This matches some of Greg Clark’s descriptions of a preindustrial Malthusian economy in A Farewell to Alms (https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Arms-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/068... or see his lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYJJlnyDpps). When the population is limited by scarce natural resources and the technology to alleviate the scarcity does not exist (or is forbidden in the case of San Francisco), then virtue is vice and vice is virtue. For example, disease increases mortality, leading to increased average incomes, so he argues that the dirty Europeans had higher average incomes than clean Japanese.