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I read Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? several years ago, and it had a really interesting chapter on Iran, actually. I guess in the 70's (? forgot exact timeframe) there was a big push from Iranian leadership for women to have more babies, the idea being to bolster the number of military-aged men for their armed forces.

Eventually though, some of their social planners realized how bad the consequences of that policy were shaping up to be (from a food security and ecological point of view), and so they implemented social campaigns to encourage women to have fewer children. The slogan was something like "1 or 2 children are good, 3 if you must" (I'm mis-remembering the slogan terribly, but this was the gist of it. It was a really good one).

I've always thought that it was a great slogan worth spreading to other countries, including the US.

I encourage everyone to read that book, by the way. It was very well written.

No, and you've spectacularly missed the point, as might be expected.

How technological progress happens, to a first approximation, doesn't matter.

How much technological progress can gain is the key question.

Technology has limits

What I claim, with a great deal of support in theory, data, belief, and existing doctrine, is that there are profound limits to what you can accomplish through technology.

E.g., Quoting from Aghion and Howitt:

> The reason why the probability of the innovation depends inversely on A is that as technology advances it becomes more complex and thus harder to improve upon.

p. 88.

Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies advances this further with several key observations which are generally the subject of chapter four of his book. The book as a whole, incidentally, addresses the entire problem of sustainability, energy, and complexity (technology) from both a historical/anthropological and theoretical basis, and I very strongly recommend it if you've got a good-faith interest in this subject.

1. Human societies are problem-solving organizations
   
2. Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance
   
3. Increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita
   
4. Investment in sociopolitical complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns
   
   For Tainter, "complexity" is largely coincident with "technology". Increasing technology means increasing complexity. And complexity is undertaken because it solves problems -- food, fuel, sanitation, commerce, etc.
   
   If you look at a history of invention over the course of, say, the Industrial Revolution, you find that there has been a general arc of innovation, peaking arguably in the late 19th / early 20th century in terms of its impacts on actual human capabilities, lifespans, and standards of living. Robert Ayres describes five technological transformations which I detail in earlier posts on Fire, Cooking, and Mental Development. More on Ayres and his works.
   
   And more on the limits of technology to provide unlimited growth.
   
   
   

   Human population and Creativity
   

   
   There is the fair question of "what level of human population is required to support or create a technological society". Why the Industrial Revolution happened when it did is itself a fascinating question. There are a number of prerequisites, not the least of which was throwing off the oppressive mantel of resistance to scientific and technical advance and inquiry imposed by the Church.
   
   Economic historian Gregory Clarke of the University of California, Davis, has studied the quesition of why the Industrial Revolution occurred when it did. His answer comprises the book A Farewell to Alms, of which The New York Times has a good review.
   
   Among other factors, population was, in fact, one. However that was the 800 million or so present at the time of the start of the Industrial Revolution. Even as innovation peaked in the early 20th century, the Earth's population was 2 billion, less than a third of what it is now. While more people, and greater wealth, might increase the rate of discovery, there are reasons to think it won't particularly:
   
   

• There are limits to how large innovative groups can be to work effectively. This is well-established in the software world, where key products are typically created by small groups, often a half-dozen to a dozen members. Increasing the size of the group reduces not only average productivity but total productivity -- this is expressed as Brooks Law from Fred Books' book The Mythical Man-Month: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." There are projects which avoid this, but largely by subdividing the work into individual modules each of which is maintained by a small group (particularly in the Free Software world).
  
• The untapped brainpower of the developing world is likely overestimated. Not because of a lack of intelligence, but because much of that which can find its way to more productive activity has. The term brain drain describes just this.
  
• Integrative coordination on complex projects becomes ever more complex. Including the overhead of shooting down stupid ideas which just won't work, such as those you're proposing.
  
  
  

  There is no "God"
  

  
  I deny the existence of a personal God, or of any reference to same to explain the world.

Israel can better defend itself today than in the past and most neighboring Arab countries seem to have concluded that it's best to just leave Israel alone or even have friendly relations, but Syria, Iran, the Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Palestinians would still be happy to drive the Jews into the sea.

The Palestinians existential threat is primarily themselves, having rejected numerous peace offers and two state solution proposals over the years while still launching terrorist attacks and firing missiles and launching incendiary kites at the Israelis. If they had just made peace in 1948 (or anytime since then) and allowed the Israelis introduction of the values of Western Civilization to help lift them out of poverty and bring them into the modern world they would be far better off today. I think the situation and mindset of the parties can best be understood by reading the historical fiction novels Exodus and The Haj.

So I shared this article to my fb wall and got this comment in response:

" this popped up on my newfeed so I thought, hey, why not chime in. Overpopulation is a myth that has been disproved for hundreds of years. Start with Mathus and end with Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich convinced Americans that we would starve by the mid 80s. And welp, we're still here. If overpoulation is a problem, then why are some European countries paying their citizens to have more babies? The answer is simple. The population as become lopsided. There aren't enough young people to care for the old, by way of taxes and retirement programs like social security. The US doesn't have this problem yet because of immigration. Yes, believe it or not, immigrants and their younger generations is what keeps this country afloat when it comes to paying for the care of the older generation. You should check out this documentary produced by social scientists. It addresses the reasons for the decline in population and what the future has in store for us.

https://www.amazon.com/Demographic-Winter-decline-human-family/dp/B001CGD1P2 "

Leafy vegetables have nothing to do with a healthy diet: https://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/1400033462

The book Countdown, implied that a lot of it came from a government economist, a man, who realized that the growing population would strain resources too much and started promoting family planning. No new technology.

Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (amazon.com) is probably the single most depressing book I've read in the past 10 years. On the time span of about 100 to 200 years we (the 7-11 billion of us) are pretty much screwed by the agricultural soil erosion issue alone.