Malthus Rides Again

A century and a half ago a despondent parson named Thomas Malthus brought out a book entitled Essay on the Principle of Population. In it he argued that the earth was advancing toward disaster. Its human population, he said, was expanding in geometrical proportion, while the available food supply increased only in arithmetical proportion. Eventually the population would outstrip the means of subsistence, and tragedy would ensue.

If this analysis had been correct, the world would have become progressively more impoverished from that time forward, and those of us who had managed to get born at all should by now be perishing from malnutrition. The trend, of course, has been all the other way. There are few people on this side of the Iron Curtain who are not to some extent better off, in material things, than were their ancestors; and Malthus’ own society, the West, is incomparably better fed, housed and clothed than were the men of 1800.

A century and a half ago a despondent parson named Thomas Malthus brought out a book entitled Essay on the Principle of Population. In it he argued that the earth was advancing toward disaster. Its human population, he said, was expanding in geometrical proportion, while the available food supply increased only in arithmetical proportion. Eventually the population would outstrip the means of subsistence, and tragedy would ensue.

If this analysis had been correct, the world would have become progressively more impoverished from that time forward, and those of us who had managed to get born at all should by now be perishing from malnutrition. The trend, of course, has been all the other way. There are few people on this side of the Iron Curtain who are not to some extent better off, in material things, than were their ancestors; and Malthus’ own society, the West, is incomparably better fed, housed and clothed than were the men of 1800.