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It strikes me as more of a tautology. If a population stops growing, then clearly it's because it has run out of some resource, particularly if you go so far a

• Periodic 17y ago
  I think it is used more to predict how a system will respond to a change in resources. If you reduce the amount of resources available to a population, that population will shrink approximately proportionally (until there is enough for the rest to survive), and if you increase the resources the population will grow to use those resources reasonably quickly. It also points out that it is the scarcest resource that limits growth. Increasing food will not allow the population grow if there isn't enough water, sun, etc. My point was mostly to point out that we may have some other scarcity that isn't food which is limiting the growth rate in industrialized countries, while increasing the food in starving countries will just cause the population to grow until it hits the limit of some other resource. I suspect that it isn't any sort of time scarcity that is limiting current human growth, but more likely the impact of contraceptives messing with our normal biological mechanisms.