— Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), from Muqaddimah[2]As a society becomes more wealthy, it also creates a well-developed set of legal rules to produce the conditions of freedom and security that progress requires.
[citation needed] In Progress and Poverty written in 1879, after describing the powerful reproductive forces of nature, the political economist Henry George wrote, "That the earth could maintain a thousand billions of people as easily as a thousand millions is a necessary deduction from the manifest truths that, at least so far as our agency is concerned, matter is eternal and force must forever continue to act.
[citation needed] One common example of this labeling is by those who are skeptical of the view that technology can solve, or overcome, the problem of an exponentially-increasing human population[5] living off a finite base of natural resources.
Cornucopians might counter that human population growth has slowed dramatically, and not only is currently growing at a linear rate,[6] but is projected to peak and start declining in the second half of the 21st century.
[9] Historian of science Naomi Oreskes criticized cornucopianism, arguing that while there were technological innovations to increase agricultural productivity for a growing world, "the cornucopian perspective ignores other important facts", such as that "an enormous number of these inventions" such as gains in health and life expectancy, "came into being through government actions", and arguing that "technological progress has not stopped the unfolding climate crisis.