Malthus was wrong of course.
But it might only have been on timescale.
Because in the end the buck doesn't stop with food.
It stops with energy.
And we do stand to run out of energy as stands, with nothing changed.
We see it in the value of money.
Money is energy, always, physically, it always has an energy value in markets.
With no energy value there is no value in money. Energy is a measure of what can be done with money.
When money makes money, or when an amount of energy expended as labor is returned by more energy in the form of money, energy has to be gained also from somewhere.
This is profit, and it's how you and I and the vast majority of everyone, all 8 billion people on the planet, currently get the 150 or so Joules per second, 24/7, we each need to metabolise as food, totalling around 0.1GWhrs for life, for each of us.
We might see that Earth is merely a store of that energy, a kind of battery, charged by the sun.
The interface with the sun is photosynthetic life, and it is the charge rate through this interface that we have managed to push up, by massaging nature in a way that has so far supported surviving humanity.
Farming, is part of the massaging.
Notice there is a significant portion of humanity that doesn't survive, despite the massaging.
Notice the portion of humanity not surviving is on the increase.
Notice also we are reducing the amount of photosynthetic life.
All of those facts are easily checked.
As stands we really are in process of going extinct, in terms of energy availabilty.
This is what is really hitting profit margins, all profit margins, and all value of money.
Both those things can be checked too, just look at the history.
Hence why I've written more than 400 stories on this subject, with the only solution.
Domestic and community solar hydrogen, backed by an economy of solar indexed stimulus, is the only solution, of a truly sustainable world which will undo all the damage done, all the increase of entropy, that our presence to date has caused.
This is the only way to wind back down the planetary temperature, which is a direct measure of entropy, despite this being masked by profit driven lies.
Profit is an energy con that steals energy from the planet without any of us being aware of it, at least those that didn't spend their lives Engineering Systems.
Profit is the fundamental dishonesty at the root of all the problems.