How many is too many?

Way back in 1690, a certain Venetian doge named Ortes, somehow calculated, that the fixed carrying capacity of the planet was three billion people. This was a couple hundred years after the Renaissance saw European population density spike, after having been essentially flat for the previous 1,300 years, also known as the Dark Age.

We're at some six billion now, so what is the fixed carrying capacity anyway?

Oligarchs like Ortes presumably thought the Earth itself had fixed natural resources, and population growth had to be curtailed , and therefore war, famine, and disease were not only desirable, but necessary to insure their monopoly on power.

The Venetian wealth eventually made its way to the North Atlantic; to the tiny island of Lilliput, also known as England, where, in modern times, Prince Philip, founder of the World Wildlife Fund for Nature, remarked, on more than one occasion, that he wished to be re-incarnated as a "deadly virus," in order to stem population growth.

His sentiments were echoed by Sir Henry the Toad, also known as Kissinger, who wrote in a memorandum, saying, essentially, to the people of Latin America: "Look, there are just too many of you; so we're going to come in with sterilization programs; abortion clinics; whatever it takes, because you're sitting on our vital, limited resources."

In other words: "Don't even think about development, just preserve your backward, indigenous way of life, and leave the resources for us."