I believe what we see in the world today is a war of cultures between a minority who want to run the world sensibly, and take professional pride in doing so, and a majority who want to live a heedless, feckless irresponsible life, as policy.
Most people anywhere in the world take pride in living on the edge, and scorn to take advantage of the modernist possibility of living far above subsistence. Rising population cancels out rising living standards; that is the objective. Rising populations make occasional food shortages likely; that is the objective. Living on the edge is a way of life, modernity threatens living on the edge, and most people act to cancel the benefits of modernity.
In poor countries, living on the edge means high and rising population pressure. In rich societies, living on the edge means reckless financing, as we saw in the Great Financial Crash of 2008, and reckless consumption of fuel and materials.
In 1930, Keynes published his great essay, The Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, and sketched the outline of a sensible mechanized society, with a stable population, and working fewer hours than we do today, what we would call job sharing. He assumed that most people would understand and move towards this goal, (why would they not?), but underestimated the difficulty most people have in changing their culture, or way of thinking.
In the end, the world might divide into two groups; a minority living the Keynes formula, or Mustachian formula, by choice; and the majority who will continue to live on the edge, by choice.
