What are “resources” and where do they disappear after we use them?
It’s very hard to talk about general social trends, because they have so many different components acting on different time frames. These are only a few sparse thoughts on the matter, not necessarily coherent as a whole.
The exponential growth law is a great intellectual achievement, but it has so many counter-intuitive implications that it usually eludes every one. It’s not surprising that it’s discoverer would be the first to get himself confused about its meaning. Malthus observation on population was precise, and even his idea of trap is very much what happens sometimes, when local regions get crowded beyond their support capacity.
Crowding offers advantages as it reduces costs of transactions thus allowing better division of labor, and that’s why cities emerge.
But given a technological level, there’s a limit to the support capacity of cities, imposed by the costs of bringing and storing food from the surrounding areas and dealing with concentrated waste and other problems generated by excessive crowding.
Only a few geographical regions are suited for large-scale crowding given a technological level. These areas once settled rapidly grow and reach their support capacity.
Support capacities tend to rise with overall technological increases. And this growth is also of exponential-like behavior.
Before the industrial era, the rate of growth of support capacities was generally lower than the rate biological rate of growth of people and Malthusian traps were very common.
But since then the situation seems to have reversed.