Yeah, there's a reason they're desperately trying to get enough food to survive. Where to you propose to find new farmland, muchacho? How about the fact that the entire industrial apparatus you're hoping to give these folks relies on finite resources that are getting rather thin on the ground?
(Fun fact: we couldn't have the Industrial Revolution today. The only source of anthracite coal left is in Antarctica, but, hey! The ice will melt soon, I guess. In the meantime, the brown crud that's left is dross the Victorians didn't consider worth burning.)
I'm not proposing to find new farmland, I'm pointing out that as farmland is being used more efficiently, these societies are transforming from peasant/agrarian to industrial and in some cases skipping right ahead to post-industrial. As much as we like to glamorize the old family farm, subsistence farming in China or India or Nigeria is a lousy way to make a living, which is why people there are willing to put up with such rough urban conditions in order to escape.
In terms of your broader point, I've already mentioned two areas, biotech and clean energy, where I see the potential for considerable improvement in human quality of life without depleting nonrenewable resources. Nanotechnology might be another one. You're absolutely right that growth is finite, but, as people on this forum should know, growth (in the form of things) isn't the only way to make things better.
Finally, I think your observation about coal actually undercuts what you're trying to say. From the earliest days of the Industrial revolution, people were worried about what would happen when that coal ran out. Did "peak coal" bringing human progress crashing to a halt?
Actually, mid-sized farms (large family farms, not subsistence) are quite quite a bit more productive per area than the collectivized industrial giants-- be that Soviet collectivization or corporate ownership, it amounts to the same thing. They are less productive by manpower, however, and that's what costs these days. Because there's absolutely no surplus workers, right?
As for the move away from subsistence farming... that has largely already happened. We called it the Green Revolution. Yields went up, for a while, and population rose to match. Now we've more hungry mouths to feed than ever.
As for "peak coal" -- where's the British Empire, these days? The Imperialists fretted that peak coal would end them, and they were right. As a civilization, we were able to transition to petrol, and keep that nebulous "progress" going for a while, sure. But
petrol is better than coal. It has a higher energy density, burns hotter (which means more efficient heat engines), and takes less energy to pump out of the ground.
There's no better energy source lined up. There's not even anything comparable.
"But clean energy!" you cry-- there is no renewable resource that can match oil in terms of energy return on investment, energy density, or sheer convenience. Dr. Tom Murphy has done a fairly good writeup on that
here.
"But biotech!" you cry-- what do you know about biotech, son? What exactly do you expect from it? So far, there's not a single bio-engineered crop that gives better yields than traditional varieties unless you're dowsing both fields in petroleum-derived Round-Up(tm). Just because you can tinker with a genome doesn't make you god; you're subject to the same laws of physics that nature's been working with for the past 4 billion years.
"But fusion!" you cry-- it's been 50 years out for 50 years now, and there's no reason to believe we are any closer to a breakthrough. Plasmas are bloody cussed things, you see. Every new reactor
should be the one that finally breaks even, based on the scaling laws from smaller experiments before. Trouble is, those empirical scaling laws hold over only a very tiny regime, and when the new reactor gets built we discover a whole new batch of instabilities and losses that set us back to square one. The goalposts just won't stay still, and there are a number of physicists in the field who now believe that nothing less energetic than a hydrogen bomb is ever going to work.
Physically possible? Sure. But there's a big difference between physically possible and practical. We went to the moon! A few times. A long time ago. You could fly to London faster than the speed of sound! For a few years, anyway, quite a while back. These things were possible, but not practical, and now they're gone. It may be hard to believe, but a whole lot of our technological gadgetry may face the same fate.
So what, though? There's more to life than silly gadgets. As Luck better Still pointed out, the IT "revolution" hasn't done much but put a whole lot of people out of work. If that's "growth," how much of it can we take?
I know one thing, though. My parents had a house, a car, two kids and all the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle on one income and a college diploma.They didn't scrimp. They weren't frugal, or mustachian. They just had the money. Virtually everyone I know has a pair of university educations, three or four jobs, and can barely make ends meet. Would it be easier if they were more frugal? Sure. But if you want to say that's growth-- well, I'll repeat myself. How much more of this kind of growth can we really take?