Thank you for sharing this lucid assessment of demographic cycles and their economic, social, and political consequences. I have no quarrel with any of your claims or with the evidence you cite in support of them.

My problem is with the unspoken presuppositions of your analysis as a whole—a problem that I find with nearly all economists. That problem is your anthropocentric blind spot; the unexamined premise that the resources and biological support system of our planet are infinite; and that nature, both physical and biological, has no value other than as a “resource” for the endless growth of human population, innovation, extraction of energy and material, occupation of land, and the production and consumption of commodities. If the Earth were infinite, your argument would be flawless. But on a finite planet with a rapidly deteriorating biological support system, an argument for more population growth to support yet more extraction, production, and consumption of commodities is simply insane.