What Malthus got wrong was the rate of technological progress. First, he was pessimistic about our ability to improve agricultural productivity. Since his writing, there have been huge advances in agriculture: the percentage of the global workforce employed in the sector has declined from more than 80 per cent to 33 per cent, and is falling rapidly (in the US and other advanced economies, agriculture represents 2 per cent of employment or less). In the last 50 years alone, the land required to produce a given quantity of food has declined by 68 per cent (Ritchie & Roser , 2019). The total amount of land used to produce food has still continued to grow at least until recently, but much more slowly than the population (Ausubel et al., 2013; Ewers et al., 2009).