint that a European model of population growth for most of the world is far off or likely to fail do to outstanding variables that might affect the likelihood of such an occurrence in say India, and that as yet (only china has birth control laws) no government will set a cap on how many its citizens can bring into the world. so if a restraint remains, which i would argue it does, it lies at the bottom of every coal mine, oil well and natural gas deposit, beyond even mining the existing amounts of plastic and platinum and lithium in the worlds ever growing dumps, and even then technical progress must be reckoned with as an ever resourceful fountain of growth, until it leans to hard on biotic stability, or better said, it leans to hard before having a chance to continue its exponential growth to were such a restraint is either not met (by means that test the biosphere less) or is overcome (by means that make the degradation of key aspects of the biosphere irrelevant)...