A closer look
Human economies before the Industrial Revolution were locked in a miserable, stagnant cycle known as the Malthusian trap, where any technological advancement that increased food production only resulted in massive population spikes that immediately caused everyone to starve again. Instead of living standards actually improving when society invented better plows or crop rotation, peasants just had ten more surviving children, which instantly consumed all the surplus wheat and violently snapped the average wealth per capita right back to zero. It was basically a thousands-of-years-long economic treadmill of utter despair, where the ultimate reward for agricultural innovation was just more mouths to feed and widespread famine. We finally broke out of this trap by aggressively burning fossil fuels to power machines, meaning our grand reward for escaping perpetual starvation was simply unlocking a highly industrialized method of eventually destroying ourselves
