It depends, and I don't have my Livi-Bacci at hand. But I can give some rough estimates from the google books pages.

In figure 1.6 we have modern day Japan, Italy of 1921 and Cisalpine Gaul as examples of how mortality affects breeding space. From it we can see that while in modern day Japan almost all born women are also alive to be mums and thus 2 children is breaking even, in 1921 Italy only 71% of the available fertile years for women can be used. So you need about 3 children per mother just to stay even in Italy 1921. And for Cisalpine Gaul you have a mere 29%, so you need about 6 children per mother to stay even.

I would say it is the six children family that is more representative of pre-19th century agricultural society. Add 19th century food and hygiene to get to Italy 1921 and you have a population that doubles per generation. Add 20th century medicine and you have a population that triples per generation.

The good news is that we have a functioning feedback to have fewer children in an increased societal position for women, which has brought and is bringing births in most of the world down to or below reproduction levels. Births started going down in the areas that first saw the decrease in deaths already a hundred years ago. That was at the same time as the European empires were at their heights and industrialism was taking off. It is hard to fit that with some precognition of future resource hardships, in particular as other societies were just entering the same pattern. So to fit it with resource scarcity the richest societies must have felt that we were heading into poverty while poorer thought they were heading for expansion.

Sweden's finest (and perhaps only) collaborative, leftist e-newspaper Synapze.se

das monde:

I do not read everything of Archdruid easily

He's no easy read, on any level! A notable sang-froid spiced with occasional bone-dry asides that use wit to stab the message further home, well it doesn't pander the reader.

Basically the price of entry is any hope you ever had of a happy ending, gloom expressed with rare elegance is the tone of all his posts. That said, he manages to make me chuckle in between groans...

Enlightened pessimism.

His writing has gravitas, but listening to him talk live he comes across less mature, a bit boyishly flippant. Common sense wrapped in a somewhat self-conscious brilliance, a polymath's love for learning and orthogonal thinking.

He has another blog on the Druidic side to his work which attracts a different set of commenters.

The level of commentary on both blogs is very sharp. The acid test of any blogger...

The Pragmatic Pagan. A rare voice, a strong signal in the minestrone of the Inter-Noise.

Feral Scholar-ish for intellectual loft, with less military stuff and more civilisation history.

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

das monde:

Arnold Toynbee [...] has pointed out an intriguing difference between the way civilizations rise and the way they fall. On the way up, he noted, each civilization tends to diverge not merely from its neighbors but from all other civilizations throughout history.

One of the consequences of 'Western Civilization' haven risen so far and so fast is that it has also almost certainly evolved capabilities that will allow it to reconfigure itself in ways that can both be more personally satisfying to the entire population and more energy efficient at the same time. Propaganda has proven such a powerful tool that it is quite conceivable that a society could be converted to an orientation that favors reduced material and energy consumption in return for more equality and opprotunity for all.

What we need is a leader and a movement that can do for capitalism what Gorbechev did for Soviet Communism, but with better control of the direction that the transformation takes. Social orders are entirely human creations and no social order is but that the thinking of the population makes it so. It only took a little more than a quarter century for US wealthy elites to transform US society from one with a powerful central government and increasing equality to one where the central government has become the creature of elites and is being used to despoil the masses in the interests of the elites. (~1950 - 1980) It would seem that it should be possible to reverse that process even quicker that the time it took to create and put it to work.

"It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."