Capitalism incentivizes overpopulation

It just occurred to me that in our present global free market capitalist paradigm, overpopulation is a good thing; the more people, the more potential consumers of goods, whether they can pay or not. It is incentivized to create a world full of people, to whom goods will be sold. The more human beings alive on the planet at any given time, the more net capital is produced. That is, of course, what capitalism is; the accumulation of capital is the point, the goal, the unalloyed good.

But a world full of ever more consumers misses one key fact; the world is not a candy-land of ever replenishing material for our consumption; yes, trees grow back and soil can be rotated to increase agricultural yield. But deforestation and soil erosion cause damage that is healed on a time scale of centuries and millennia, and human consumers do not benefit on that timescale.

The overconsumption that comes with overpopulation, which is itself an incentive of capitalism, is a strictly short term enterprise. It has no long term potential. You can't have a living, breathing earth with resources for all AND 10 billion people living as though the accumulation of capital and goods is the point of their existence. It's one or the other.

The harsh implication is that capitalism in its present form is not ecologically viable, and things that are not ecologically viable possess an unerring tendency towards obsolescence and extinction.

"The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed. Many people would like to deny that this is so. They would like to believe in that oxymoron, "sustainable growth." Kenneth Boulding, President Kennedy's Environmental Advisor 45 years ago, said something about this: "Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical on a physically finite planet," he said, "is either mad or an economist."

-Sir David Attenborough, speaking to the RSA.