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but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology
i realise that population growth is currently centred outside of the "developed" world, but nonetheless, something changed 300 or so hundred years ago:
https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time
so it could be that we can do a bit of levelling up / levelling down at a global level, population peaks somewhere between 9 and 11? Bn and we muddle through. it just seems unlikely to me.
ChasnotRobert-
The answer is mainly hygiene. You have to remember that people in cities basically used to drink water enriched with shit and life expectancy was far lower. Improving this didn't start with John Snow, although he was tremendously important in taking hygiene to another level. Of course, it wasn't monocausal, and there were other factors, too. Technology mainly benefited only a small percentage of the population, as today (although most people use technology today, you still have a huge discrepancy between those with the massive data centres and those with their little computers at home).
Oliver Schick
It's well-established that the main driver of extreme population growth is poverty. Obviously, public health is a complex subject, and you need to factor in the impact of hygiene, etc., but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology (understood in the modern sense; I guess you could also interpret traditional modes of sustainable agriculture like in India and China as technology).
I'm not talking about an 'ordinary' Westerners consumption. Astonishingly, the worst polluters are just a few thousand people. That's not to try and oversimplify it; of course it has an impact if 'ordinary' Westerners fly to the Maldives on holiday. However, we're talking about people who take at least several flights a week. The ratio of that to an 'ordinary' Western household is mind-boggling.
Obviously, even if all those people changed their ways, it would still leave that kind of 'lifestyle' as 'aspirational' and the cycle would begin all over again of people jockeying to get into that kind of position and perpetuate the nonsense that got us here in the first place.