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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
hippy
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.