Is that, of itself, a good thing, or not?

Is the "of itself" qualification, of itself, a reasonable one?

Hah, I just read an article from the SEP related to that: "The Repugnant Conclusion"[1]. I think it was actually on the front page of HN a few days ago.

In essence, it's a tricky ethical question: is having more people with a lower quality of life preferable to fewer people with a higher quality of life? Any immediately intuitive answer to that question leads to some highly unintuitive conclusions.

[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

Related, the Malthusian trap, and the paradox of good and bad fortune (in a system which can respond through population growth and decline, and per-capita wealth and decline). As Gregory Clark puts it in A Farewell to Alms: what's virtue is vice, and vice virtue.

That is: increasing prosperity leads to larger populations and less to go around (food, resources, etc.). Calamities such as famine, plague, wars, etc., reduce populations and spawn an increase in per-capita wealth.

This is generally, though not universally, seen to apply to pre-industrial civilisations only.