Books, Arts & Manners

The Population Explosion, by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $18.95)

KARL MARX, cursing his carbuncles in the British Museum, dreamed up an analysis of the Industrial Revolution that predicted precisely the opposite of what history subsequently served up. Thomas Malthus proclaimed that the world faced imminent starvation because, so he protested, population, if left to itself, increases geometrically while food production limps along arithmetically. (The poor American farmer did not have the time to read Malthus, so he produced food faster than the world could consume it.) David Ricardo, a follower of Malthus, combined the master’s theory with an “iron law of wages”—as iron, it turned out, as a tin horn, and as applicable to the ups and downs of contemporary economics as the water level in Archimedes’s bathtub.

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Ralph de Toledano

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The Population Explosion, by Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $18.95)

KARL MARX, cursing his carbuncles in the British Museum, dreamed up an analysis of the Industrial Revolution that predicted precisely the opposite of what history subsequently served up. Thomas Malthus proclaimed that the world faced imminent starvation because, so he protested, population, if left to itself, increases geometrically while food production limps along arithmetically. (The poor American farmer did not have the time to read Malthus, so he produced food faster than the world could consume it.) David Ricardo, a follower of Malthus, combined the master’s theory with an “iron law of wages”—as iron, it turned out, as a tin horn, and as applicable to the ups and downs of contemporary economics as the water level in Archimedes’s bathtub.