Civil wars and regime changes aren't a lot of fun to live... or die through.

It is "dismal" but unnecessary through good governance. We really do have enough resources to ensure moderate standards of living.

Political upheaval would be appropriately considered a market failure.

    item = np.random.choice(["macroeconomics","Venezuela"])
 
    meme_du_jour: f"tell me you don't know about {item} without telling me you don't know about {item}" 

    print(meme_du_jour)

Unless there's something in it for them by their own assessment people will not make sacrifices of that magnitude.

Government isn’t directly responsible for food prices, but they frequently involve themselves because social order/stability requires reasonable food prices. When store shelves are empty in a neighborhood/ region, riots break out. Riots work on the time scale of hours/days. Families having fewer kids is on the time scale of years. Farmers planning for likely yields/costs is months/years.

Your idea of “fair” suggests you would just shrug at the famines caused by Stalin and Mao regimes and blame the people because they weren’t willing to pay enough. When people are food desperate, social order, norms, and predictability break down. This is why governments have strong incentives to intervene to ensure reasonable food prices.

Oh, and to paraphrase Hitchhiker's Guide, programmers will probably the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.

On a less violent note, every country has seen birth rates decline as it became richer. Modern western societies only grow through immigration, and even many countries in, say, Africa, have seen drastic declines. Humanity doesn’t expand until it unavoidably runs out of food, that’s a 19th century idea.