Failure to recognize the argument. I'm not advocating mass death as the "cure". I'm saying "you know, traditionally, lots of people dying ahead of their life expectancy had an (typically healthy) impact on the economy and since that's not happening right now, that's having an impact too."

You are saying exactly that.

You said: "It's totally horrible for me to say this but a deadly flu pandemic is needed for the health of our economy."

Mass death is needed for the health of our economy, is what that says. Emphasis on needed and for the health of our economy.

You don't believe in evolution then ? I'm pretty sure it says that

1) populations will grow far above reasonable levels and extremely far above sustainable levels.

2) this WILL get resolved.

> "populations will grow far above reasonable levels"

This theory was considered state of the art in 1798 (when Malthus proposed it) and refuted by 1838 (when Verhulst came up with a better model, which fits actual population data much better).

Populations do occasionally grow "far above reasonable levels" and then crash, but this requires pretty extreme circumstances. The best example I can think of is the Kaibab Deer population -- various human decisions (killing off predators, changes to hunting policies, changes to livestock grazing policies) caused the deer population to explode over the course of 20 years, and the deer population crashed a few years later as it overshot what the environment could sustain and caused substantial damage. That population curve is more or less A-shaped, with a steep climb and steep dropoff.

Populations in general don't behave that way. Most populations of most organisms we know of have an S-shaped curve, with a steep growth phase and then a leveling out phase that involves very little "overshoot" and very little "catastrophic resolution". (Human population looks to be following exactly such a trajectory, and is on course to level off somewhere in the 9-12 billion range.)