I&#x27;ve been thinking along similar lines recently.<p>One counter to this argument is that as this process of overpopulation (relative to useful jobs) begins to happen, standard of living decreases.* As standard of living decreases on average, people start to have less children. So the imbalance is somewhat self-correcting, it&#x27;s just that human lives are getting to be longer while the time between inventions that obviate the need for human labor seems to be getting shorter.<p>Longer average lifespans (with the same legal retirement age for social security, medical benefits) exacerbate this problem.<p>But there is always one industry that can be fueled by human lives and that looks great on an economic balance sheet - war. It decreases surplus labor, increases nationalism and social cohesion (if people generally see the necessity of the war), and injects a huge stimulus of demand into the economy through gov spending on all sorts of goods for the war effort, as well as investments in R&amp;D that adds to the country&#x27;s infrastructure base.<p>If the latency between idle&#x2F;restless&#x2F;poor&#x2F;disenfranchised population and meaningful&#x2F;useful jobs gets to be too large, then all it takes is a spark to start a protest, rebellion, or war as people have nothing else to really live for.<p>* I would use GDP&#x2F;capita to have a more quantifiable benchmark, but I find GDP to be almost completely useless when accounting for things that matter to actual human beings such as quality of social cohesion, potential social mobility, amount of pollution, etc.