Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal

The first time I read "A Modest Proposal," I was taking a high school course in British literature. After reading it, our teacher told us that Swift wrote it as a satirical rebuttal to complaints of the close-minded, pampered upper class about the squalid poor, who were worthless and incapable of rising from their current station. The irony of it was that some of those very people actually took Swift seriously.
This passage, written so long ago, shows us that overcrowding and overpopulation were problems even hundreds of years ago. Nothing was done in London to fix this percieved problem, but Londoners have survived to this day. They didn't starve, and they certainly didn't do anything as ghastly as eat babies, as Swift sarcastically proposed. This brings up two questions. The first one concerns overpopulation. "If London was overcrowded nearly three centries ago and nothing was done about it, does that mean that overcrowding solves itself, and is not as grave a problem as some people think it is?" The second question concerns population control. "Is controlling human population, as if human beings were some type of animal, ethical?"