world population is leveling off because we're approaching many of these limits to growth and that's affecting the enabling factors for continued population growth.
> The author also assumes, incorrectly, that GDP--money spent on goods and services--is the right measure of overall wealth. It's not. The author even discusses "decoupling", the fact that many types of wealth require little or no physical resources to produce, but fails to realize that the long term outcome of this will not be to raise monetary GDP more and more, but to make monetary GDP less and less of an accurate measure of wealth production.
I agree with this.
> "A limited life-essential resource will always carry a moderately high value." This is a common misconception. An obvious counterexample is air: air is a limited resource (Earth's atmosphere contains only a finite quantity of it), it is life-essential, but it is free. Why? Because it costs nothing to produce.
you conflate value and price here. obviously atmosphere is not currently metered. That doesn't mean we don't place a high value on clean air.
> And if the cost of production of other life-essential resources, like food, were reduced, those things would also become cheaper.
