He might have had some valid points but he lost me when he started with, "
I fully understand that our financial system isn't perfect but at least it's real."
Exactly! Humans use too much energy - even the ones using the
real financial system.
Mechanical/biological POV: boiled down, it's how much of a quasi-monoculture of humans can this planet sustain at various levels of mutual comfort? If we were in the low-mid hundreds of myriads, no problem: have all the tantalium you want - or buffalo, or whatever you can realistically find. Just a matter of price. Oops. Be it the economy or just a kind of behavioral physics, we end up doing hat many other animals - or plants - do when left alone in a place where they "just can": multiply and grow in shapes that often are exponential up to a ceiling, much like an S of sorts. But I digress. There are S-curves that spin more pleasant thought, and this gentlemen.
Nah, population growth have stopped, the average ratio planetwide is two children per family, and it is dropping, in a not to distant future a diminishing population will be our biggest problem.
The reason it doesn't look like that is because the older generations that are now dying of where fewer in number then the ones being born now, when that tip of what used to be a pyramid but now is an obelisk is gone it will be a tower that will slowly turn in to a upside down pyramid.
Interesting.
Every year over the last 50 years we have gone up in population.
I think the last set of negative years was during world war two.
Maybe you are correct we should know in under ten-twenty years time.