Yeah that isn’t true. The world never ran on the mathusian nightmare. If it had everything would be gone by now. You see wild edible plants and wild edible animals. Also census numbers and tax revenues would have been stable. The people of the past had the same issues we had. They starved on fertile farm land, they had economic downturns, they had baby booms, farms would switch from high end cash products to cheap grains they could sustain themselves with and back again.
Banks aren’t doing us some favor by being the engine of economic growth. Every bank you see has become a corny capitalism abomination that makes most of its money lending money to people who don’t need it, government infusions, and fees. Even the things that you can point to like financing a home ignore that it is a disease that they helped cause and they are selling the cure to.