One reason that humans might not self-regulate population is because we are less in direct contact with our ecosystem. A rat knows if food has been scarce lately, or the nest crowded. Your average human has no intuitive idea if the soil in the big AgriCorp farms has been depleted, or if the oil reserves are about to run out, and the price of housing in the suburbs only a intellectual consideration.
No intuitive idea of the direct issue, but a VERY intuitive idea of the downstream resource scarcity: Prices. Or, in the case of house prices, the downstream result of money printing and interest rate suppression.
