The population of the world keeps increasing. The supply of non-renewable resources keeps diminishing. Sooner or later, some generation is not going to live as well as its parents. It seems we decided to let that happen.
Living in a world without fossil fuel reserves, endless supply of fresh water, plastic, minerals, rare earths, etc. will be nothing like the 20th century. And that world is guaranteed. Those who anticipate what that world will look like have an opportunity to be ready for it. My hunch is that the steady-state of the world could at best look like, say, the Song Dynasty era.
This may not always be true. In rich countries, the problem seems to be avoiding population decline, not over population. As more people become wealthy, we might achieve some steady state of population.
There is still the problem, of course, of even a stable population exhausting non-renewable resources (fossil fuels, for example).
Living in a world without fossil fuel reserves, endless supply of fresh water, plastic, minerals, rare earths, etc. will be nothing like the 20th century. And that world is guaranteed. Those who anticipate what that world will look like have an opportunity to be ready for it. My hunch is that the steady-state of the world could at best look like, say, the Song Dynasty era.