Thomas Malthus

The Classical School
by Callum Williams
Published 19 May 2020

Ricardo would no doubt have enjoyed intellectual battles with Marx as much as he had done with Thomas Malthus. We will learn more about Marx in Chapter 15. For now it is worth noting one thing. It is an oddity of history that someone who is today seen as one of the fathers of abstract classical economics also bequeathed Karl Marx to the world. 10 JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY (1767–1832) John Maynard Keynes’s straw man David Ricardo did not think much of Jean-Baptiste Say. “M. Say came to me here from London at the request of Mr. Mill,” he wrote to Thomas Malthus in 1814. While he was an “agreeable man”, Ricardo noted that “in his book there are many points which I think are very far from being satisfactorily established… He does not appear to me to be ready in conversation on the subject on which he has very ably written.”

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(The British government used the Sinking Fund to pay off debt.) In her autobiography Martineau recalls the amusement of Thomas Malthus “when I told him I was sick of his name before I was fifteen”. Malthus was not Martineau’s only famous friend. In her day she was something of a celebrity, especially after she moved to London in the early 1830s. Eventually, says Michael Hill, “her intellectual circle came to include Charles Babbage, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, Thomas Malthus, William Wordsworth, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin”. She was also exceptionally well-travelled.

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If someone can make it seem as though their argument, no matter how arcane, was or would have been supported by one of these thinkers, it carries that bit more weight. Which makes it essential to get a better sense of what these economists really meant. What did Adam Smith mean by the term “invisible hand”? Did Karl Marx predict the end of capitalism? Was John Stuart Mill a utilitarian? Did Thomas Malthus believe that famines were desirable? This book will talk about what the founders of economics actually thought. That involves debunking some popular myths. I will also explain the significance of their ideas in simple language. The book has no equations and hopefully no jargon. After reading this book, you will know a few interesting things about the very famous (Smith, Malthus, Mill) and the much less famous (Harriet Martineau, Bernard Mandeville, Dadabhai Naoroji).

The Kingdom of Speech
by Tom Wolfe
Published 30 Aug 2016

This being 1858 on a miserable, sparsely populated speck of earth somewhere far, far south of London’s nobs, fops, top hats, and toffs, he has nothing with which to while the time away except for a copy of Tristram Shandy he has already read five times—that and his own thoughts… One day he’s lying back on his reeking bog of a bed…thinking…about this and that…when a book he read a good twelve years earlier comes bubbling up his brain stem: An Essay on the Principle of Population by a Church of England priest, Thomas Malthus.c The priest had a deformed palate that left him with a speech defect, but he could write like a dream. The book had been published in 1798 and was still very much alive sixty years and six editions later. Left unchecked, Malthus said, human populations would increase geometrically, doubling every twenty-five years.1 But the food supply increases only arithmetically, one step at a time.2 By the twenty-first century, the entire earth would be covered by one great heaving mass of very hungry people pressed together shank to flank, butt to gut.

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He used his clout as a Gentleman and a leading naturalist to enter Jenny’s cage and study her expressions up close.29 Certain he was…and so what? That left him as stumped as everybody else who was so sure about it, including his grandfather Erasmus Darwin. Erasmus couldn’t figure out exactly how transmutationi—Evolution—occurred, and neither could his grandson. In October of 1838, Charles happened to pick up a copy of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population…“for amusement,” as he put it, apparently assuming that no deep thinker could possibly find a book as old and popular as Principle of Population profound.30 He started reading it, and— Ahura! That old Malthusian magic’s got me in its spell! It lights up Darwin’s brainpan precisely the way it would Wallace’s twenty years later—It!

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a According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, the word “primitive” can be defined as: “of, belonging to, or seeming to come from an early time in the very ancient past; not having a written language, advanced technology, etc.;…of, relating to, or produced by a people or culture that is nonindustrial and often nonliterate and tribal.” Notes Chapter I: The Beast Who Talked 1 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798), chapter 2. 2 Ibid., chapter 1. 3 James Hutton, An Investigation of the Principles of Knowledge, and of the Progress of Reason, from Sense to Science and Philosophy, (Edinburgh: Strahan and Cadell, 1794). 4 Erasmus Darwin, Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life, (London: J.

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And
by Sonia Arrison
Published 22 Aug 2011

It is difficult to predict what will happen to fertility rates in the future, and depending on which rate is factored into the assumptions, the United Nations notes that the world population could either grow or shrink.12 If we take a middle ground and assume moderate population growth owing to decreased fertility rates and increased longevity, then we should next consider whether we would have the resources needed for these additional people. FIGURE 3.1 SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, International Database, December 2010. WHY THOMAS MALTHUS WAS WRONG In his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Thomas Malthus advanced this thesis: “The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.”13 This notion that population grows faster than the ability to provide for ourselves seems intuitive to some and was borrowed by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the 1968 best-selling eco-doom book The Population Bomb.

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Table of Contents Also by Sonia Arrison Title Page Dedication Foreword CHAPTER 1 - Humankind’s Eternal Quest for the Fountain of Youth IT’S OUR FAULT OVERCOMING DEATH, IMAGINING TRAGIC RESULTS FIGHTING DEATH CHAPTER 2 - How Science and Technology Will Increase Life Span REDEFINING OLD AGE SCIENCE FICTION BECOMING REALITY LEARNING FROM SALAMANDERS MANIPULATING CELLS MANIPULATING GENES THE PLASTICITY OF AGING THE SEARCH FOR AN ANTIAGING PILL GREATEST ENGINEERING PROJECT OF ALL TIME CHAPTER 3 - Mother Nature and the Longevity Revolution THE EARTH’S ABILITY TO HANDLE LONGER-LIVED HUMANS MODELING POPULATIONS WITH LONGER LIVES WHY THOMAS MALTHUS WAS WRONG OLDER, RICHER, AND CLEANER NEXT STEPS PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLE VERSUS INNOVATION CHAPTER 4 - The Longevity Divide NATURE AND HUMANITY THE PRUDENCE OF AUGMENTING NATURE THREAT OF EUGENICS? RESOURCE USE AND SOCIAL JUSTICE HUMAN RIGHTS, GENETIC WARFARE, AND ECONOMIC DIVIDES INNOVATION, EXPONENTIAL GROWTH, AND DISTRIBUTION OF TECHNOLOGY WOULD OUR ANCESTORS HAVE WANTED TO LIVE LONGER?

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Billari, “Advances in Development Reverse Fertility Declines,” Nature 460 (August 6, 2009): 741–743, www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/abs/nature08230.html. 12 United Nations, Department of Social and Economic Affairs, Population Division, “World Population to 2300,” 2004, www.un.org/esa/population/publications/longrange2/WorldPop2300final.pdf. 13 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Library of Economics and Liberty, www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop1.html#I.17. 14 Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), prologue. 15 Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61–62. 16 Ed Regis, “The Doomslayer,” Wired, February 1997, 12, www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html. 17 Ibid. 18 These were chromium, copper, nickel, tin, and tungsten. 19 Jennifer Clapp and Peter Dauvergne, Paths to a Green World: The Political Economy of the Global Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 103. 20 David McClintick and Ross B.

How Much Is Enough?: Money and the Good Life
by Robert Skidelsky and Edward Skidelsky
Published 18 Jun 2012

If scarcity is always with us, then efficiency, the optimal use of scarce resources, and economics, the science that teaches us efficiency, will always be necessary. Yet on any commonsensical view of the matter, scarcity waxes and wanes. We know that famines are periods of extreme scarcity and good harvests produce relative plenty. Thomas Malthus understood that when population grows faster than food supplies, scarcity grows; and in the reverse case, it declines. Moreover, scarcity, as most people understand it, has diminished greatly in most societies over the last two hundred years. People in rich and even medium-rich countries no longer starve to death.

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In fact he and his contemporaries did not talk about growth at all but about “improvement,” a term encompassing moral as well as material conditions. At the end of this road lay the “stationary state”—a state in which the possibilities of improvement were exhausted. All the classical economists had this end point in mind, at varying degrees of affluence. Smith’s two famous successors, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, were much less optimistic than Smith himself. Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798, 1826) was written to challenge William Godwin’s utopian claim that property redistribution would make possible abundance for all. Its logic was straightforwardly cyclical. Without strenuous moral “checks,” population would inevitably outstrip the land available to support it: variations in population pressure would determine cycles of rising and falling incomes.

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Our own aspiration is to persuade by joy, to present a vision of the good life as one to be pursued not from guilt or fear of retribution but in happiness and hope. Limits to Growth Keynes looked forwards to a final end of growth, a point at which all material wants are definitively satisfied. Others, more pessimistic, have postulated a limit to growth, an external barrier to further progress. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, mentioned in Chapter 2, is the first and classic statement of this point of view. Malthus’s argument is beguilingly simple. It starts from two certainties: the finitude of the earth and the existence of a certain “passion between the sexes.” The earth’s ability to bring forth food is inherently limited.

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity
by Stephen D. King
Published 14 Jun 2010

The case for government in general is famously well expressed in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, where the ‘state of nature’ gives rise to continuous wars leaving human lives ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’. Even the best of governments, however, have difficulties coming up with policies that work in the international arena. 11. Thomas Malthus (ed. G. Gilbert), An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993), p. 18. 12. For an attempt to rehabilitate Thomas Malthus, read Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2007). 13. From The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. For an update on Marx and globalization, see Meghnad Desai’s Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism (Verso, London, 2002). 14.

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BACK TO THE CLASSICAL ECONOMISTS With scarce resources, there’s no particular reason why higher living standards should always be achievable, no matter how market-friendly an economy might be. How, then, have some societies managed to perform what would seem to be a remarkable trick? If resources are scarce, how have living standards consistently risen? How has the curse of Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), author of An Essay on the Principles of Population (first published in 1798), been sidestepped? Is Western progress really just the result of market forces? Malthus’s arguments were, as far as I can tell, based on his view that labourers had voracious sexual appetites. In his words, ‘in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population.

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Even though the fertility rate has dropped rapidly since the 1970s – partly a reflection of China’s one-child policy and the much wider use of contraception across the region as a whole – the decline has not been fast enough to prevent a population explosion. In the early 1950s, East Asia had a population of fewer than 700 million. Half a century later, the population had more than doubled. DEMOGRAPHIC DIVIDENDS AND DEFICITS These numbers, although impressive, say little about the economic consequences of demographic change. Ever since Thomas Malthus first wrote his Essay on the Principle of Population, there has been a heated debate over whether changes in population size are bad for welfare (the Malthusian subsistence argument), good for welfare (what might be termed the human ingenuity argument) or entirely neutral for welfare (the income per capita rather than total income argument).

An Edible History of Humanity
by Tom Standage
Published 30 Jun 2009

The problem was that the supply of land was finite, and it was needed for other things besides agriculture: to grow wood for construction and fuel, and to accommodate Europe’s growing cities. Again, the problem was particularly acute in England, where urbanization had been most rapid. People began to worry that the population would soon outstrip the food supply. The problem was elegantly summarized by the English economist Thomas Malthus, who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. It was an extraordinarily influential work, and its main argument runs as follows: The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

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Butchers, bakers, shoemakers, weavers, carpenters, and shipbuilders depended on animal or vegetable raw materials, all of which were the products, directly or indirectly, of photosynthesis—the capture of the sun’s energy by growing plants. Since all these things came from the land, and since the supply of land was limited, Thomas Malthus concluded that there was an ecological limit that growing populations and economies would eventually run into. He first made this prediction on the eve of the nineteenth century, and he refined his argument in the following years. Yet Britain did not hit the ecological wall that Malthus anticipated.

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Despite efforts to increase agricultural production, both countries relied on imported wheat. In a speech at the annual conference of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1898, William Crookes, an English chemist and the president of the association, highlighted the obvious solution to the problem. A century after Thomas Malthus had made the same point, he warned that “civilised nations stand in deadly peril of not having enough to eat.” With no more land available, and with concern growing over Britain’s dependence on wheat imports, there was no alternative but to find a way to increase yields. “Wheat preeminently demands nitrogen,” Crookes observed.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

Around 2002, SFI researcher Jim Crutchfield (along with UC Berkley’s Karl Young) wondered what sorts of models algorithms could infer from the simplest possible capital-C complex system in the world. To examine this they employed the logistics equation, a simplified version of the Malthusian Model, derived from the same Thomas Malthus that inspired Charles Darwin.5 In 1845 the French mathematician Pierre François Verhulst, after he read the famous essay where Thomas Malthus theorized that human population growth would inevitably lead to starvation and misery due to the overuse of limited resources, rendered the idea in mathematical form, calling it the Malthusian Model, which was used to calculate the number of animals that might be grazed on a piece of land without destroying it, and even to explore human demographics, in line with the theories of Malthus.

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And, the idea that mankind could work towards a perfect society on earth ran counter to traditional Christian thinking that held that man was innately sinful and the only way of overcoming the present misery was through religious salvation, and a paradise after death. Perhaps because of this, in 1798, curate and academic Thomas Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in response to Godwin’s theory that society and universal suffrage would lead towards a perfected world. In the essay, Malthus argued that humankind’s improvement was bounded by a harsh reality: populations could only increase until they exhausted their food supplies, which resulted in poverty, and constrained the vast majority of people in a sub-perfect equilibrium of tolerable starvation.

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This is exactly what Kalyan’s more literal fitness-sharing algorithm was doing, except in the immune model there was no fitness-sharing function acting numerically on a numerical fitness. Instead, what the simulation showed was that natural resource sharing in the immune system had the emergent effect of maintaining diversity.19 If we recall the theory of eighteenth-century curate Thomas Malthus, limited resources are supposed to assure a sub-optimal social equilibrium, making evolutionary utopianism impossible. Darwin and Wallace transformed that idea into the mechanism of natural selection, which was eventually re-branded ‘survival of the fittest’. In their view, limited resource availability drove evolution because the less ‘fit’ didn’t survive and reproduce, ensuring the population became more and more fit over time.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

The classical gold/silver standard restrains the state from depreciating the currency and provides a stable monetary environment in which the economy may flourish. As we shall see, the classical model of Adam Smith would repeatedly come under attack over the centuries by friends and foes alike. Adam Smith and the Age of Economists Adam Smith was not perfect by any means. He led disciples David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus down the wrong road with his crude labor theory of value, his critique of landlords, his strange distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" labor, and his failure to recognize the fundamental principle of subjective marginal utility in price theory. But these are parenthetical deviations that were unfortunately magnified by the classical economists and distort his overwhelming positive contribution to economic science.

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Smith's model of universal prosperity was encouraged initially by mist, "I cannot get over the difficulty of the wine which is kept in a cellar for 3 or 4 years, or that of the oak tree, which perhaps had not 2/- expended on it in the way of labour, and yet comes to be worth £100" (Vivo 1987, 193). Even Thomas Malthus disagreed with his friend, writing, "neither labour nor any other commodity can be an accurate measure of real value in exchange" (Ricardo 1951, 416). Economists over the years have had difficulty understanding Ricardo's "corn model" and his Principles textbook, especially the twisted assumptions he required to prove his theories.

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The price of gold is a valuable monitor of global economic instability, and it has been rising lately. Environmentalism is a major subject of debate. How can nations grow and increase their standards of living without destroying the air, polluting the water, devastating the forests, and causing global warming? The debate goes back to Thomas Malthus (chapter 2) and is related to historical and present-day concerns over unlimited growth and limited resources. In this ecological debate, economists, while not alarmists, have made numerous contributions to minimizing pollution and other environmental problems. To solve the "tragedy of the commons," for example, market economists have emphasized the need to establish defensive resource rights in water, fishing, and forestland, so that owners have the proper incentives to preserve these resources in a balanced way.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

That outpaces gains in most other countries and reflects a dramatic rise in the standard of living of most people, bringing better food, better hospitals, and better housing. Whether or not China’s growth threatens the planet—as well as its own sustainability—is a matter of conjecture. Ever since Thomas Malthus, a cleric and scholar who wrote his famous An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798, people have been predicting that the earth is reaching its natural limits. Malthus thought that population growth would always outpace improvements in agricultural production, ensuring that living standards would stall and eventually catastrophe would strike.

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In 1961 human demand accounted for 0.7 planet’s worth of biocapacity. That meant we were in the black. By the mid-1980s humanity had tipped into the red, and by 2008 the picture had changed dramatically. In that year, GFN said, we needed 1.5 planets to sustain us, something that is clearly unsustainable. It is enough to make Thomas Malthus stir from his grave to say, “I told you so.” * * * — Wealth is a measure not only of the present but also of the future. That is because today’s wealth—the balance sheet of all our assets, natural, physical and institutional—is tomorrow’s income. That contrasts with our standard economic gauge—GDP—which is essentially a backward-looking measure, a way of recording what has already been produced, say in the past year.

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That’s why so many talk about Japan, with its mildly shrinking population and positive per-capita growth rates, as being in a “demographic death spiral.”4 Economists are so wedded to the idea that the economy must always be expanding that they find it hard to break the logic of “just add people.” If Thomas Malthus thought more and more people would be the death of human civilization, modern economists think the reverse. Yet unless we imagine the world’s population increasing indefinitely, we really must begin to imagine a world where the economy eventually stops expanding—in rich, mature economies at least.5 That does not mean that income per capita necessarily needs to stop rising.

A Little History of Economics
by Niall Kishtainy
Published 15 Jan 2017

Later, he helped lend money to the British government to fight Napoleon. One of his deals was effectively a bet on the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. By lending to the government Ricardo was taking a huge risk: if the British were defeated, he’d lose a lot of money. His friend and fellow economist, Thomas Malthus, who we’ll meet properly soon, had a small stake in the loan. Malthus panicked, and wrote to Ricardo to ask him to get rid of his share. Ricardo held his nerve, though, and held onto his own stake. When news came of the British victory, he became one of the wealthiest men in Britain overnight.

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Scrooge scowls at the men and shoos them out of the room. Speaking about the poor, he says to the departing visitors: ‘If they would rather die they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’ Earlier, we met a financial genius and one of the great British economists, David Ricardo and his good friend, the clergyman Thomas Malthus. Malthus (1766–1834) wasn’t as good at earning money as Ricardo but turned out to be very good at coming up with economic theories that made people sit up and take notice. He was the first ever professor of economics, appointed in 1805 to the East India College, which trained officers of the East India Company, the famous British trading company.

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At the time, in the 1970s and 1980s, there were terrible famines in Africa and Asia. The most obvious cause seemed to be a lack of food: people starve when the rains fail and the crops die. Or perhaps there were simply too many mouths to feed as a result of rapid population growth, the conclusion of Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century. Sen saw defects in the common explanations. Droughts happen in America from time to time, but no one ever starves there. And while Malthus warned of the consequences of too many people, famines have happened in Ethiopia and Sudan, places where the populations live thinly scattered over vast areas of land.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future
by Laurence C. Smith
Published 22 Sep 2010

One billion is more than triple the 2010 population of the United States, the third most populous country on Earth. Imagine a world in which we added one-plus USA, or two Pakistans, or three Mexicos, every four years. . . . Actually, this requires no imagination at all. It is reality. We will add our seventh billion some time in 2011. This extraordinary acceleration, foreseen over two centuries ago by Thomas Malthus,13 burst into popular culture again in 1968 when Paul Ehrlich, then a young biology professor at Stanford, jolted the world with The Population Bomb, a terrifying book forecasting global famines, “smog deaths,” and massive human die-offs if we didn’t somehow control our numbers.14 He became a frequent guest on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and his ideas almost certainly helped nudge China toward its “One-Child” population control policy implemented in 1979.

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Put another way, the urbanization of society—if also associated with modernization and women’s rights—helps slow the rate of growth. There are, of course, exceptions to this tendency, but as these phenomena continue to expand throughout the developing world, the global population explosion so feared by Thomas Malthus and Paul Ehrlich is expected to decelerate. Already, in late-stage, low-immigration developed countries like Japan and Italy, and in regions like Eastern Europe, populations have not only stabilized but are falling. Assuming that fertility rates continue to drop as they are now, we are heading toward a total world population of around 9.2 billion in 2050, at which point we will still be growing but about half as fast as we are today.78 One of the most profound long-term effects of women having fewer babies is to skew societal age structures toward the elderly (the pulse of babies from population momentum is only temporary).

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Are we about to run out of the raw materials our cities and mechanized farmlands so desperately need? Are We Running Out of Resources? The debate over natural resources, and whether we are running out of them, is a contentious and surprisingly ancient debate. Even Aristotle wrote about it. In 1798 Thomas Malthus’ first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population argued that the exponential growth of human population, set against the arithmetic growth in the area of arable land, must ultimately lead us to outstrip our food supply, thus inevitably dragging us toward a brutal world of famines and violence.95 Among Malthus’ more odious ideas was that social programs are pointless because they enable poor people to have more babies, thus making the problem worse.

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World
by Paul Morland
Published 10 Jan 2019

What long-term trends there had been, such as population growth in Europe and in the world more generally, had been gentle and punctuated with unhappy setbacks. By around 1800 the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ (essentially Britons and Americans) were escaping the constraints on population growth identified and defined by Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman, writer and thinker whose life spanned the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and of whom much will be said later. Ironically, however, they were escaping these constraints precisely as they were being identified. This era marks a meaningful break in demographic history, a demographic corollary of the industrial revolution, a landmark pointing both geographically and historically to global and permanent change.

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When a population–or anything else–is growing at 1.33% per annum, it doubles in around fifty years, then doubles again in the next fifty years, and that is what the population of England did during the course of the nineteenth century. Just as this revolution was getting under way, the ‘old regime’ from which it was breaking was at last being identified, by the Reverend Thomas Malthus. Malthus was a country parson from Surrey, a prosperous county in southern England, who identified what he believed was an iron law of history. In his famous Essay on the Principle of Population, written, published and progressively revised between 1798 and 1830, he argued that a growing population would always outstrip the ability of the land to support it, which would lead inexorably to misery and death.

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New social and economic trends came to the fore, and now the trendsetter was the most populous country of the West, the United States. 6 The West since 1945 From Baby Boom to Mass Immigration Living in Surrey in the early nineteenth century, and seemingly oblivious to the revolutionary changes occurring in the industrial heartland a few hundred miles to the north, the Reverend Thomas Malthus was describing a vanishing world. It was a world in which the capacity of land to support people rose only gradually, while growth in human numbers might grow exponentially and would be kept in check, one way or another, by the limitations of slowly growing food production. Yet while Malthus was expounding his theory in various versions of An Essay on the Principle of Population, his agrarian assumptions were being undermined as a whole new society was being born around Manchester and other new industrial centres in England’s north and Midlands.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

A 1915 article published in Literary Digest confidently predicted that with electrification, it “will become next to impossible to contract disease germs or get hurt in the city, and country folk will go to town to rest and get well.”9 Edison himself was convinced that electricity would help us overcome the greatest hurdle to further progress: our need to sleep. Technology was the new religion of the people. There was the sense that there was no problem that technology could not solve. In hindsight, and in the light of the gains brought by technology, it is astounding to think that economists of the early nineteenth century like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo did not believe that technology could improve the human lot. The technological virtuosity of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took some time to trickle down to the economics profession. But in the 1950s, Robert Solow, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1987, found that virtually all economic advance over the twentieth century had been thanks to technology.

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Broadly speaking, there are two strands of explanations. While some scholars have emphasized constraints on the supply of technology, others have pointed at limited demand. Joseph Schumpeter believed that for a given technology to be adopted, some kind of need must exist.2 This was also the view of Thomas Malthus, who reckoned that “necessity has been with great truth called the mother of invention. Some of the noblest exertions of the human mind have been set in motion by the necessity of satisfying the wants of the body.”3 A number of examples of technological developments since the Industrial Revolution that conform to this view spring to mind, including the Manhattan Project, set up by the U.S. government to develop an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany could do so; the steam engine developed by Thomas Savery to pump water out of British coal mines; and the interchangeable parts pioneered by Eli Whitney to “substitute correct and effective operations of machinery for the skill of the artist which is acquired only by long practice and experience; a species of skill which is not possessed in this country to any considerable extent.”4 To return to the preindustrial world, most demand-driven explanations of the lack of preindustrial growth tend to emphasize the fact that labor-saving technologies, which allow us to produce more with less, make economic sense only if capital is relatively cheap compared to labor.

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As Americans in the middle and at the lower end of the income distribution became the prime beneficiaries of progress, inequality went into reverse. Along with every other industrialized nation, America saw the share of income accruing to people at the top, fall. It may be telling that unlike economists of the Industrial Revolution (like Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx) who were all fond of apocalyptic economic predictions, economists living in the aftermath of the Second Industrial Revolution were largely optimistic—perhaps overly so. In any event, the idea that industrialists grew rich on the misery of workers had evidently fallen out of fashion.

The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World
by Tim Harford
Published 1 Jan 2008

Neanderthals, apparently, did not: Men, women, and children all behaved like human males, hunting reindeer and mastodons. So much for the past. Now, what about the future? ECONOMISTS ARE TYPICALLY wrong about the future, but few have ever been as spectacularly, famously, and lucklessly wrong as Thomas Malthus. Malthus, a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, and a parson at Oke-wood church, near Albury, produced his most famous work in 1798: An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus offered two “postulata”: “First, That food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, That the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.”

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Marshall’s idea was intuitive: Marshall’s idea was also mathematically convenient. David Warsh, Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (New York: Norton, 2006), chapter 7, explains the mathematical appeal of Marshall’s “externalities.” Economists were starting to realize that contrary to the dismal predictions of Thomas Malthus, the world was getting richer rather than running out of everything. The explanation was “increasing returns.” The world wasn’t running out of food or energy or space. Instead, more people, more investment, and larger firms made things cheaper. Marshall realized that if individual firms enjoyed increasing returns to scale, the mathematics of modeling them would be formidably complicated, and logically the world would be dominated by monopolists.

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Also Steven L. Kuhn and Mary C. Stiner, “What’s a Mother to Do? The Division of Labor Among Neanderthals and Modern Humans in Eurasia,” Current Anthropology 47, no. 6(December 2006): 953–80, www.journals.uchicago.edu/CA/journal/issues/v47n6/066001/066001.web.pdf. “First, That food is necessary”: Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798. “from one million B.C. to 1990”: Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change.” The end of the last ice age: ibid. Also see Clark, Farewell to Alms, chapter 7. Most commodity prices: Julian Simon, The State of Humanity (Boston: Blackwell, 1995).

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History
by Derek S. Hoff
Published 30 May 2012

The first, the “limits to growth” perspective, insists that people eventually and disastrously outstrip the supply of natural resources. When twenty-first-century Americans hear the words “population debate,” most think of—but do not agree with—the limits-to-growth principles set forth by British pastor Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). In his Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798 but updated in a more widely read 1803 edition, Malthus concluded that overpopulation and misery were inevitable. “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio,” he observed. “Subsistence [the food supply] increases only in an arithmetical ratio.

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The population policies of the new United States were indirect but powerful: the federal government subsidized the numerical and geographical expansion of the citizenry by acquiring new territories and removing Indians from them, providing cheap land to settlers and introduction 11 railroads, and welcoming the nearly unlimited immigration of people not of “African descent.” But the founders’ “republican” theory of democracy, sprung from the Enlightenment, valued an agrarian society with room to expand and fostered population anxieties among the elite well before Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. In the Early Republic, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party worried that population growth threatened the agrarian republic, whereas the Federalist Party embraced rising numbers, believing they accelerated commerce and spurred beneficial manufacturing.

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Its followers feared that a rising population was fraught with peril and heralded the kind of fully settled, commercial- and manufacturing-based, deeply inegalitarian, and morally decrepit European society from which the colonists had fled.8 Ideas about population were not a perfect proxy for party affiliation, but whereas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans tended to imbibe republicanism’s aversion to population growth, John Adams’s Federalists and later the Whig Party tended to embrace liberalism’s celebration of it—and hoped to keep it confined to America’s great cities rather than seeing it disperse across the West. Thus Americans had engaged in substantial population debates long before the Rev. Thomas Malthus argued in An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society (1798) that population growth doomed human societies by overwhelming natural resources. (Although Malthus published the first edition anonymously, and it was little read, he made no attempt to hide his authorship.

The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
by William R. Easterly
Published 1 Aug 2002

Conversely, control of population through family planning-using condoms during sex tobe explicit-will promote the prosperityof poor nations. Population is an old concern in economics. Thomas Malthus in the early nineteenth century famously saw exponential population growth outracing food production, which he said would lead to a major population correction in the form of widespread famines. The latter-day incarnation of Thomas Malthus is Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich in his famous cri de coeur of 1968, The PopuZation Bomb, foresaw that within a decadeafter his writing, famines would sweep ”repeatedly across Asia, Africa, and South America,” killing perhaps as many asone-fifth of the world’s population.’

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He noted that this principle suggests a positive relationship between initial populationandsubsequentpopulation growth.28 A higher initial populationmeansmore idea creation, more people to use the idea, and more people to share the fixed cost of implementing the idea. The benefits to society then should make possible the support of more new babies, and so population growth Cash for Condoms? 95 should increase. This prediction is in stark contrast to the Thomas Malthus-Paul Ehrlich-Lester Brown principlethathigher initial population will lead to a population crash as famine sets in.So who is right: Boserup or Malthus? Kremer pointed out that the evidence of the very long run is in favor of Boserup. World population has been growing steadilyover time, from 125,000 in 1 million B.c., to 4 million in 10,000 B.c.,to 170 million at the time of the Christ, to about 1 billion at the time of Mozart, to 2billion at the timeof the Great Depression, to 4 billion at the time of Watergate, to 6 billion today.29 And population growth has been accelerating, not falling.

The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations
by Jacob Soll
Published 28 Apr 2014

From the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, those societies that managed to harness accounting and long-term traditions of financial accountability and trust did so by full cultural engagement: Republican Italian city-states like Florence and Genoa, Golden Age Holland, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and America all integrated accounting into their educational curriculum, religious and moral thought, art, philosophy, and political theory. Accounting became the subject of theological and political works, great paintings, social and scientific theories, and novels, from Dante and the Dutch Masters to Auguste Comte, Thomas Malthus, Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, and Max Weber. In a virtuous circle, the elevation of practical, business-minded mathematics into the spheres of high and humane thinking allowed these societies not only to maximize their use of accounting but also to build complex cultures of accountability and awareness of the difficulties posed by such a culture.

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From maps, biology, human behavior, and railroads to the probabilities of life and death and the management of time itself, all now came under the purview of the men of numbers. The spread of science into all aspects of life brought great advantages in industry, technology, and medicine, but it was also used for more morally ambiguous purposes.7 Whereas Jeremy Bentham had used a double-entry model to try to calculate happiness, Thomas Malthus used the analogy of a numerical balance in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). In a pessimistic parallel to Bentham, Malthus also believed in two sides balancing each other out. In a biological reckoning, human subsistence requirements and the fatalities of vice would balance human population in a natural system of checks and balances, by which “the superior power of population is repressed, and the actual population kept equal to the means of subsistence, by misery and vice.”

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Henry David Thoreau, Walden or Life in the Woods (Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino, 2009), 26. 5. Ibid., 17, 28. 6. Amanda Vickerey, “His and Hers: Gender, Consumption and Household Accounting in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 1, Supplement 1 (2006): 12–38. 7. Porter, Trust in Numbers, 17–30. 8. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 61. 9. Janet Browne, “The Natural Economy of Households: Charles Darwin’s Account Books,” in Aurora Torealis: Studies in the History of Science and Ideas in the Honor Tore Frängsmyr, ed. Marco Beretta, Karl Grandin, and Svante Lindqvist (Sagamore Beach, MA: Watson, 2008), 104. 10.

Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty
by Peter Singer
Published 3 Mar 2009

The Planet Can’t Hold Them When speaking to audiences about global poverty, I’m often challenged along the following lines: “Saving the lives of poor people now will only mean that more will die when the population eventually crashes because our planet has long passed its carrying capacity.” The challenge is evidence of the continuing relevance of the thought of the eighteenth-century English economist and clergyman Thomas Malthus, who famously claimed that population would always outstrip food supplies. If epidemics and plagues did not keep human population in check, he wrote, then “gigantic inevitable famine” would do so.24 Two centuries later, in 1968, entomologist Paul Ehrlich warned in his bestseller The Population Bomb that we had lost the battle to feed humanity.

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Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 238-41; www.millenniumvillages.org. 23. “Millennium Villages: A New Approach to Fighting Poverty: FAQ,” www.unmillenniumproject.org/mv/mv_faq.htm; “The Magnificent Seven,” The Economist, April 26, 2006, p. 63. 24. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1st edition, 1798. 25. Paul Ehrlich, “Paying the Piper,” New Scientist 36:652-55, reprinted in Garrett Hardin, ed., Population, Evolution, and Birth Control, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1969), p. 127. See also Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine, 1968), p. 36. 26.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

Take a look at a map of the city nearest you in 1970 and contrast it with today and then imagine what it will look like when quadrupled in size and density over the next twenty years. But it would be a serious error to assume that human social evolution is governed by some mathematical formula. This was the big mistake made by Thomas Malthus when he first advanced his principle of population in 1798 (roughly the same time when Richard Price and others were celebrating – if that is the right word – the power of exponential growth in human affairs). Malthus’s arguments are directly relevant to the issue at hand, while they also provide a cautionary tale.

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First, capital has a long history of successfully resolving its ecological difficulties, no matter whether these refer to its use of ‘natural’ resources, the ability to absorb pollutants or to cope with the degradation of habitats, the loss of biodiversity, the declining qualities of air, land and water, and the like. Past predictions of an apocalyptic end to civilisation and capitalism as a result of natural scarcities and disasters look foolish in retrospect. Throughout capital’s history far too many doomsayers have cried ‘wolf’ too fast and too often. In 1798 Thomas Malthus, as we have seen, erroneously predicted social catastrophe (spreading famine, disease, war) as exponential population growth outran the capacity to increase food supplies. In the 1970s Paul Ehrlich, a leading environmentalist, argued that mass starvation was imminent by the end of the decade, but it did not occur.

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Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1982; Contours of the World Economy, 1–2030 AD, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007. 6. Bradford DeLong, ‘Estimating World GDP, One Million B.C.–Present’. Estimates given in Wikipedia entry on Gross World Product. 7. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. 8. McKinsey Global Institute, ‘The World at Work: Jobs, Pay and Skills for 3.5 Billion People’, Report of the McKinsey Global Institute, 2012. 9. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Kalamazoo, Black & Red, 2000. 10.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

Due to the war with France, England’s gold supply was under pressure so the Bank of England had stopped paying its notes in gold. Freed from this constraint, Ricardo argued that there was too much money printed by the central bank, which contributed to the high inflation of the time. This critique in his very first publication brought him to the attention of some of the leading thinkers of the time: Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, father of the prominent philosopher John Stuart Mill. An increase in tariffs on imported wheat in 1815 under the Corn Laws prompted his next major work, Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock. The argument against the protectionist Corn Laws formed the foundation for his future and seminal work that set out the basis for trade models in economics.

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Marxism It was after the 1857 global crisis that Marx began writing his treatise on political economy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was published two years later. He analysed the ideas of the leading political economists of the day, particularly Adam Smith and his chief disciple, David Ricardo, as well as Thomas Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say and James and John Stuart Mill, among others. Somewhat surprisingly, Marx admired Ricardo, calling him ‘the greatest economist of the nineteenth century’.14 Even though Ricardo was a capitalist, Marx shared his belief in a conflictual course of capitalism. Recall from the previous chapter that Ricardo saw an inevitable conflict between the classes due to international trade.

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Even though he lived in the world’s largest city after 1849, Marx became eventually convinced of the significance of agriculture in a capitalist economy and of the importance of social conflict in the countryside for revolution. In part, he gained these views from the French Physiocrats, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, all of whom considered the agricultural sector to be an essential part of the development process, and thus a source of capitalist conflict in Marx’s view. In Capital, Marx wrote of the labourers, capitalists, and landowners. Yet in the Communist Manifesto, written nineteen years before, he focused on two classes in a capitalist society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

Due to the war with France, England’s gold supply was under pressure so the Bank of England had stopped paying its notes in gold. Freed from this constraint, Ricardo argued that there was too much money printed by the central bank, which contributed to the high inflation of the time. This critique in his very first publication brought him to the attention of some of the leading thinkers of the time: Thomas Malthus, Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, father of the prominent philosopher John Stuart Mill. An increase in tariffs on imported wheat in 1815 under the Corn Laws prompted his next major work, Essay on the Influence of a Low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock. The argument against the protectionist Corn Laws formed the foundation for his future and seminal work that set out the basis for trade models in economics.

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Marxism It was after the 1857 global crisis that Marx began writing his treatise on political economy, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which was published two years later. He analysed the ideas of the leading political economists of the day, particularly Adam Smith and his chief disciple, David Ricardo, as well as Thomas Malthus, Jean-Baptiste Say and James and John Stuart Mill, among others. Somewhat surprisingly, Marx admired Ricardo, calling him ‘the greatest economist of the nineteenth century’.14 Even though Ricardo was a capitalist, Marx shared his belief in a conflictual course of capitalism. Recall from the previous chapter that Ricardo saw an inevitable conflict between the classes due to international trade.

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Even though he lived in the world’s largest city after 1849, Marx became eventually convinced of the significance of agriculture in a capitalist economy and of the importance of social conflict in the countryside for revolution. In part, he gained these views from the French Physiocrats, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, all of whom considered the agricultural sector to be an essential part of the development process, and thus a source of capitalist conflict in Marx’s view. In Capital, Marx wrote of the labourers, capitalists, and landowners. Yet in the Communist Manifesto, written nineteen years before, he focused on two classes in a capitalist society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler
Published 1 Sep 2007

Many reviewers have emphasized the infectious zaniness of the play, seemingly missing its explicit message — idealism and good intentions are insufficient responses to problems of population pressure and resource depletion. Maybe that’s just as well: Urinetown succeeds so well as comedy and theater that even people utterly immune to its insights still have a good time; thus more people are drawn to see it, including those who do “get it.” Thomas Malthus 1766-1834. What’s the significance of the play’s last line, “Hail Malthus!”? Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) was a British political economist who theorized that unchecked population growth must eventually outstrip increases in food production. He is most famous for the Essay on Population (1798), in which he explained in simple terms the connection between population pressure and human misery.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

In the same period, however, some were raising doubts about the wisdom of aiding the poor. In his 1786 Dissertation on the Poor Law, the vicar Joseph Townsend had already, almost a decade before Speenhamland, warned that “it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger.” Another clergyman, Thomas Malthus, elaborated on Townsend’s ideas. In the summer of 1798, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, he described “the great difficulty” on the road to progress, “that to me appears insurmountable.” His premise was twofold: (1) Humans need food to survive, and (2) The passion between the sexes is ineradicable.

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See: Gabriel Thompson, “Could You Survive on $2 a Day?” Mother Jones (December 13, 2012). http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/extreme-poverty-unemployment-recession-economy-fresno 8. The Reading Mercury (May 11, 1795). http://www1.umassd.edu/ir/resources/poorlaw/p1.doc 9. This concerns the plague. See: Thomas Malthus, “An Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798). http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf 10. For simplicity’s sake I refer to David Ricardo as an “economist,” but in his own day he was considered a “political economist.” As the chapter on GDP explains, modern economists are a 20th century invention. 11.

The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters
by Sean B. Carroll
Published 16 Feb 2016

Based on a maximum doubling time of twenty minutes, one can calculate how long it would take for one bacterium to give rise to enough bacteria to equal the weight of the Earth. The answer: just two days. But the world is not made of solid elephants or bacteria. Why? Because there are limits to the growth and numbers of all creatures. Darwin recognized that. And he understood it because Reverend Thomas Malthus stated it long before in his landmark Essay on the Principle of Populations (1798): Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. . . . The germs of existence contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.

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[Figure 7.6] What the curves revealed was that the rate of increase of each species was higher when their numbers were fewer, decreased as the populations grew, and then turned negative (the populations decreased). In other words, the rate of change in the population depended on its density. This phenomenon is known as density-dependent regulation. It has been appreciated since the writings of social economist Thomas Malthus that populations will increase indefinitely unless something prevents them from doing so. Imagine, however, a group of large animals in a fixed space, like goats in a pasture. If the population starts out small in number, it can expand as rapidly as the animals can reproduce. But as the number of animals increases, space or food begins to run low.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor
Published 22 Mar 2022

But since the dawn of the nineteenth century, a split second compared to the span of human existence, life expectancy has more than doubled, and per capita incomes have soared twenty-fold in the most developed regions of the world, and fourteen-fold on Planet Earth as a whole (Fig. 1).[2] This continuing improvement has been so radical, in fact, that we often lose sight of just how exceptional this period is in relation to the rest of our history. What explains this Mystery of Growth – the scarcely conceivable transformation in the quality of life of the last few centuries, in terms of health, wealth and education, which dwarf any other changes in these dimensions since the emergence of Homo sapiens? In 1798, the English scholar Thomas Malthus offered a plausible theory for the mechanism that had caused living standards to remain stagnant, effectively trapping societies in poverty, since time immemorial. He argued that whenever societies managed to bring about a food surplus through technological innovation, the resulting boost in living standards could only ever be temporary as it would lead inevitably to a corresponding rise in birth rates and a reduction in mortality rates.

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Yet as noted at the outset, despite these enormous advances in knowledge and technology, quite mysteriously human living standards, measured in terms of lifespan, quality of life and our degree of material comfort and prosperity, remained largely stagnant. To resolve this mystery, we have to delve deeper into the origins of this stagnation: the poverty trap. 2 Lost in Stagnation The eighteenth-century cleric Thomas Malthus was raised in a wealthy family among England’s social elite. An influential scholar, he deplored the utopianism of contemporary philosophers such as William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet – luminaries of the Age of Enlightenment – who envisioned humanity’s path as one of inevitable progress towards an ideal society.

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work
by Richard Baldwin
Published 10 Jan 2019

The 1834 act made it illegal to give support to people outside of workhouses, and then required the conditions in the workhouses to be horrible as a matter of moral principle. And it worked. Workhouses were widely feared—a terrible fate to be chosen only by the most desperate. Victorian social thinkers like Reverend Thomas Malthus viewed poverty as a natural condition that particular workers fell into due to their personal moral failings. To avoid encouraging immorality and sloth, workhouse conditions were designed to be worse than those of the poorest free laborer outside of the workhouse. As Catherine Spence’s example illustrates, such conditions shifted between fair-to-middling in good years to dire deprivation, or simple starvation, in downturn years.

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The Great Depression was launched by a historic stock market crash in 1929 that was made much worse by poor policy. Allowing banks to fail proved deadly, but the real fault went much higher. The sitting president, Herbert Hoover, stuck to his philosophic belief in minimal government. Using workhouse logic that would have made Thomas Malthus proud, he argued that helping the destitute would tempt them into laziness and dependency. As the 1929 recession became the Great Depression, a backlash became inevitable. In the United States, this took the form of an electoral landslide for a new type of politician—one who promised to end the view of poverty as a moral failing on the part of the poor and who viewed it as the government’s duty to be caring and interventionist.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

But output can also be improved by new ways of organising production, such as the moving assembly line that allowed Henry Ford to produce cars more cheaply. Financial innovation, such as letters of credit, or legal reforms like the creation of the limited liability company, made it easier for traders to take risks and expand their operations. Perhaps the most important area of innovation has been agriculture. Thomas Malthus, an 18th-century vicar, is famed for his gloomy forecasts about the dangers of population growth. He spotted the underlying problem of civilisation until that time: the limits on the ability to produce more food. New gadgets such as the seed drill may have helped escape this Malthusian trap, as it became known, but just as important were new crops, and new systems of field rotation that boosted output.

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And without those same productivity improvements, the planet would never be able to support the 7.7bn humans who are alive today. In the first seven decades of the 20th century, an average of 49 people per 100,000 died from famines somewhere in the world; in the subsequent four decades (up until 2010), the average was just 4.5.3 Thomas Malthus, the cleric and scholar whose 1798 essay predicted that food production would never keep pace with population growth, has been proved wrong time and again. As recently as 1950, farming still employed two-thirds of the global workforce.4 We can classify the countries of the world by the proportion of the workforce involved in agriculture.

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Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 2. N.F.R. Crafts and C.K. Harley, “Output growth and the British Industrial Revolution: a restatement of the Crafts-Harley view”, The Economic History Review, vol. 45, no. 4, November 1992 3. Maddison, Growth and Interaction in the World Economy, op. cit. 4. Ibid. 5. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population 6. Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, op. cit. 7. Jűrgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the 19th Century 8. Ibid. 9. Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, The Rise of the Western World: A New Economic History 10.

Energy: A Human History
by Richard Rhodes
Published 28 May 2018

“The man in the street in the 1790s,” Wrigley argues, “would be in no doubt about the occurrence of a revolution across the Channel in France, but he would have been astonished to learn that he was living in the middle of what future generations would also term a revolution.” Nor was the man in the street the only person in denial, Wrigley adds. “The three greatest of the framers of classical economics, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo, not only were equally unaware of it, but were unanimous in dismissing the possibility of what later generations came to term an industrial revolution.”I14 Wagonways and railways extending to and from canals were numerous by 1800. A few railways hauling coal, like the Merthyr Tramroad, bypassed canals where traffic was heavy.

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Tracing that link in detail is outside the scope of this book, but several scholars have done so, including Robert Zubrin in his 2013 study Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism, and Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer in a lengthy 2009 paper, “The Postwar Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb.”10 Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century English proto-economist, was himself no piker at human pruning, notoriously proposing: Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.

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“The postwar intellectual roots of the population bomb”: Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer, “The Postwar Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb: Fairfield Osborn’s ‘Our Plundered Planet’ and William Vogt’s ‘Road to Survival’ in Retrospect,” Electronic Journal of Sustainable Development 1, no. 3 (2009): 37–61. 11. Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population, 6th ed., bk. 4, ch. 5 (London: John Murray, 1826), .300–1, quoted in Robert Zubrin, Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism (New York: Encounter Books, 2013), 6. 12. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1969), 12. 13.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

GETTING TO DENMARK PART FIVE - Toward a Theory of Political Development 29 - POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT AND POLITICAL DECAY THE BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF POLITICS IDEAS AS CAUSE THE GENERAL MECHANISM OF POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT SPANDRELS EVERYWHERE INSTITUTIONS POLITICAL DECAY VIOLENCE AND THE DYSFUNCTIONAL EQUILIBRIUM 30 - POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT, THEN AND NOW THOMAS MALTHUS POLITICS IN A MALTHUSIAN WORLD DEVELOPMENT UNDER CONTEMPORARY CONDITIONS THE MODERN DEVELOPMENT PARADIGM WHAT HAS CHANGED ACCOUNTABILITY TODAY WHAT COMES NEXT ALSO BY FRANCIS FUKUYAMA NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Copyright Page PREFACE This book has two origins.

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This is why the anachronistic application of contemporary property rights theory to historical situations leads to fundamental misunderstandings. Many economists believe that strong property rights promote growth because they protect private returns to investment, thereby stimulating investment and growth. But economic life in Han Dynasty China resembled the world described by Thomas Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population much more than the world that has existed since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution of the last two hundred years.6 Today, we expect increases in labor productivity (output per person) as the result of technological innovation and change. But before 1800, productivity gains were much more episodic.

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We need, then, to disaggregate the political, economic, and social dimensions of development, and understand how they relate to one another as separate phenomena that periodically interact. We need to do this, not least because the nature of these relationships is very different now than it was under the historical conditions of a Malthusian world. THOMAS MALTHUS The world changed very dramatically after approximately the year 1800, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Before then, economic growth in the form of continuously increasing productivity based on technological change could not be taken for granted. Indeed, it barely existed at all.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon!
by Joseph N. Pelton
Published 5 Nov 2016

No one should be naïve enough, though, to overlook the fact that our future in space involves a three way tug-of-war between: (1) the new businesses hoping to realize the riches of outer space via space commerce; (2) the push for new international space agreements—i.e., new “rules of the outer skies” and cooperative space standards and practices—that can allow a fair and equitable set of practices for the “cosmic commons” and (3) the strategic and even military space systems that will “police” the new space economy as it grows and matures further and further away from Planet Earth . Astral Abundance Unless we turn to the commercial opportunities of New Space and breakthrough new technologies here on Earth, we could indeed be in deep trouble. This will be ever clearer as populations continue to rise and resources shrink (Fig. 1.3). Dr. Thomas Malthus, the economic prophet of the eighteenth century who predicted we would eventually run out of food and vital resources, will be proven right even though he was perhaps three centuries premature. Some very capable people have gathered data from all over the world to put together the following chart on so-called “non-renewable resources .”

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There are larger versions that are 2–6 units that are used for many new applications for commercial applications. Earth’s finite resourcesThere have been various warnings about the world’s mounting human population and the limits of natural resources, potable water, and food that the planet can sustain. Thomas Malthus was the first to publicly warn of such a concern, but in more recent times there has been the Club of Rome “Limits to Growth” study, the book Population Bomb and many other books and studies. Global Navigation Satellite Services or Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)Satellites used to provide navigation and targeting capabilities as well as precision timing.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

Data on fertility, poverty, and religious fervor in the United States is drawn from Census Bureau, Fertility of American Women 2006 (www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/p20-558.pdf, accessed 08/19/2010); Census Bureau, State Median Family Income 2007 (www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/statemedfaminc.html. , accessed 08/19/2010); and Frank Newport, “Religious Identity: States Differ Widely,” Gallup Report, August 7, 2009 (www.gallup.com/poll/122075/religious-identity-states-differ-widely.aspx, accessed 07/19/2010). 201-205 The Price of the Future: The description of the Reverend Thomas Malthus is drawn from Robert Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, revised 7th edition (New York: Touchstone, 1999), pp. 75-104. Malthus’s quote is in Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: or, A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 42-43. Carlyle’s quote is in Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1847), p. 383.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World
by James D. Miller
Published 14 Jun 2012

But why should you read this particular book, given that its author is an economist and not a scientist or an engineer? One reason is that I will use economic analysis to predict how probable changes in technology will affect society. For example, the theories of nineteenth-century economists David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus provide insights into whether robots might take all of our jobs (Ricardo) and why the creation of easy-to-copy emulations of human brains might throw mankind back into a horrible pre-Industrial Revolution trap (Malthus). Economics also sheds light on many less-significant economic effects of an advanced AI, such as the labor-market consequences if sexbots cause many men to forgo competing for flesh-and-blood women.

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Robin thinks that in the long run, emulations will drive wages down to almost zero, pushing most of the people who are unfortunate enough to rely on their wages into starvation—because emulations will kick us back into a “Malthusian trap.” MALTHUSIAN TRAP Arguably, humanity’s greatest accomplishment was escaping the Malthusian trap. Thomas Malthus, a nineteenth-century economist, believed that starvation would ultimately strike every country in the entire world. Malthus wrote that if a population is not facing starvation, people in that population will have many children who grow up, get married, and have even more children. A country with an abundance of food, Malthus wrote, is one with an increasing population.

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety
by Gideon Rachman
Published 1 Feb 2011

It was that many believed technology would solve the problem. The Economist epitomized this mood in an article on environmental scares published in December 1997. “Forecasters of scarcity and doom,” the magazine announced, are “invariably wrong.” It traced the history of environmental scares all the way from Thomas Malthus’s predictions of impending famine in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries up to contemporary predictions that the world was running out of oil or food. As the article illustrated, forecasters of scarcity and doom had consistently failed to anticipate how new technologies would solve the problems that worried them.

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In 2007, the year before the financial crisis hit, the world price of basic foodstuffs rose by 50 percent.8 Several countries were shaken by riots over rising food prices, including Mexico, Indonesia, and China. Indeed Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, claimed in 2009 that there had been food riots in more than sixty countries over the previous two years, adding, “Massive hunger poses a threat to the stability of governments, societies and borders.”9 Ever since Thomas Malthus first predicted that a rising population would provoke famine, gloomy predictions about food shortages have always eventually been confounded by technological advances, which have ensured that supply has kept pace with demand. Over the long term, that may well prove to be the case again. But over the next decade, a resumption of global economic growth, combined with uncertain weather linked to climate change, is likely to provoke further destabilizing spikes in food prices.

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 30 Jun 2004

Nonetheless, the U.N.’s median prediction puts the likely world population at nearly 8 billion by 2025 and just under 9 billion by 2050.111 Surprisingly, the experts think that, for the foreseeable future, there will be enough food to go around. In 1798, when the world had barely 1 billion people, Thomas Malthus foresaw terrible disasters flowing from the imbalance in “the proportion between the natural increase of population and food.”112 But in a global perspective of two centuries, Malthus has been proved wrong. Thanks largely to the so-called Green revolution, food production per head has increased in every region of the world except Africa since the late 1970s, despite the spectacular growth in the number of mouths to feed.

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See http://www.unfpa.org/6billion/ccmc/thedayofsixbillion.htm and UNPD, World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision, on http://www.un.org/esa/population/unpop.ht. 109. See http://www.unfpa.org/6billion/. Every two-fifths of a second is my timing of that counter. 110. World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision, p. 1. 111. Ibid., p. vii. 112. Thomas Malthus, Essay on Population, quoted in Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 205. I follow Sen’s argument. 113. Ibid., Table 9.1 on p. 206. 114. Human Development Report 2003, p. 227. 115. Ibid., p. 125. “Water stress” is defined as consuming more than 20 percent of your renewable water supply every year. 116.

Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming
by Mckenzie Funk
Published 22 Jan 2014

The Murray-Darling basin, along with most of its rice and wheat exports, was decimated by drought. In China’s grain-growing north, fifty million acres and six million people suffered the worst water shortages in five years. At Costco and Sam’s Club, shoppers were limited to a few bags of rice each. “The world needs food,” Heilberg told me. “Thomas Malthus talked about the problem of finite land but infinite growth, and he’s been wrong to date—we can use technology to push out more food. But what happens when technology isn’t coming fast enough? I think people will panic, especially those who have no land to grow on.” The panic was already beginning.

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Johnson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (New York: Random House, 1957) were my guides to Phil Heilberg’s patch of Africa. For an overview of global food crises, I turned to The Coming Famine by Julian Cribb (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010) and An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus (London: J. Johnson, 1798). To understand the history of shelterbelts like the Great Green Wall, I read Woman Against the Desert by Wendy Campbell-Purdie (London: Victor Gollancz, 1967). The amphibious future envisioned by Koen Olthuis is detailed in his book Float! (Amsterdam: Frame, 2010), written with David Keuning.

The Lessons of History
by Will Durant and Ariel Durant
Published 1 Jan 1968

When Rome fell the Franks rushed in from Germany and made Gaul France; if England and America should fall, France, whose population remained almost stationary through the nineteenth century, might again be overrun. If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war. In a famous Essay on Population (1798) Thomas Malthus explained that without these periodic checks the birth rate would so far exceed the death rate that the multiplication of mouths would nullify any increase in the production of food. Though he was a clergyman and a man of good will, Malthus pointed out that the issuance of relief funds or supplies to the poor encouraged them to marry early and breed improvidently, making the problem worse.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty
by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Published 25 Apr 2011

For example, a country like Ethiopia, where the total fertility rate is 6.12 children per woman, is fifty-one times poorer than the United States, where the total fertility rate is 2.05. This strong relationship has convinced many, including academics and policy makers, of the validity of an old argument first popularized by the Reverend Thomas Malthus, a professor of history and political economy at the East India Company College, near London, at the turn of the eighteenth century. Malthus believed that the resources countries have are more or less fixed (his favorite example was land), and he therefore thought that population growth was bound to make them poorer.5 By this logic, the Black Death, believed to have killed half of Britain’s population between 1348 and 1377, should get credit for the high-wage years that followed.

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Gwatkin,“Political Will and Family Planning:The Implications of India’s Emergency Experience,” Population and Development Review 5 (1): 29–59 (1979), which is the source of this account of the forced sterilization episode during the Emergency. 2 John Bongaarts, “Population Policy Options in the Developing World,” Science 263 (5148) (1994): 771—776. 3 Jeffrey Sachs, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (New York: Allen Lane/Penguin, 2008). 4 World Health Organization, Water Scarcity Fact File, 2009, available at http://www.who.int/features/factfiles/water/en/. 5 Thomas Malthus, Population: The First Essay (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1978). 6 Alywn Young, “The Gift of the Dying: The Tragedy of AIDS and the Welfare of Future African Generations,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 120 (2) (2005): 243–266. 7 Jane Forston, “HIV/AIDS and Fertility,” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1 (3) (July 2009): 170–194; and Sebnem Kalemli-Ozcan, “AIDS, ‘Reversal’ of the Demographic Transition and Economic Development: Evidence from Africa,” NBER Working Paper W12181 (2006). 8 Michael Kremer, “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 108 (3) (1993): 681–716. 9 Gary Becker, “An Economic Analysis of Fertility,” Demographic and Economic Change in Developed Countries (Princeton: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1960). 10 Sachs, Common Wealth. 11 Vida Maralani, “Family Size and Educational Attainment in Indonesia: A Cohort Perspective,” California Center for Population Research Working Paper CCPR-17-04 (2004). 12 Mark Montgomery, Aka Kouamle, and Raylynn Oliver, The Tradeoff Between Number of Children and Child Schooling: Evidence from Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1995). 13 Joshua Angrist and William Evans, “Children and Their Parents’ Labor Supply: Evidence from Exogenous Variation in Family Size,” American Economic Review 88 (3) (1998): 450–477. 14 Joshua Angrist, Victor Lavy, and Analia Schlosser, “New Evidence on the Causal Link Between the Quantity and Quality of Children,” NBER Working Paper W11835 (2005). 15 Nancy Qian, “Quantity-Quality and the One Child Policy: The Positive Effect of Family Size on School Enrollment in China,” NBER Working Paper W14973 (2009). 16 T.

The Map That Changed the World
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 2001

An impressive roll call of luminaries chose over the years to become associated with or full members of the various new bodies—the Bath and West of England Society, the Bath Agricultural Society, the Bath Philosophical Society, the Literary Society, and today’s successors to them all, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution and the Royal Bath and West of England Society (now based in Shepton Mallet). There was Joseph Priestley (who discovered oxygen); Thomas Malthus (the economist and population expert), Sir William Herschel (who discovered Uranus* lurking way at the back of the solar system), Humphry Davy (who discovered sodium and potassium), and one Augustus Voelcker, a German, who was a specialist in the chemistry of cheese and set up a school to teach cheesemaking in Wells, nearby.

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But the young man’s interests were in fact wider and more catholic by far than those of a typical ducal employee: He soon left Woburn (sacked by an incoming duke) and became an expert musician (and a chorister of note), a mathematician whose work (on the curious properties of vulgar fractions) is still known today, and a contributor to encyclopedias on such topics as astronomy, engineering, the history of pacifism, the design of steam engines, the decimalization of currencies, and the population theories of Thomas Malthus. He was also hugely interested in and stimulated by Smith, and traveled with him frequently as a devoted acolyte and apprentice in those early years of the century, learning theories and techniques that he was eventually to put to good use on his own account. Rather too good, Smith was eventually to complain bitterly—in an incident that illustrates the growing problems, some real, others merely the consequence of his perception, that were beginning to cloud Smith’s life.

Life Is Simple: How Occam's Razor Set Science Free and Shapes the Universe
by Johnjoe McFadden
Published 27 Sep 2021

After many months spent as a jobbing labourer, he eventually found a position more suited to his interests, as a teacher in Leicester. In his spare time he visited the city’s local library, where he read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle and Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population. He also met his lifelong friend Henry Walter Bates (1825–92), another self-educated young man who had also acquired an interest in beetles. Alfred and Henry made regular excursions into the Leicestershire countryside to return with catch nets full of beetles, butterflies and other insects.

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In this sense it was closer to Kepler’s kinematic laws rather than Newton’s causal laws. The missing piece of the puzzle was why and how allied species emerge in the same place and at the same time. With perhaps his own mortality in mind – it was only seven years since his brother had died of a tropical fever similar to his own – his ideas turned to Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population and its grim observation that reproduction always outstrips available resources, leading to an inevitable natural cull on population growth. He now combined this notion with the extensive variation that he, and others, had discovered within any species.

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
by Daniel Immerwahr
Published 19 Feb 2019

Franklin is best remembered for his experiments with electricity and his many inventions (bifocals, the lightning rod, the circulating stove, the urinary catheter), but his demographic research was a large part of his legacy, too. His numbers quickly made the rounds in Europe, only sometimes with his name attached, and entered the thought of such philosophers as Adam Smith and David Hume. The grim prediction by the economist Thomas Malthus that food supply could never keep pace with population growth was largely based on Franklin’s North American calculations (which, Malthus gasped, indicated “a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history”). Malthus, in turn, was an important influence on Charles Darwin, both of whose grandfathers knew Franklin well.

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* * * To understand why anyone would care about bird droppings, it helps to know a little about preindustrial agriculture. Farming in the nineteenth-century United States was not like it is today, acres of staggeringly prolific fields bristling with high-yield crops. It was a touch-and-go business. The reason Benjamin Franklin’s population numbers had alarmed Thomas Malthus was that Malthus couldn’t see where the food would come from to feed those multiplying generations. New farmland and virgin soil had given North Americans a margin of ease, he acknowledged, but that could only be temporary. In the end, he wrote, “the power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

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Von Valtier, “‘An Extravagant Assumption’: The Demographic Numbers Behind Benjamin Franklin’s Twenty-Five-Year Doubling Period,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155 (2011): 158–88. “rapidity of increase”: Thomas Robert Malthus, First Essay on Population (London, 1798), 105. Malthus, in turn: Joyce E. Chaplin, Benjamin Franklin’s Political Arithmetic: A Materialist View of Humanity (Washington, DC, 2009), 45. 1890 census: Conway Zirkle, “Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Malthus and the United States Census,” Isis 48 (1957): 62. surpassed that of Britain: MPD. population of France: U.S. and French figures from MPD. For my understanding of U.S. population growth, I am indebted to D. W. Meinig, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History, vol. 2 (New Haven, CT, 1993), and James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783–1939 (Oxford, UK, 2009).

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

In particular, there has always been an understandable fear that capitalism’s dynamic of endless and accelerating growth will collapse when faced with the depletion of the inputs to that growth, whether those are energy inputs like coal and oil or raw materials like wood and iron. But while scarce resources have impinged on capitalist development at various points throughout its history, this has repeatedly happened in ways that caught theorists of the system by surprise. Writing at the turn of the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus worried that the limits of agricultural productivity, combined with the inevitable propensity of the poor to reproduce, meant that it was impossible to achieve both population growth and increasing economic prosperity. To this day, those who claim that capitalism is ultimately constrained by the carrying capacity of the earth are popularly referred to as “Malthusians,” even if the particular forms of scarcity they point to are very different than those Malthus was interested in.

The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World
by Steven Radelet
Published 10 Nov 2015

This combination would lead not just to development diminished, but to development derailed and progress reversed. It is to these growing threats that I now turn. TWELVE FUTURE 3—PROGRESS DERAILED: CLIMATE AND CONFLICT HALT DEVELOPMENT The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. —Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, 1798 When a powerful storm destroyed her riverside home in 2009, Jahanara Khatun lost more than the modest roof over her head. In the aftermath, her husband died and she became so destitute that she sold her son and daughter into bonded servitude. And she may lose yet more.

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Democracy is seen as a failed experiment, and dictators rise again. For more than two centuries, people have predicted that the combination of growing population, increased demand for resources, and environmental and ecological damage will lead to famine, war, and a reversal of progress. This view dates back at least to the great English cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus, captured in the quotation at the beginning of this chapter. Malthus argued in 1798 that “the passion between the sexes” was so strong that world population was destined to grow much faster than food supplies. Specifically, he argued that global population would increase geometrically, while food production could grow only arithmetically.

Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century
by Mark Leonard
Published 4 Sep 2000

The figure is forecast to grow to 47 per cent in 2020 and 70 per cent in 2050, leading to a European Commission forecast that annual growth could decline from around 2 per cent to 11/4 per cent by 2040.17 But the fact that demographers have spotted a trend does not mean that it will lead inexorably to disaster: most demographic predictions – dating right back to Thomas Malthus and his apocalyptic visions of the rise in population leading to mass starvation – have been wrong. And there are many signs that today’s merchants of doom will be mistaken. After years of a falling birth rate, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Britain, and France are showing signs of a reverse while others are learning from their example.

The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
by William Rosen
Published 31 May 2010

The worldwide per capita GDP in 800 BCE3—$543—is virtually identical to the number in 1600. The average person of William Shakespeare’s time lived no better than his counterpart in Homer’s. The first person to explain why the average human living in the seventeenth century was as impoverished as his or her counterpart in the seventh was the English demographer Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population demonstrated that throughout human history, population had always increased faster than the food supply. Seeking the credibility of a mathematical formula (this is a constant trope in the history of social science), he argued that population, unless unchecked by war, famine, epidemic disease, or similarly unappreciated bits of news, always increased geometrically, while the resources needed by that population, primarily food, always increased arithmetically.* The “Malthusian trap”—the term has been in general use for centuries—ensured that though mankind regularly discovered or invented more productive ways of feeding, clothing, transporting or (more frequently) conquering itself, the resulting population increase quickly consumed all of the surplus, leaving everyone in precisely the same place as before.

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.* They inspired David Ricardo’s exposition, in 1817, of the principle of diminishing returns: his argument that the growth of the first decades of industrialization was certain to level off, as each successive improvement produced smaller results. Helped along by the inflation in food prices caused by the Napoleonic Wars, they even set the stage for Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, with its famous argument that population always grows geometrically, food production arithmetically. What they didn’t do was explain how wealth, profit, and competition can all grow over time. In short, it didn’t explain the two centuries of growth that were beginning just as Wealth of Nations was being published.

It's Better Than It Looks: Reasons for Optimism in an Age of Fear
by Gregg Easterbrook
Published 20 Feb 2018

Don’t think solely about what happened; think as well about what did not happen, and thereby is unseen. In our great spinning world, what do we not see? As a prelude to the book’s three goals, ponder for a moment the tribulations our world does not have. Granaries are not empty. It has been two centuries since Thomas Malthus said rising population would lead to mass starvation—unavoidably, as an iron law. During the 1960s, it was predicted that hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, soon would die of hunger. Instead, by 2015, the United Nations reported global malnutrition had declined to the lowest level in history.

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The production of food is the first window to understanding why many expected calamities give way to mostly positive trends. The kinds of steps that prevented expected starvation can work against other challenges to come. Historically, expectations of starvation have been keen. Two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus declared that population would increase faster than food production, leading to general ruin. This would happen inexorably, Malthus said, because nature uses scarcity to control species, and it would be physically impossible to cultivate enough land to feed all those being born. Famines that struck China, India, Ireland, and Japan about a generation after Malthus seemed to confirm his contention.

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
by Noam Chomsky
Published 6 Sep 2011

But the great beast is hard to tame. Repeatedly it has been thought that the problem has been solved, and that the “end of history” has been reached in a kind of utopia of the masters. One classic moment was at the origins of neoliberal doctrine in the early nineteenth century, when David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and other great figures of classical economics announced that the new science had proven, with the certainty of Newton’s laws, that we only harm the poor by trying to help them, and that the best gift we can offer the suffering masses is to free them from the delusion that they have a right to live.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics
by Nicholas Wapshott
Published 10 Oct 2011

Hayek then addressed an element missing from Cantillon and Hume, “the influence of the quantity of money on the rate of interest, and through it on the relative demand for consumers’ goods on the one hand and producers’ or capital goods on the other.”30 A glut of money tended to lower the price of borrowing, which caused consumer goods to increase in price while making saving less attractive. He traced how the relationship between money and interest rates had been explored by thinkers such as Henry Thornton,31 David Richard,32 and Thomas Tooke,33 and how the link between money and capital, in the shape of “forced savings,” was addressed by Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus,34 John Stuart Mill,35 Léon Walras,36 Knut Wicksell, and Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk. In drawing attention to what he perceived as a flaw in Wicksell’s logic, Hayek took a swipe at the central assumption in Keynes’s Treatise on Money,37 that if the “natural rate” of interest and the “market rate” of interest were identical, prices would remain stable.38 Exactly why he disagreed with Wicksell—and Keynes—Hayek promised to expand on in a later lecture.

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First published by Routledge & Sons, London, 1931. 27 Ibid., p. 198. 28 Ibid., p. 199. 29 Richard Cantillon (1680–1734), Irish-French economist who referred to the “natural” behavior of the economy and the notion that economies tended toward an equilibrium. 30 Hayek, Prices and Production, p. 205. 31 Henry Thornton (1760–1815), English economist and member of Parliament. 32 David Ricardo (1772–1823), English economist. 33 Thomas Tooke (1774–1858), English economist who lent his name to the chair of economics that Hayek was awarded as a result of his LSE lectures. 34 Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), English economist. 35 John Stuart Mill (1806–73), English philosopher, political theorist, economist, and member of Parliament. 36 Marie-Esprit-Léon Walras (1834–1910), French economist. 37 It is not known whether Hayek had read Keynes’s Treatise, published in December 1930, by the time he delivered his first lecture at the LSE in February 1931. 38 Hayek, Prices and Production, p. 215. 39 Ibid., pp. 217–218. 40 Ibid., p. 219. 41 Ibid., pp. 220–221. 42 Ibid., p. 241. 43 Ludwig von Mises, Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel (Duncker & Humblot, Munich, 1912) p. 431. 44 Hayek, Prices and Production, p. 272. 45 Ibid., p. 273. 46 Ibid., p. 275. 47 Ibid., p. 299. 48 Ibid., p. 288. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid., p. 290. 51 Ibid., p. 298. 52 Ibid. 53 Robbins, Autobiography of an Economist, p. 127. 54 John Cunningham Wood and Robert D.

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
by Rebecca Solnit
Published 31 Aug 2010

The structure is also ideological, a philosophy that best serves the wealthy and powerful but shapes all of our lives, reinforced as the conventional wisdom disseminated by the media, from news hours to disaster movies. The facets of that ideology have been called individualism, capitalism, and Social Darwinism and have appeared in the political philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Malthus, as well as the work of most conventional contemporary economists, who presume we seek personal gain for rational reasons and refrain from looking at the ways a system skewed to that end damages much else we need for our survival and desire for our well-being. Disaster demonstrates this, since among the factors determining whether you will live or die are the health of your immediate community and the justness of your society.

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It justified callousness toward those who lost out in the economic struggle: they did so because they were unfit, ill adapted, and lazy, rather than because the system was unfair—a common justification of colonial rapacity, the deprivation of the poor, and basis for theories of racial inferiority. They deserved it, or they were at least doomed and could not be saved, if the forces that trampled them down were as inevitable as nature itself. Social Darwinists also tend to share Thomas Malthus’s belief that life must almost inevitably be a scramble for the scarce resources of the earth, a scramble in which some must die because there is not enough for all. Capitalism’s fundamental premise is scarcity, while a lot of tribal and gift economies operate on a basis of abundance. Their generosity is both an economic and an ethical premise.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
by Michael Shellenberger
Published 28 Jun 2020

“Each century will add new enlightenment to that of the century that has preceded it,” Condorcet wrote in 1782, “and this progress, which nothing can henceforth halt or delay, will have no other limits than that of the duration of the universe.” Ibid. 39. Ibid., 41. 40. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 61. 41. Thomas Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 417. 42. Robert J. Mayhew, Malthus: The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2014), 45. 43. Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 452. 44.

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In 1846, Ireland exported three million quarts of grain and corn flour to Britain, and 730,000 cattle and livestock. 49. Quoted in Fred Pearce, The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet’s Surprising Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 18. 50. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population: The 1803 Edition, 265. 51. Thomas Malthus, letter to David Ricardo, 1817, in Thomas Robert Malthus: Critical Assessments, John Cunningham Wood, ed. (London: Routledge, 1994), 262. 52. John and Richard Strachey, The Finances and Public Works of India (London: K. Paul Trench & Company, 1882), 172. 53. The House of Commons of the United Kingdom, “Copy of Correspondence Between the Secretary of State for India and the Government of India, on the Subject of the Famine in Western and Southern India,” in Parliamentary Papers, vol. 59, H.M.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

Politicians, academics and pub bores around the world have found the authority of The Wealth of Nations and the simplicity of its core ideas an irresistible combination, and routinely draw on them to dignify and adorn their own beliefs or arguments. The result has been to obscure Smith, to mistake the range and power of his ideas and to breed myths without number. Smith’s reputation advanced by stages throughout the nineteenth century. By the 1820s he was being acclaimed by no less an authority than the great population theorist Thomas Malthus, who echoed Pownall’s early review by remarking that The Wealth of Nations had ‘done for political economy what the Principia of Newton had done for physics’. But Smith’s death itself excited very little immediate comment at the time; and so it remained for several decades. There were few obituaries, and they were desultory and brief: twelve lines in the Annual Register, nine in the Scots Magazine.

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The attraction of this approach was its apparent potential to be objective and scientific: to reduce vague moral intuitions to objective facts about human psychology that could in principle be tested. ‘Utility’ became a catch-all for the satisfaction of human wants or preferences, and the general idea of a ‘utility function’, mapping an individual’s consumption of goods to their utility, was born in embryo. Less than a decade later, Thomas Malthus published his famous Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). There he predicted that, left unchecked, the world’s population would grow geometrically, as in the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16…, while food production could only grow arithmetically, as in the series 1, 2, 3, 4…, creating a gap with potentially catastrophic consequences.

A Dominant Character
by Samanth Subramanian
Published 27 Apr 2020

Wallace, a naturalist, was there to work, but he only made a few preliminary observations of the local tribes and collected some insects before falling ill with fits of malarial fever, which sometimes left him feeling so cold that he rolled his lanky frame into blankets, even though it was a balmy 90 degrees outdoors. His thoughts slipped and tumbled around his overheated mind—his notions about species, tribes, and populations, about resources and poverty, all his obsessions eddying madly around each other. Then, perhaps inspired by the malaria, Wallace thought of Thomas Malthus and of that clergyman’s book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. Wallace had read it more than a decade ago, but he remembered its arguments: that human populations grow in geometric haste to outstrip their supplies of food and that their numbers are kept in check only by the ravages of war, disease, and famine.

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Even in this, he was fated to be yoked to Darwin. The article’s subtitle was “My Relations with Darwin in Reference to the Theory of Natural Selection.” 158 “for amusement”: Darwin, Charles, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (London: Collins, 1958), 120. 158 “not be considered as comfortable asylums”: Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 37. 158 “our population is more largely renewed”: Alfred Russel Wallace, “Human Selection,” Fortnightly Review 48 (September 1890). 159 “progress is merely accidental”: Marx to Engels, August 7, 1866. 160 volunteered to act as a bouncer: From Haldane, Why I Am a Cooperator. 161 “I consider the present distribution”: From Haldane’s essay “What I Think About,” in The Inequality of Man, 218–19. 161 “I would trust Shakespeare”: From Haldane’s essay “Possibilities of Human Evolution,” in The Inequality of Man, 91–92. 161 “How, in a society based on hierarchies”: Gary Werskey, The Visible College, 108. 162 “for the stupid to inherit”: Julian Huxley, What Dare I Think?

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
by Branko Milanovic
Published 9 Oct 2023

See Arnold Heertje, “The Dutch and Portuguese-Jewish Background of David Ricardo,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 11, no. 2 (2004): 281–294. 5 . This is clear from Ricardo’s correspondence: “As for myself, I have all my … money invested in Stock; and this is as great an advantage as ever I expect or wish to make by a rise. I have been a considerable gainer by the loan; … and I have every reason to be well contented.” David Ricardo to Thomas Malthus, June 27, 1815, in Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Pierro Sraffa with the collaboration of M. H. Dobb, vol. 6, Letters, 1810–1815 (Cambridge: University Press for the Royal Economic Society, 1952), 233. (Hereafter Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo ). Ricardo was also a shareholder of the Bank of England. 6 .

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Emphasis in original. 20 . Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, in Collected Works, 32:348. Emphasis in original. 21 . Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ch. XXXII, 276n1. 22 . Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ch. VII, 77. 23 . David Ricardo to Thomas Malthus, October 11, 1816, in Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, vol. 7, Letters, 1816–1818, 78. 24 . David Ricardo, “An Essay on Profits (and the Rent of Land),” in Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, vol. 4, Pamphlets and Papers, 1809–1811, 18, quoted in Maurice Dobb, Theories of Value and Distribution since Adam Smith: Ideology and Economic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 72. 25 .

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

As the planet’s population continues to expand, we’ll be faced with an inability to produce enough food. Mass starvation will eventually bring the population back to sustainable levels, which is not comforting to those who don’t make the cut. His conclusion is based on undisputed historical data, verified by sources across the globe. The British economist was Thomas Malthus and the study was the Essay on Principle of Population, which he penned two hundred years ago in 1798. Malthus believed population growth was such a powerful force that eventually it would outpace man’s ability to keep up, resulting in a return to subsistence level conditions. More and more people would be born into a world that couldn’t possibly keep up with feeding them.

Clock of the Long Now
by Stewart Brand
Published 1 Jan 1999

“What people mean by the word technology,” says computer designer Alan Kay, “is anything invented since they were born.” Computer designer Danny Hillis counters, “What people mean by the word technology is the stuff that doesn’t really work yet.” Technology is both the problem and its own solution. No wonder it obsesses us. The gathering acceleration of history was noted in the 1790s by Thomas Malthus and in 1909 by Henry Adams, who wrote, The world did not double or treble its movement between 1800 and 1900, but, measured by any standard . . . the tension and vibration and volume and so-called progression of society were fully a thousand times greater in 1900 than in 1800—the force had doubled ten times over, and the speed, when measured by electrical standards as in telegraphy, approached infinity, and had annihilated both space and time.

A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright
Published 2 Jan 2004

The invention of agriculture is itself a runaway train, leading to vastly expanded populations but seldom solving the food problem because of two inevitable (or nearly inevitable) consequences. The first is biological: the population grows until it hits the bounds of the food supply. The second is social: all civilizations become hierarchical; the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there can never be enough to go around. The economist Thomas Malthus explored the first dilemma, and thinkers from Christ to Marx have touched on the second. As the Chinese saying has it: “A peasant must stand a long time on the hillside with his mouth open before a roast duck flies in.” Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps.

The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War
by Robert D. Kaplan
Published 1 Jan 1994

It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to vi­ olence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed, "blank" and "unexplored." However, whereas Greene's vision implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the philoso­ pher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa's future. And West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world. CONSIDER "CHICAGO." I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to a slum district of Abidjan, which the young toughs in the area 10 / THE COMING ANARCHY have named after the American city.

The Production of Money: How to Break the Power of Banks
by Ann Pettifor
Published 27 Mar 2017

But this understanding of a system of bank money causing rates of interest to fall was lost in the classical economics of one David Ricardo (a financier). As a result, the theories of credit and associated bank-money policies lived on only, as Keynes put it, in ‘an underworld’ of scholars and activists. These included Henry Thornton, Thomas Malthus and Henry Dunning McLeod, and the sociologists Peter Knapp and Georg Simmel, who were not content to leave the question of the nature of money to the economists. Keynes’s great achievement was to retrieve this understanding from its burial by economic scholars. He understood that basing a theory of the economy on a fallacious theory of bank money would lead to profound misjudgements in economic policy, and to financial and economic crises.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100
by Michio Kaku
Published 15 Mar 2011

And in the twentieth century, the world population soared to new heights, more than doubling from 1950 to 1992: from 2.5 billion to 5.5 billion. It now stands at 6.7 billion. Every year, 79 million people join the human race, which is more than the entire population of France. As a result, many predictions of doomsday have been made, yet so far humanity has been able to dodge the bullet. Back in 1798, Thomas Malthus warned us what would happen when the population exceeded the food supply. Famines, food riots, the collapse of governments, and mass starvation could ensue until a new equilibrium is found between population and resources. Since the food supply expands only linearly with time, while the population grows exponentially, it seemed inevitable that at some point the world would hit the breaking point.

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Luttwak, Edward Lutz, Robert Maes, Pattie Maglev trains and cars, 5.­1, 9.­1 Magnetic energy, 5.­1, 9.­1 Magnetic field to create nuclear fusion Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) as mind-reading technology, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3 replicators and reverse engineering the brain and Mallouk, Thomas Malthus, Thomas Mammoth resurrection Markram, Henry Marquess, Ron Marriage and family life in 2100 Mars landing/­colonization Martel, Sylvain Martian moon landing Matrix movies, 2.­1, 7.­1 Maxwell, James Clerk McGinnis, Dave McRae, Hamish, 7.­1, 7.­2, 7.­3 Medicine/­biotechnology augmented reality and brain injury treatments cancer screening cancer therapies, 1.­1, 3.­1, 3.­2, 4.­1, 9.­1 Cave Man Principle and cloning, 3.­1, 3.­2 computers and creating new life-­forms curing all diseases, 3.­1, 8.­1 depression treatments designer children, 3.­1, 3.­2, 3.­3 far future (2070), 3.­1, 9.­1, 9.­2 gene therapy, 3.­1, 3.­2 genetic enhancements genomic medicine germ warfare memory enhancement, 3.­1, 3.­2 midcentury (2030) Moore’­s law and muscle disorder treatments nanotechnology and near future (present to 2030) nightmare scenarios quantum theory and resurrecting extinct life-­forms robotics and, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 side effects of biotech revolution spinal cord injury treatments stem cell technology surgery three stages of tissue engineering (organ replacement), 3.­1, 3.­2 virtual reality and See also Longevity Memory enhancement, 3.­1, 3.­2 Men in Black (movie) “­Merger of Flesh and Machine, The”­ (Brooks) Merrill Lynch company Methane gas, 5.­1, 6.­1 Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS), 4.­1, 4.­2 Middle class, planetary Miesenbö­ck, Gero Miller, Webb Mind-­body problem Mind reading EEG and MRI technology for ethics of Kaku’­s brain scan mini-­MRI machines photographing of dreams Mining operations on other worlds Minsky, Marvin, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 Mischel, Walter Modha, Dharmendra Modular robots, 2.­1, 4.­1 Mohamad, Mahathir Moon landing/colonization, 6.­1, 6.­2 Moore, Gordon, 1.­1, 4.­1 Moore’s law computers and, 1.­1, 1.­2, 1.­3, 4.­1 medicine and nanotechnology and, 4.­1, 4.­2 Moravec, Hans, 2.­1, 2.­2, 2.­3 More, Sir Thomas Morfoot, Linda Morphing Moses, Edward MRI-­MOUSE Muscle disorder treatments Musical robots Music industry Myrabo, Leik Najmabadi, Farrokh, 5.­1, 5.­2 Nanobots, 4.­1, 4.­2, 4.­3 Nanocars Nanoparticles, 4.­1, 4.­2 Nanorods Nanostarships Nanotechnology carbon nanotubes, 4.­1, 6.­1 commercial applications today computers and DNA chips energy for molecular machines far future (2070) manipulation of individual atoms medicine and midcentury (2030) Moore’s law and, 4.­1, 4.­2 nanomachines in our bodies near future (present to 2030) potential of quantum theory and shape-­shifting technology space travel and, 6.­1, 6.­2 See also Replicators National Ignition Facility (NIF) Neanderthal resurrection Neecke, Nikolas Neumann, John von, 2.­1, 2.­2 Neural networks News broadcasting Newspaper industry Newton, Isaac, itr.­1, 6.­1, 7.­1 New York Times Nicolelis, Miguel A.­

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future
by Mervyn King and John Kay
Published 5 Mar 2020

Smith was not writing about the manufacture of pins, any more than Akerlof had been describing the activities of the members of the Retail Motor Federation, or Tucker the functioning of the American criminal justice system. They were using these models as illustrations of principles of much more general applicability. Economics subsequently made advances through a whole series of small-world models of this type. Two decades after Smith, Thomas Malthus provided a notorious model of population and growth, which we discuss further in chapter 20 . In addition to his principle of comparative advantage, David Ricardo developed a model of economic rent: the amount received by the supplier of an input in excess of the amount necessary to ensure its supply (many people in the sports and financial services industries would surely work there for lower rewards than they currently receive).

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And it is the pervasive nature of radical uncertainty which is the source of the problem. 20 THE USE AND MISUSE OF MODELS Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rates of return and strategic studies prepared by his troops. —WARREN BUFFETT 1 I n the eighteenth century there were country clergymen of exceptional intelligence who had time on their hands. They benefited from a secure reference narrative. Thomas Bayes was one; Thomas Malthus another. In 1798, Malthus set out what might be regarded as the first growth model in economics. He hypothesised that population tended to grow exponentially, as a result of what he coyly termed ‘the passions’, while food supplies could grow only linearly. The rising population would put pressure on food supplies, and then the resulting destitution would reduce that population.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

Byron wasn’t entirely convinced that Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a romantic, politically charged epic that was obviously inspired by his own life, was suited for publication. A business partner convinced him otherwise. He sold the manuscript to an enterprising Fleet Street bookseller named John Murray, who was just embarking on his literary publishing career; he would soon publish Jane Austen and Thomas Malthus, too. Byron was still in London when he received word that his mother had fallen gravely ill. He rushed home for Newstead but did not make it in time. “I heard one day of her illness, the next of her death,” Byron wrote. His grief would only compound, as a season of death set in. In a matter of months, three of his friends would pass away, two of consumption and one of drowning.

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There was already a sense, even then, that they were doing more than enriching themselves at the expense of the workingmen whom their devices were making redundant; they were using those machines to impose an entirely new mode of work onto the populace. Theirs were the guiding hands on new technologies that were helping to forge the very shape of industrial capitalism. Footnote 1 Also crucial were the ideas of the economist Thomas Malthus, who held that periods of mass suffering among the working poor were inevitable in any prospering economy as the population grew too fast for food production to keep pace. B November 1811 In a secret meeting at the Falstaff Hotel in Manchester, in the middle of a black November night, a man who dressed and presented as a cloth worker listened in as a delegate from the town of Royton spoke up.

Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science
by Dani Rodrik
Published 12 Oct 2015

If wages rose too much above this level, the result would be an increase in population—because more children could survive—and in the labor force. As a consequence, wages would drop back down to their “natural” level. The main beneficiaries of economic advances and technological progress would therefore be owners of land, which was in finite supply. It was this kind of thinking, associated in particular with Thomas Malthus, that led the nineteenth-century essayist Thomas Carlyle to famously call economics the “dismal science.” Marx, whose influence would extend well into the twentieth century, also adhered to the labor theory of value. He, too, believed that wages were held down. But in his theory the culprits were capitalists who exploited workers and managed to discipline them through the “reserve army of the unemployed.”

Willful: How We Choose What We Do
by Richard Robb
Published 12 Nov 2019

This spike appears to be the result of bets made in bars by traders goofing around—they put no money behind the contracts, had no money to pay, and perhaps no expectation that the contracts would be enforced. There are no credible contemporaneous accounts of economic distress; the speculation caused only the transfer of wealth, and little wealth was transferred in the end. 2. Zeckhauser, “Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable.” Ricardo persuaded Thomas Malthus to join him in buying bonds, but Malthus chickened out before the battle and sold at a small profit. 3. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 64. Emphasis mine. FIVE For-Itself Decision-Making within a Group 1. Even if the entrepreneur did manage to convince the venture capitalist, many communication hurdles would still lie ahead.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know
by Richard Watson
Published 5 Nov 2013

It’s forecast that food production globally will have to increase by 50 percent by 2030 and to double by the year 2050 to feed the planet’s rapidly growing population. If this is true, it presents something of a challenge, but we have been here before to some extent. Back in the late 1700s and early 1800s Thomas Malthus predicted that the world would run into severe trouble because agricultural production would not be able to keep pace with population growth. He was absolutely right about population growth, but totally wrong about agricultural productivity and the ways in which free-market mechanisms respond to demand.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

The cloud created by this enforced move had a silver lining. After shining at high school he went to the University of Chicago at the age of 16. ‘I was reborn, born as an economist, at 8.30am on January 2nd 1932, in the University of Chicago classroom,’ he said in a memoir published just before his death.2 The trigger was a lecture about Thomas Malthus, the 18th-century British economist who wrote about population and poverty. From then on Samuelson was hooked on economics. He graduated with a master’s economics degree in 1935 so his time at Chicago coincided with the worst years of the Great Depression. Chicago was already emerged as a haven for neoclassical economists under the influence of Milton Friedman.

Elsewhere, U.S.A: How We Got From the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms,and Economic Anxiety
by Dalton Conley
Published 27 Dec 2008

I was wrong, and she was right (on average, for professional parents, perhaps, with a host of other caveats as well). But I can’t bring myself to apologize in the main text, so I am relegating this to an end-note. 5. Jun Fletcher, “For Mansion Owners, A Little-Noticed Tax Break,” The Wall Street Journal, December 5, 1997. 6. The fundamental paradox in agrarian societies was identified by Thomas Malthus: Food production increased arithmetically (gradually) but human populations increase geometrically (i.e., like rabbits multiplicatively). This fact, according to Malthus, would yield a situation of near-constant human misery. Any improvement in agricultural technology would lead humans to have more babies and thus erase any improvement in living standards.

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet
by Jane Gleeson-White
Published 14 May 2011

In defence of Sombart, however, Eve Chiapello responds to his critics by suggesting that the links between capitalism and accounting are not so much historical as conceptual, that capitalism could only ‘be born conceptually’ thanks to double entry—which makes sense of the fact that the only historical links between accounting and capitalism that are outlined by Sombart and also affirmed by historians occur from the second half of the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth. It was during this period that the social science of political economy was born, that the work of Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo was published (and influenced Marx’s thinking during the same era). The emerging social sciences looked to accounting for their foundations. It was double entry that allowed economists to build the models they used to analyse economies and revealed to Marx the building blocks of nineteenth-century industrial production and management.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger
by Matthew Yglesias
Published 14 Sep 2020

Like any patriotic American, I have my doubts about all those countries (some don’t put enough ice in their drinks, and some have weird ventless dryers that don’t actually dry clothing), but they’re all perfectly pleasant places that people from all over the world visit happily. One billion Americans won’t make us overcrowded; we’re extremely undercrowded today—and significant parts of the country are depopulating. The long shadow of the Malthusian past Thomas Malthus, one of the earliest economists, famously argued that human societies would inevitably become poorer as they become more populated. Eventually a people would become so impoverished that famine or disease would cull the population and lead to a higher standing of living.* Malthus wrote in the late eighteenth century, on the verge of the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of a long technological liftoff that would prove him wrong.

Imagining India
by Nandan Nilekani
Published 25 Nov 2008

“Millions on an anthill” For most of the twentieth century, people both within and outside India viewed us through a lens that was distinctly Malthusian. As a poor and extremely crowded part of the world, we seemed to vindicate Thomas Malthus’s uniquely despondent vision—that great population growth inevitably led to great famine and despair. The time that Thomas Malthus, writer, amateur economist and clergyman(the enduring term history gave him would be “the gloomy parson”), lived in may have greatly influenced his theory on population. Nineteenth-century England was seeing very high birth rates, with families having children by the baker’s dozen.

Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought
by Andrew W. Lo
Published 3 Apr 2017

All individuals are always vying for survival—even if the laws of the jungle are less vicious on the African savannah than on Wall Street. It’s no surprise, then, that economic behavior is often best viewed through the lens of biology. The connections between evolution and economics are not new. Economics may have even inspired evolutionary theory. The British economist Thomas Malthus deeply influenced both Charles Darwin and Darwin’s close competitor, Alfred Russell Wallace.8 Malthus forecast that human population growth would increase exponentially, while food supplies would increase only along a straight line. He concluded that the human race was doomed to eventual starvation and possible extinction.

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In addition to Herbert Simon’s notion of bounded rationality, it’s worth reviewing the other strands of academic research, both past and current, that lend support to Adaptive Markets. Ours is certainly not the first attempt to fuse insights from biological systems with economic thinking—we’ve already mentioned Thomas Malthus, who used biological examples to illustrate his principles about population growth. As an Anglican clergyman, he framed his arguments in moralistic terms, but his reasoning can easily be restated in terms familiar to today’s economists. After the death of Charles Darwin, evolutionary theory languished, remaining undeveloped for decades, a crude version of it (“social Darwinism”) used to justify inhumane government policies.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

If the freedom to acquire property existed independently of the state, it seemed that no government could legitimately restrict it; if the power of the state to enforce human rights was so overwhelming that its citizens could, in Rousseau’s words, be “forced to be free” by the government, then property rights might, as Babeuf argued, lawfully be extinguished by the state. As though to underline the divide, the English economist and cleric Reverend Thomas Malthus wrote an essay in 1800, On the Present High Price of Provisions, in which he explained in terms as uncompromising as Babeuf’s why the unconstrained working of the free-market, even in times of famine, was the most efficient way of feeding a population. “The man who refuses to send his corn to market when it is at twenty pounds a load because he thinks that in two months time it will be at thirty [pounds],” Malthus argued, “if he be right in his judgment and succeed in his speculation, is a positive and decided benefactor to the state.”

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There would be an enhanced two-way trade between the colonies and the home country, and where Australia was concerned, the chance of opening up a three-way network exporting cereals to China, Chinese tea to Britain, and British manufactures to Australia. Wakefield’s analysis of the colonies’ economic potential was grounded in the theories of the era’s two preeminent free-market economists, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. Ricardo’s theories on profit made it clear that the high price of British property rendered its purchase an inefficient use of capital compared with investing it in cheaper, productive land elsewhere. Malthus’s stark warning of overpopulation focused more closely on the wastage of labor in the unemployed poor: “Increase the demand for agricultural labour by promoting cultivation, and with it consequently increase the produce of the country, and ameliorate the condition of the labourer, and no apprehensions whatever need be entertained of the proportional increase of population.”

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us
by Tim Sullivan
Published 6 Jun 2016

These early economists aimed to tackle big questions about how the economy worked (and whether it could be made to work better), weighing in on such important matters as market function (and dysfunction), the origin of value, business cycles, and unemployment. It was set in motion by Smith and carried on for one hundred years thereafter by the classical economists—David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, Karl Marx, Vilfredo Pareto, among others. It was continued for nearly one hundred years more by neoclassical economists like Thorstein Veblen, John Maynard Keynes, and an enduring hero of free-market proponents, Joseph Schumpeter. Pareto, who lived from 1848 until 1923, is emblematic of both the worldliness and precision of these towering figures in the history of economic thought.

Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium
by Carl Sagan
Published 11 May 1998

After the invention of agriculture—including the planting and harvesting of those grains of wheat the Grand Vizier was hankering for—the human population of this planet began increasing, entering an exponential phase, which is very far from a steady state. Right now the doubling time of the world population is about 40 years. Every 40 years there will be twice as many of us. As the English clergyman Thomas Malthus pointed out in 1798, a population increasing exponentially—Malthus described it as a geometrical progression—will outstrip any conceivable increase in food supply. No Green Revolution, no hydroponics, no making the deserts bloom can beat an exponential population growth. There is also no extraterrestrial solution to this problem.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
by Juliet B. Schor
Published 12 May 2010

Beckerman overstated the case, but he was right that the discipline has historically tended to optimism about the environment and is adept at creating narratives about why solutions for environmental problems will naturally emerge. Economists have seen the very idea of ecological limits as a rehash of the discredited theories of the early nineteenth-century political economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus believed that population growth would outrun increases in agricultural productivity, so that food production would fail to keep up with mouths to feed. He foresaw rising poverty and famines. The standard view is that he got it wrong, given the tremendous increases in agricultural productivity and the demographic transition toward lower birth rates.

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

[xxv] During the early 19th century, when the industrial revolution was in full swing, most members of the newly-established social science of economics argued that any unemployment caused by the introduction of machinery would be resolved by the growth in overall economic demand. But there were prominent figures who took the more pessimistic view, that innovation could cause long-term unemployment. They included Thomas Malthus, John Stuart Mill, and even the most respected economist of the time, David Ricardo.[xxvi] The Luddite fallacy and economic theory The debate can get quite technical, but there are two reasons why it has been correct to reject the Luddite fallacy up until now. The first reason is economic theory: companies introduce machines because they increase production and cut costs.

The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date
by Samuel Arbesman
Published 31 Aug 2012

In an analysis worthy of someone as well traveled as Doctor Who, Kremer shows that the growth of human population over the history of the world is consistent with how technological change happens. Kremer does this in an elegant way, making only a small set of assumptions. First he states that population growth is limited by technological progress. This is one of those assumptions that has been around since Thomas Malthus, and it is based on the simple fact that as a population grows we need more technology to sustain the population, whether through more efficient food production, more efficient waste management, or other similar considerations. Conversely, Kremer also states that technological growth should be proportional to population size.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

From the perspective of mouths to feed that means it won’t look that different from today – an extra 3 billion people – which is what the world has added since 1974. Indeed, it is rising expectations in diet, combined with declining crop yields as a result of climate change, which represent the biggest hurdles in eliminating world hunger. Claims about rising populations and the natural limits of the Earth are nothing new. Indeed Thomas Malthus, one of the most important thinkers in the early history of political economy, was obsessed by the issue. In his 1798 polemic An Essay on the Principle of Population, he observed how any increase in food production led to a growth in population rather than an improvement in the average standard of living.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

This chapter traces ‘growth’ economics from the insights of the classical economists to the emergence of development economics as a distinct subfield of economics in the second half of the twentieth century, and the gradual dissolution of the developmental perspective into the neoclassical Washington Consensus. Population If the economist is a tragedian, the Revd Thomas Malthus has a claim to be considered its tragedian in chief. Before Malthus there was the allure of a more prosperous future; after him gloom. For the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, economics was known as the ‘dismal science’. In An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) Malthus set out to refute the utopianism of writers like Condorcet, Godwin, and Thomas Paine.

How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks
by Robin Dunbar and Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar
Published 2 Nov 2010

So whether or not our industrial and agricultural activities have caused the current warming, we would do well to remember that the earth’s climate is naturally unstable. Our real problem is how we cope with these changes as they occur. The optimists will want to rely on science. After all, they might say, science has already got us out of one such mess. Nearly two centuries ago, Thomas Malthus stirred a few feathers by pointing out that the world was heading for disaster because agricultural productivity couldn’t keep step with the rate at which the population was increasing. Darwin was greatly influenced by Malthus when he was writing his Origin of Species: it provided him with the insight as to how natural selection might work.

Transport for Humans: Are We Nearly There Yet?
by Pete Dyson and Rory Sutherland
Published 15 Jan 2021

‘Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change,’ writes Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, who could scarcely have imagined the scale of the challenges ahead 200 years ago, yet understood the nature of them perfectly. A world of nearly 8 billion people might have surprised Shelley, especially if her 1826 apocalyptic plague horror The Last Man was a nod to Thomas Malthus’s theory on limits of population growth.3 A phenomenon we neglect in the present day is not the number of people around the world, but their distribution. Rural-to-urban migration creates huge pressure for dense public transport in mega cities while also embedding long-distance domestic travel as people keep ties to connections back home.

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room
by David Weinberger
Published 14 Jul 2011

Simpson, Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, 2009). 11 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact (University of Chicago, 1998). 12 The title of the work in which Bacon lays this out—Novum Organum—is a reference to Aristotle’s Organum. 13 See Chapter 3 of Barry Gower’s Scientific Method (Routledge, 1997), http://books.google.com/books?id=D3rV2t2XkWYC&pg=PA40&lpg=PA40. 14 Ibid., p. 49. 15 Poovey traces the role of interests to Hobbes and following thinkers. 16 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, Vol. 1 (first edition). This is online at http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop1.html. 17 Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, p. 229. 18 “Chimney Sweepers’ Regulation Bill,” Hansard 39 (February 16, 1819): 448–454, http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1819/feb/17/chimney-sweepers-regulation-bill. 19 Sir Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform 1815–1870, 2nd ed.

The Locavore's Dilemma
by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu
Published 29 May 2012

3 By the early 1920s, the geographer Ray Hughes Whitbeck documented how “one or more railway companies, several truckmen, a wholesale dealer or two, a retail dealer and his clerks, a delivery boy, and perhaps several other persons or corporations” along with perhaps even “one or more brokers” stood between a grapefruit grower and his laborers and his final consumer in a northern American city.4 Not surprisingly, these activities have long been decried as superfluous and parasitical by critics who, as Bastiat observed in 1848, “would willingly eliminate the capitalist, the banker, the speculator, the entrepreneur, the businessman, and the merchant, accusing them of interposing themselves between producer and consumer in order to fleece them both, without giving them anything of value.”5 Antipathy against intermediaries was always heightened during food crises. Writing in the early years of the Napoleonic wars, a time of rapid price increases, the political economist Robert Thomas Malthus observed that the general indignation of common people had fallen upon “monopolizers, forestallers, and regraters—words, that are . . . applied indiscriminately to all middle men whatever, to every kind of trader that goes between the grower of the commodity and the consumer . . .”6 Today’s locavores are but the latest activists to echo this sentiment with their contention that direct relationships between producers and consumers will improve a community’s social capital while putting more money directly into farmers’ (as opposed to intermediaries’) pockets.

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery
by Stewart Lansley
Published 19 Jan 2012

Before Henry Ford made his dramatic intervention, a number of economists had explored the economic consequences of a lack of working class purchasing power, a problem labelled the theory of ‘underconsumption’. Such theories were developed during the nineteenth century by a range of British scholars, most notably Thomas Malthus—who developed his own theory of the insufficiency of demand as early as the 1920s—and fifty years later by John A Hobson. Writing at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, Hobson —who was born in Derby in 1858—challenged much of the accepted economic thinking of the time.

The End of Growth
by Jeff Rubin
Published 2 Sep 2013

In the last forty years, the Club has distributed more than 12 million copies of the report, which also asserts that global society is likely to overshoot the planet’s carrying capacity. Once that happens, the club contends, society won’t be able to avoid a large-scale environmental collapse. Prophets of doom have sounded similar alarms before. Some two hundred years ago, Reverend Thomas Malthus warned that population growth was an inexorable force that would exhaust the land’s capacity to provide sustenance. He foresaw starvation and pestilence arising as an inevitable result of overpopulation, bringing about a dying off that would cull the number of people in the world. Along with epidemics that would increase the death rate, Malthus also believed that moral restraint was necessary to keep the birthrate in check.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
by Michael Specter
Published 14 Apr 2009

Farmers in developing countries often see their crops rot in the fields long before they can be eaten or rushed across rutted dirt roads to markets many hours away. To those people, the Western cult of organic food is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the rich world—one with the power to kill them. IT’S HARD to find anything positive to say about Thomas Malthus. After all, his dour view of the world has consistently been proven wrong. In 1798, he argued that the earth’s population was rising exponentially and the food supply necessary to feed it was not. He famously promised “famine . . . the last, the most dreadful resource of nature.” It took another 125 years for the world’s population to double, but only fifty more for it to double again.

Social Life of Information
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Published 2 Feb 2000

As Carl Shapiro and Hal Varian, two economists at Berkeley, argue in their book Information Rules, even an information economy needs some formal institutions to guard against monopolies. 41 The use of deliberate structure to preserve the spontaneity of self-organization may be one of humanity's most productive assets. Since the nineteenth century, when the economist Thomas Malthus gloomily predicted that the geometric growth of population would outstrip the arithmetic growth in resources, predictions appear regularly that humanity is on the edge of destroying itself.42 Most of these predictions take humans to be, like insects, relatively passive in the face of such problems.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

The most important inter-class behavioural difference was considered to be the fact that capitalists invested (virtually) all of their incomes while the other classes – the working class and the landlord class – consumed them. On the landlord class, opinion was split. Some, like Ricardo, saw it as a consuming class that hampered capital accumulation, while others, such as Thomas Malthus, thought that its consumption helped the capitalist class by offering extra demands for their products. However, on the workers, there was a consensus. They spent all of their income, so if the workers got a higher share of the national income, investment and thus economic growth would fall. This is where ardent free-marketeers like Ricardo meet ultra-left wing communists like Preobrazhensky.

The Strange Order of Things: The Biological Roots of Culture
by Antonio Damasio
Published 6 Feb 2018

By the end of the nineteenth century, the role of biology in the shaping of cultural events was acknowledged by Charles Darwin, William James, Sigmund Freud, and Émile Durkheim, among others.1 At about the same time, and into the early decades of the new century, biological facts were invoked by a number of theorists (among them Herbert Spencer and Thomas Malthus) to defend the application of Darwinian thinking to society. These efforts, generally known as social Darwinism, resulted in eugenic recommendations in Europe and in the United States. Later, during the Third Reich, biological facts were misinterpreted and applied to human societies with the goal of producing a radical sociocultural transformation.

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline
by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson
Published 5 Feb 2019

doc=76 46 World Health Organization; World Food Program; United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; United Nations Children Fund. 47 Max Roser, “Life Expectancy,” Our World in Data, 2017. http://ourworldindata.org/data/population-growth-vital-statistics/life-expectancy 48 Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina, “World Population Growth,” Our World in Data, April 2017. https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth/ 49 Mike Hanlon, “World Becomes More Urban Than Rural,” Gizmag, 29 May 2007. http://www.gizmag.com/go/7334 50 Soylent Green, DVD, directed by Richard Fleischer (Los Angeles: MGM, 1973). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/ 51 Inferno, DVD, directed by Ron Howard (Los Angeles: Sony, 2016). 52 Donna Gunn MacRae, “Thomas Robert Malthus,”Encyclopedia Britannica. http://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Robert-Malthus 53 Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J. Johnson, 1798). http://www.econlib.org/library/Malthus/malPop1.html#Chapter%20I 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ron Broglio, “The Best Machine for Converting Herbage into Money,” in Tamar Wagner and Narin Hassan, eds., Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century: Narratives of Consumption 1700–1900 (Lanham: Lexington, 2007), 35. https://books.google.com/books/about/Consuming_Culture_in_the_Long_Nineteenth.html?

How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature
by George Monbiot
Published 14 Apr 2016

But as the US academics Fred Block and Margaret Somers explain in their fascinating book The Power of Market Fundamentalism, those who implemented it seemed to recognise that occasional unemployment was an intrinsic feature of working life.2 But in 1786, as economic crises threw rising numbers onto the mercy of their parishes, the clergyman Joseph Townsend sought to recast poverty as a moral or even biological condition. ‘The poor know little of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action – pride, honour, and ambition’, he argued in his Dissertation on the Poor Laws.3 ‘In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them onto labour; yet our laws have said, they shall never hunger.’ Thomas Malthus expands on this theme in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798.4 Poor relief, he maintained, causes poverty. It destroys the work ethic, reducing productivity. It also creates an incentive to reproduce, as payments rise with every family member. The higher the population, the hungrier the poor become: kindness results in cruelty.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe
by William Poundstone
Published 3 Jun 2019

That’s well over 10 trillion trillion times the current world population. The Commandant would need more than the world population just to advance to the eleventh roll. Are we being overly literal in pointing this out? I would say so. The shooting room invokes exponential growth for the same reason that Thomas Malthus and Gordon Moore did. It’s our lived reality, for the time being. A sizable fraction of all the people who have ever lived are living right now—in the last round? So let’s suspend disbelief on the numbers. Crowd-management issues aside, there is nothing magical or mysterious about the shooting room.

The Gene: An Intimate History
by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Published 16 May 2016

What hand, Darwin asked, had guided the creation of such different varieties of finches on those distant volcanic islands or made small armadillos out of giant precursors on the plains of South America? Darwin knew that he was now gliding along the dangerous edge of the known world, tacking south of heresy. He could easily have ascribed the invisible hand to God. But the answer that came to him in October 1838, in a book by another cleric, the Reverend Thomas Malthus, had nothing to do with divinity. Thomas Malthus had been a curate at the Okewood Chapel in Surrey by daytime, but he was a closet economist by night. His true passion was the study of populations and growth. In 1798, writing under a pseudonym, Malthus had published an incendiary paper—An Essay on the Principle of Population—in which he had argued that the human population was in constant struggle with its limited resource pool.

Empire of Guns
by Priya Satia
Published 10 Apr 2018

“In lieu thereof,” he built “iron furnaces & foundrys which . . . is more perminant [sic] & more profitable in proportion to their being more usefull to the publick.” He advised his son “to confine his persuits to things usefull rather than ornamental.” The war and the expanding market for steam engines underwrote his embrace of utility. After the wars, the influential political economist Thomas Malthus claimed, “In carrying the late war, we were powerfully assisted by our steam-engines.” In fact, war had assisted the spread of steam engines. These inventions—steam engines, lathes, the puddling process—facilitated the rise of large-scale industry. They were interdependent and mutually reinforcing, and the state stood at the center of the networks around them.

…

Later investigations into the chemical properties of the ore improved its strength, enabling the use of puddled iron in arms. M. Brown, Firearms in Colonial America, 380. They, too, multiplied: John, “War and the English Economy,” 334. “Golden toys or ormolu”: Matthew Boulton, 1796, quoted in P. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment, 228. Thomas Malthus claimed: Quoted in Crouzet, “The Impact of the French Wars on the British Economy,” 209. Other big purchasers: Shenhav, “At a Gun Point,” 26. worth “unremitting exertions”: Deakin to Mulgrave, October 27, 1814, and Deakin to Ordnance Board, August 18, 1814, in Deakin, Plain Narrative of the Circumstances That Have Occurred in the Transactions, 16 and 24–26.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

In Influences, his clearest point was conveyed in statistical tables which claimed to show that production costs in England were competitive with Europe; given other variables, like soil conditions and cost of transport, foreign grain was unlikely to flood the home market.17 Still more significant, however, were the theoretical foundations for this claim. In contrast to Ricardo and Thomas Malthus he did not see class conflict as an inherent fact of economic life: from the former he discarded or modified the theory of marginal rents and wages, and from the latter the pessimistic forecast that population always outpaces food supply. Ricardo suggested that landed capital gained at the expense of industrial capital, and Malthus that working-class wages tended towards the bare minimum necessary for survival.

…

In the new century, Bush’s good intentions were also unjustly criticized, for America ‘waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq against a genuine but elusive foe, extreme Islamism’, even if operations in Iraq were unhappily less well informed and prepared than in Afghanistan.36 As an economic doctrine, liberalism is scarcely less sanitized. In the nineteenth century, laissez-faire is dismissed as an urban legend, without mention of Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus or James Wilson, let alone the famines in Ireland or India that its doctrines justified. Rather, Liberals were eminently practical arbiters of the mutable borders between the state and the market, rivals that also needed one another – resisting the supremacy of either, viewing both as variable instruments to be used according to the changing needs of ‘human betterment’, and by the mid-twentieth century getting the balance right.

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller
by Alec Nevala-Lee
Published 1 Aug 2022

Fuller with his sister Rosamond in the playpen that he built for her at Bear Island (1907). Courtesy of the estate of R. Buckminster Fuller It was also evidently around this time that Fuller had a long talk with his uncle. His grandmother may have taught him the Golden Rule, but Rockwell King sided with the English economist Thomas Malthus, who argued that rising population led to scarcity and grief. “If you are going to survive and have a family of five and wish to prosper,” King said, “you’re going to have to do it at the expense of five hundred others. So do it as neatly and cleanly and politely as you know how.” In 1906 Fuller recovered from appendicitis in time to visit Bear Island with Wolcott, and they returned following the birth of their younger sister, Rosamond, in September.

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It required a correspondingly vast idea, and Fuller found it in the challenge of using the earth’s resources for the welfare of all mankind—a legitimately urgent and worthwhile goal that would have greater appeal to the young than the military and industrial applications he had pursued in the past. In July he spoke in London at the World Congress of the International Union of Architects (UIA), attacking the “you or me” ideology of the English economist Thomas Malthus. Industrialization trended toward universal wealth, but because capitalists and politicians acted only in war, Fuller contended that power ought to be given to students instead. By arguing that architectural schools should take responsibility for encouraging radical design solutions in peacetime, Fuller was really just changing the name of the patron, which was a role that he intended to assume himself.

Oil Panic and the Global Crisis: Predictions and Myths
by Steven M. Gorelick
Published 9 Dec 2009

There are classical historical arguments that have been used to support the notion of natural-resource exhaustion and the scientific basis for the decline in global oil production. The oil depletion debate has occurred in the context of repeated panics that the world is entering an oil-supply crisis. Has the crisis finally arrived? The Malthusian Doctrine In 1798, Thomas Malthus, a 32-year-old British economist and demographer, published An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society. There, he argued that society as it was then known was not sustainable: … I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. … Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Published 6 Feb 2015

See also Michel Callon, “The Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics,” in Michel Callon (ed.), The Laws of the Markets (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), pp. 1–57, where Callon first uses the term. 13. Karl Marx, The German Ideology, in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: Norton, 1978). 14. David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo (London: Cambridge University Press, 1973). 15. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, ed. Geoffrey Gilbert. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 16. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Kissimmee: Signalman, 1936). 17. Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). 18.

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good
by Robert H. Frank
Published 3 Sep 2011

Charles Darwin was himself no slouch, obviously, yet few people outside academic departments of biology and economics associate his name with ideas in economics. Those who have studied Darwin’s theory of evolution carefully, however, realize that he was in fact heavily influenced by the works of the economists Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Malthus had been a student of Smith’s, and Ricardo was heavily influenced by The Wealth of Nations. So even if my prediction comes true, Smith’s fans can still justifiably think of him as the great-grandfather of economics. 16 DARWIN’S WEDGE 17 I base my prediction on a subtle but extremely important distinction between Darwin’s view of the competitive process and Smith’s.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

Here, too, capitalism is likely to encounter limits and barriers which will become increasingly hard to circumvent. Nowhere has the idea of limits to capital been more stridently and persistently asserted throughout capitalism’s history than with respect to scarcities in nature. The famous Enlightenment economists Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo both held that diminishing returns in agriculture would eventually lead the profit rate to fall to zero, thus spelling the end of capitalism as we know it because all profit would be absorbed by rent on land and on the supply of natural resources. Malthus went still further, of course, insisting (in the first version of his population theory) that the conflict between population growth and natural limits was bound to produce (and already was producing) crises of famine, poverty, pestilence and war, no matter what policies were implemented.

The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis
by Ruth Defries
Published 8 Sep 2014

Regardless, ideas that worked spread and took hold. Our species’ trademark of accumulating knowledge through trial-and-error and sharing new knowledge was in play. People had no other choice but to try to resolve the conundrums within their available means. The mayhem of the late eighteenth century was the context for the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s famous dire warnings. Malthus argued in a 1798 essay that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” Malthus saw the situation from the lens of the time in which he lived. He was viewing the world from the pinnacle of a ratchet that had resulted from many centuries of increasing yields, which had produced more food, more people, more profit-seeking, bigger cities, and still greater demand for a reliable source of food.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 1 Jan 2008

In a famous letter to George III, the Qienlong emperor, who ruled from 1736 to 1795, rejected Britain’s request for trade, explaining, “We have never set much store on strange and ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.” The Chinese had closed their minds to the world.5 Without new technologies and techniques, Asia fell prey to the classic Malthusian problem. Thomas Malthus’ famous 1798 treatise, An Essay on the Principle of Population, is remembered today for its erroneous pessimism, but, in fact, many of Malthus’ insights were highly intelligent. He observed that food production in England rose at an arithmetic rate (1, 2, 3, 4, . . .) but population grew at a geometric rate (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, . . .).

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health
by David B. Agus
Published 29 Dec 2015

The vaccine wars of today, stirred up most recently by outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases like whooping cough and measles, are nothing new. They are as old as vaccination itself. When Edward Jenner, a brilliant English country doctor, developed the vaccine for smallpox in 1796, he was both praised and mocked, lauded and feared. Religious authorities accused him of playing God, and even the equally bright economist Thomas Malthus lost sleep over the thought that vaccines would lead to unsustainable surges in the number of people on the planet. And when people first heard about getting an injection of foreign animal matter into their bodies, they were taken aback.4 Jenner himself was the butt of jokes as cartoons emerged showing cows’ horns shooting up from the heads of recently vaccinated people.

When the Money Runs Out: The End of Western Affluence
by Stephen D. King
Published 17 Jun 2013

Perhaps, as the Skidelsky family would argue, we already have enough.1 Perhaps we should accept, with equanimity, our declining influence in world economic and political affairs and, as I put it in Losing Control, learn to grow old gracefully. For good or bad, plenty of sages have warned that nature imposes a natural and inevitable limit on living standards and that stagnation, or worse, is our ultimate destiny. Thomas Malthus argued in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1798): Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio … By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins , Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane
Published 28 Feb 2017

Ricardo’s ‘law of rent’ challenged established theories of wages that existed at the time, in particular the belief that as the population of a country increased, wages would inevitably fall to just above that which was required for sustenance. This was the ‘iron law of wages’ associated with Thomas Malthus (1872).3 One important aspect of Ricardo’s argument is that the landowner is not free to choose the economic rent they charge for the use of their land. This rent will change over time as land is developed around any particular plot, out of the control of any individual landlord. But equally, economic rent is not related to the investment the landowner has put into the land.

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data
by David Spiegelhalter
Published 2 Sep 2019

We just want to tell it how it is, or at least how it seems to be, and while we cannot ever claim to tell the absolute truth, we can at least try to be as truthful as possible. Of course this attempt at scientific objectivity is easier said than done. When the Statistical Society of London (later the Royal Statistical Society) was set up in 1834 by Charles Babbage, Thomas Malthus and others, they loftily declared that ‘The Statistical Society will consider it to be the first and most essential rule of its conduct to exclude carefully all opinions from its transactions and publications—to confine its attention rigorously to facts—and, as far as it may be found possible, to facts which can be stated numerically and arranged in tables.’7 From the very start they took no notice whatsoever of this stricture, and immediately starting inserting their opinions about what their data on crime, health and the economy meant and what should be done in response to it.

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data
by David Spiegelhalter
Published 14 Oct 2019

We just want to tell it how it is, or at least how it seems to be, and while we cannot ever claim to tell the absolute truth, we can at least try to be as truthful as possible. Of course this attempt at scientific objectivity is easier said than done. When the Statistical Society of London (later the Royal Statistical Society) was set up in 1834 by Charles Babbage, Thomas Malthus and others, they loftily declared that ‘The Statistical Society will consider it to be the first and most essential rule of its conduct to exclude carefully all opinions from its transactions and publications – to confine its attention rigorously to facts – and, as far as it may be found possible, to facts which can be stated numerically and arranged in tables.’7 From the very start they took no notice whatsoever of this stricture, and immediately starting inserting their opinions about what their data on crime, health and the economy meant and what should be done in response to it.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

Notes Introduction: README Jesse Ausubel’s amazing essay: Jesse Ausubel, “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment,” Breakthrough Journal 5 (Summer 2015), https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/issue-5/the-return-of-nature. Chapter 1: All the Malthusian Millennia “the passion between the sexes is less ardent”: Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (1798; repr., Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, http://www.esp.org, 1998), 12, http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change
by Dieter Helm
Published 2 Sep 2020

Some environmentalists claim that there can be no more economic growth at all, and hence the future generation will not be better off in this respect.[5] The argument is that the earth has finite resources and hence the population runs up against natural constraints. It is not just that we should not have economic growth, but that we will not. It is the argument advanced by Thomas Malthus, and later by Paul Ehrlich and the Club of Rome.[6] This is far too pessimistic. There is (sadly) no chance of us running out of fossil fuels, nor of many of the other main minerals that are crucial to the economy. But, more importantly, there is one resource which we continually invent and do not run out of.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman
Published 24 Sep 2018

Darwin’s account left out many key details, and indeed it was written a century before the discovery of dna. But it still carried enormous power to connect macroscale biology—species and ecosystems—with the pressures on individual organisms. In Darwin’s account, his eureka moment came while reading Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that society is doomed to outstrip its food supply because human population grows geometrically. If every couple has four surviving children, for example, the population will double every generation. In a flash, Darwin realized that natural selection would not be cumulative, but compounded: the population of organisms with favorable traits multiplies with every succeeding generation.

Collapse
by Jared Diamond
Published 25 Apr 2011

I acknowledge, however, that Maya archaeologists still disagree vigorously among themselves—in part, because the different strands evidently varied in importance among different parts of the Maya realm; because detailed archaeological studies are available for only some Maya sites; and because it remains puzzling why most of the Maya heartland remained nearly empty of population and failed to recover after the collapse and after regrowth of forests. With those caveats, it appears to me that one strand consisted of population growth outstripping available resources: a dilemma similar to the one foreseen by Thomas Malthus in 1798 and being played out today in Rwanda (Chapter 10), Haiti (Chapter 11), and elsewhere. As the archaeologist David Webster succinctly puts it, "Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape." Compounding that mismatch between population and resources was the second strand: the effects of deforestation and hillside erosion, which caused a decrease in the amount of useable farmland at a time when more rather than less farmland was needed, and possibly exacerbated by an anthropogenic drought resulting from deforestation, by soil nutrient depletion and other soil problems, and by the struggle to prevent bracken ferns from overrunning the fields.

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In fact, it has been exploding recently for many reasons: the adoption of crops native to the New World (especially corn, beans, sweet potatoes, and manioc, alias cassava), broadening the agricultural base and increasing food production beyond that previously possible with native African crops alone; improved hygiene, preventive medicine, vaccinations of mothers and children, antibi-otics, and some control of malaria and other endemic African diseases; and national unification and the fixing of national boundaries, thereby opening to settlement some areas that were formerly no-man's lands fought over by adjacent smaller polities. Population problems such as those of East Africa are often referred to as "Malthusian," because in 1798 the English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus published a famous book in which he argued that human population growth would tend to outrun the growth of food production. That's because (Malthus reasoned) population growth proceeds exponentially, while food production increases only arithmetically. For instance, if a population's doubling time is 35 years, then a population of 100 people in the year 2000, if it continues to grow with that same doubling time, will have doubled in the year 2035 to 200 people, who will in turn double to 400 people in 2070, who will double to 800 people in the year 2105, and so on.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

FIGURE 1 HOW THE WORLD CHANGED AFTER 1800 The rate of economic growth accelerated dramatically around the year 1800 with the takeoff of the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that moment, which corresponds to the historical period covered in the first volume of this book, much of the world lived under the conditions described by the English writer Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population painted a gloomy picture in which population growth would outstrip economic resources in the long run. Figure 2 shows an estimate of per capita income over an eight-hundred-year period in England, where the Industrial Revolution started. The hockey-stick shape of the curve, and the sudden transition to a much higher rate of growth, reflects the fact that the later period saw continual year-on-year increases in productivity that vastly outstripped the rate of population growth.

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In the days when the markets for such skills and services were localized due to the high costs of communications and transportation, there were plenty of openings for people farther down the hierarchy because mass audiences did not have access to the best of the best. But today, anyone can attend a performance by the Metropolitan Opera or the Royal Ballet live on a high-definition screen, which many would watch in preference to a third- or fourth-tier local company.13 MALTHUS REVISITED Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population had the bad luck to be published in 1798, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, just as a technological tsunami was gathering force. His prediction that human population growth would outstrip increases in productivity proved very wrong in the two centuries that followed, and human societies succeeded in enriching themselves on a per capita basis to a historically unprecedented degree.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life
by Daniel C. Dennett
Published 15 Jan 1995

Today we can readily enough imagine proving Darwin's first case — the brute historic fact of descent with modification — quite independently of any consideration of Natural selection or indeed any other mechanism for bringing these brute events about, but for Darwin the idea of the mechanism was both the {40} hunting license he needed, and an unwavering guide to the right questions to ask.1 The idea of natural selection was not itself a miraculously novel creation of Darwin's but, rather, the offspring of earlier ideas that had been vigorously discussed for years and even generations (for an excellent account of this intellectual history, see R. Richards 1987). Chief among these parent ideas was an insight Darwin gained from reflection on the 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus, which argued that population explosion and famine were inevitable, given the excess fertility of human beings, unless drastic measures were taken. The grim Malthusian vision of the social and political forces that could act to check human overpopulation may have strongly flavored Darwin's thinking (and undoubtedly has flavored the shallow political attacks of many an anti-Darwinian), but the idea Darwin needed from Malthus is purely logical.

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The idea that Design is something that has taken work to create, and {73} hence has value at least in the sense that it is something that might be conserved (and then stolen or sold), finds robust expression in economic terms. Had Darwin not had the benefit of being born into a mercantile world that had already created its Adam Smith and its Thomas Malthus, he would not have been in position to find ready-made pieces he could put together into a new, value-added product. (You see, the idea applies to itself very nicely.) The various sources of the Design that went into Darwin's grand idea give us important insights into the idea itself, but do no more to diminish its value or threaten its objectivity than the humble origins of methane diminish its BTUs when it is put to use as a fuel. 4.

The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car
by Tim Harford
Published 15 Mar 2006

Paul Klemperer, the auction designer who features in chapter 7, helped to design an auction for the United Kingdom government to kick-start their program of tradable emission permits. Anyone doubting my statement that “economists have long been in the forefront of analyzing environmental problems” will be surprised to hear that one of the first environmentalists was also one of the first and most famous economists, Thomas Malthus, whose study of overpopulation was published in 1798. (“An Essay on the Principle of Population” (London: Murray). Only slightly less famous is the inspiration for this entire chapter: Arthur Pigou, professor of economics at Cambridge University, whose seminal book The Economics of Welfare (London: Macmillan, 1920) developed the theory of externalities and the solution of externality pricing.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

Such communities would engage primarily in farming and only secondarily in manufacturing, but they would utilize the latest machinery and draw on the best agricultural science. Moreover, they would be able to grow enough food to supply an expanding population that, according to some economists such as Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), was doomed to increase faster than the means of subsistence. The affluence necessary for nearly all serious utopian schemes would thus be available. As envisioned by Owen, these communities would consist of multi-storied “parallelograms,” each housing between three hundred and two thousand men, women, and children.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

Allotments are small plots for city dwellers and others to grow vegetables and fruit for consumption by themselves, family and friends. They symbolise the historical continuity of the commons. Allotments have had a chequered history. At the time of the Speenhamland system, they were opposed by Thomas Malthus and Edmund Burke on the grounds that they would reduce labour supply to employers and slow capital accumulation. But gradually through the nineteenth century, sentiment changed. Three Parliamentary Acts between 1887 and 1908 empowered local authorities to acquire land to turn into municipal allotments and, in rural areas, County Smallholdings Estate.

The Mystery of Charles Dickens
by A. N. Wilson
Published 3 Jun 2020

The draconian, Malthusian New Poor Law of 1834, however, was trying to address a question which demanded more than the occasional Christmas turkey being taken to a delighted Bob Cratchit and Tiny Tim. The population had grown, and expert opinion, in and out of government, agreed with the Reverend Thomas Malthus’s view that there was only a fixed amount of food available at any one time: therefore when the population grew, the poor were in trouble. Malthusian economics, moreover, taught that the more the wages of the poor were subsidized, the less money there would be: there being, in this wrong-headed view of things, only a fixed amount of money to pay wages or subsidies.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming
by David Wallace-Wells
Published 19 Feb 2019

The planet’s only other similar boundary is the one separating the Sahara desert from the rest of Africa. That desert has expanded by 10 percent, too; in the winter, the figure is 18 percent. * * * — The privileged children of the industrialized West have long laughed at the predictions of Thomas Malthus, the British economist who believed that long-term economic growth was impossible, since each bumper crop or episode of growth would ultimately produce more children to consume or absorb it—and as a result the size of any population, including that of the planet as a whole, was a check against material well-being.

The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy
by Nick Romeo
Published 15 Jan 2024

Footnotes i Some have treated Piketty’s observation that the rate of return on capital, r, is greater than the growth rate of the economy, g, as a quasi-law, but his own policy proposal of a global wealth tax does not accept current arrangements as inevitable. ii The aspiration of “political economy” to refashion itself as a natural science also dominates the Englishman William Jevons’s 1862 A General Mathematical Theory of Political Economy, and it’s evident in the earlier work of nineteenth-century thinkers like Jean-Baptiste Say and Thomas Malthus, who attempted to identify general “laws” that govern economies. Much of the history of economic thought is a graveyard of such laws, from Say’s law to the iron law of wages. iii The book is spreading rapidly around the world. By 2023, forty-eight out of the sixty universities in the United Kingdom that offer an economics degree were using CORE’s The Economy for at least one course.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Published 2 Jan 2008

I acknowledge, however, that Maya archaeologists still disagree vigorously among themselves—in part, because the different strands evidently varied in importance among different parts of the Maya realm; because detailed archaeological studies are available for only some Maya sites; and because it remains puzzling why most of the Maya heartland remained nearly empty of population and failed to recover after the collapse and after regrowth of forests. With those caveats, it appears to me that one strand consisted of population growth outstripping available resources: a dilemma similar to the one foreseen by Thomas Malthus in 1798 and being played out today in Rwanda (Chapter 10), Haiti (Chapter 11), and elsewhere. As the archaeologist David Webster succinctly puts it, “Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape.” Compounding that mismatch between population and resources was the second strand: the effects of deforestation and hillside erosion, which caused a decrease in the amount of useable farmland at a time when more rather than less farmland was needed, and possibly exacerbated by an anthropogenic drought resulting from deforestation, by soil nutrient depletion and other soil problems, and by the struggle to prevent bracken ferns from overrunning the fields.

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In fact, it has been exploding recently for many reasons: the adoption of crops native to the New World (especially corn, beans, sweet potatoes, and manioc, alias cassava), broadening the agricultural base and increasing food production beyond that previously possible with native African crops alone; improved hygiene, preventive medicine, vaccinations of mothers and children, antibiotics, and some control of malaria and other endemic African diseases; and national unification and the fixing of national boundaries, thereby opening to settlement some areas that were formerly no-man’s lands fought over by adjacent smaller polities. Population problems such as those of East Africa are often referred to as “Malthusian,” because in 1798 the English economist and demographer Thomas Malthus published a famous book in which he argued that human population growth would tend to outrun the growth of food production. That’s because (Malthus reasoned) population growth proceeds exponentially, while food production increases only arithmetically. For instance, if a population’s doubling time is 35 years, then a population of 100 people in the year 2000, if it continues to grow with that same doubling time, will have doubled in the year 2035 to 200 people, who will in turn double to 400 people in 2070, who will double to 800 people in the year 2105, and so on.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality
by Richard Heinberg
Published 1 Jun 2011

Most economists would probably agree with the view that environmental constraints and a crisis in the financial world don’t add up to the end of growth — just a speed bump in the highway of progress. That’s because smart people will always be thinking of new technologies and of new ways to do more with less. And these will in turn be the basis of new commercial products and business models. Talk of limits typically elicits dismissive references to the failed warnings of Thomas Malthus — the 18th-century economist who reasoned that population growth would inevitably (and soon) outpace food production, leading to a general famine. Malthus was obviously wrong, at least in the short run: food production expanded throughout the 19th and 20th centuries to feed a fast-growing population.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived
by Adam Rutherford
Published 7 Sep 2016

They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State . . . but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood . . . George Bernard Shaw, also on the political left, said ‘The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of man.’ The British never did adopt a eugenics policy, despite England being the intellectual birthplace of the idea. Before Darwin and Galton, Thomas Malthus had formally fretted about population growth and control, and therein laid the foundations of improving the ‘stock’ of a people. But in the USA, and a few other countries (notably Sweden), the forced, involuntary and often secret sterilization of undesirables was embraced enthusiastically. From 1907 when Indiana passed the first mandate, until 1963, forced sterilization was legally administered in thirty-one states, with California the most vigorous adopter.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
by K. Eric Drexler
Published 6 May 2013

Bernal, and the father of theoretical astronautics, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. 15fn1missions to asteroids have become part of NASA’s plans: See, for example, http://www.nasa.gov/about/obamaspeechfeature.html. 15fn2because in the end Malthus was right: In his Essay on the Principle of Population, Reverend Thomas Malthus argued that population tended to grow exponentially and that this exponential growth would overrun the limits of food production even if production steadily increased. His general argument regarding exponential growth holds true for any imaginable production technology within the bounds of the material universe. 18His bold visions started early: In our forward-looking conversations Arthur had occasion to mention only a few of his past accomplishments.

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age
by Roger Bootle
Published 4 Sep 2019

Moreover, a higher rate of population growth would mean a higher ratio of nonproductive children to productive adults. (Mind you, just as in many poor societies today, stringent efforts were made to make children to some degree productive from an early age.) The constraints on living standards imposed by rising population were the central element in the theory propounded by the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who was both a minister of the Church and one of the early economists. These days his rank pessimism has been completely discredited. And rightly so. He really did give economics and economists a bad name. Writing in England in 1798, he said: The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

Everyone realized that radical transformations were under way, precipitated by sustained demographic growth—a previously unknown phenomenon—coupled with a rural exodus and the advent of the Industrial Revolution. How would these upheavals affect the distribution of wealth, the social structure, and the political equilibrium of European society? For Thomas Malthus, who in 1798 published his Essay on the Principle of Population, there could be no doubt: the primary threat was overpopulation.1 Although his sources were thin, he made the best he could of them. One particularly important influence was the travel diary published by Arthur Young, an English agronomist who traveled extensively in France, from Calais to the Pyrenees and from Brittany to Franche-Comté, in 1787–1788, on the eve of the Revolution.

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My goal in writing was to make this book accessible to people without any special technical training, while the book together with the technical appendix should satisfy the demands of specialists in the field. This procedure will also allow me to post revised online versions and updates of the tables, graphs, and technical apparatus. I welcome input from readers of the book or website, who can send comments and criticisms to piketty@ens.fr. Introduction 1. The English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) is considered to be one of the most influential members of the “classical” school, along with Adam Smith (1723–1790) and David Ricardo (1772–1823). 2. There is of course a more optimistic school of liberals: Adam Smith seems to belong to it, and in fact he never really considered the possibility that the distribution of wealth might grow more unequal over the long run.

The Third Industrial Revolution: How Lateral Power Is Transforming Energy, the Economy, and the World
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 27 Sep 2011

French Enlightenment philosopher and revolutionary Marquis de Condorcet captured the euphoria of the new age of progress when he proclaimed, No bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties . . . the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; . . . the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the control of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which Nature has placed us.16 Giddy over the prospect of creating a material cornucopia on Earth, the classical economists, with the exception of Thomas Malthus, were united in their belief that human industriousness could create a utopian paradise. The very idea that an acceleration of economic activity might result in a degraded environment and a dark future for unborn generations would have been unfathomable. HOW ECONOMIC THEORY BECAME IRRELEVANT This ideological blind spot shows up in nearly every one of the underlying assumptions of classical and neoclassical economic theory.

Complexity: A Guided Tour
by Melanie Mitchell
Published 31 Mar 2009

Such a view of gradualism—that small causes, taken over long periods, can have very large effects—was anathema to religious fundamentalists of the day, but Lyell’s evidence was compelling to Darwin, especially as, on his voyage, he could see for himself the results of different kinds of geological processes. Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) drew Darwin’s attention to the fact that population growth leads to competition for food and other resources. Malthus’s essay was about human population growth, but Darwin would adapt these ideas to explain the evolution of all living organisms via a continual “struggle for existence.”

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto
by Stewart Brand
Published 15 Mar 2009

Enlil’s action is violent, but it has a certain ecological logic: the noisiness of the human race is an outgrowth of overpopulation, a serious issue in ancient Mesopotamia, whose large populations often put the region’s resources under stress. It all reads like an early chapter in Steven LeBlanc’s chronicle of “constant battles” brought about by fecund humanity perpetually colliding with carrying capacity. Thomas Malthus told the same story in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798); so did my teacher Paul Ehrlich, whose book The Population Bomb (1968) put overpopulation at the top of the Green agenda. His book begins: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”

Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism
by Kevin Phillips
Published 31 Mar 2008

To Polanyi, an upheaval in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Britain yanked the nation’s financial markets from a previous position of being embedded in society and religion and stood them on their own—the rise of the unregulated and self-correcting market, which Polanyi discerned in economic developments and also in the theories of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, with some reference back to Adam Smith.33 Much more was involved than just that. Over more than two decades of studying the circumstances of the three leading world economic powers that preceded the United States, I have been drawn to see other origins—a kind of passing of the baton that initially included non-Anglo-Saxons.

Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science
by Jim Al-Khalili
Published 28 Sep 2010

For when one considers the sheer number of original ideas and contributions across so many areas of economic thought that Ibn Khaldūn invented we are left in absolutely no doubt that he is more worthy of the title.9 Ibn Khaldūn discovered a number of key economic notions several hundred years before their ‘official’ births, such as the virtues and necessity of a division of labour (before Smith), the principle of labour value (before David Ricardo), a theory of population (before Thomas Malthus) and the role of the state in the economy (before John Maynard Keynes). He then used these concepts to build a coherent dynamic system of economic theory.10 Not only was he the forerunner of European economists, such was his intellect that he is also considered to be the undisputed founder and father of the field of sociology.

The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be
by Moises Naim
Published 5 Mar 2013

The default answer is yes—unless, and until, we adjust to the decay of power and accept that the ways we cooperate across borders, both inside and outside the framework of governments, must change. There is no reason we cannot do so. The collapse of the world system has been repeatedly predicted at times of technological change and cultural and demographic flux. Thomas Malthus predicted that the world could not carry an expanding population. Yet it did. Witnessing the industrial revolution and the expansion of global markets and trade in the nineteenth century, the Marxists anticipated a collapse of capitalism under the weight of its internal contradictions. It did not.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

It may not feature in the textbooks but this S curve is no newcomer to the theatre of economics: it is, in fact, one of the oldest but most miscast of all actors in the play. Its shape first stepped on to the economic stage in 1838 when the Belgian mathematician Pierre Verhulst drew it to depict the trajectory of population growth, showing that populations would not increase exponentially, as the Reverend Thomas Malthus had believed, but would tend to a limit set by the availability, or carrying capacity, of resources such as food. It was a brilliant insight – worthy of an economic Oscar – but hardly anyone noticed the S curve’s star-like qualities, so it got dropped from the cast list for over a century. Left to languish backstage, the S curve’s talents were spotted by ecologists, biologists, demographers and statisticians who realised that it was a strong fit for describing many processes of growth in the natural world – from a child’s feet and the world’s forests to bacteria in a Petri dish and tumours in a body – and so they have used it ever since.

An Extraordinary Time: The End of the Postwar Boom and the Return of the Ordinary Economy
by Marc Levinson
Published 31 Jul 2016

And while the authors were careful to qualify their forecasts with caveats, their tone was decidedly apocalyptic: “When there is plenty of unused arable land, there can be more people and also more food per person. When all the land is already used, the trade-off between more people or more food per person becomes a choice between absolutes.” Warnings about a world unable to feed its population were nothing new; the English cleric Thomas Malthus had predicted much the same in 1798. But Malthus had fallen out of favor, largely because, nearly two centuries on, the anticipated catastrophe had not happened. The Limits to Growth went beyond Malthus in predicting a world short of oil to heat its homes, metals for its factories, and even clean water to drink.

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar
Published 6 Sep 2021

Assuming a raindrop is about 4 cubic millimetres, by the 47th minute the deluge would be 600 million litres of water.7 Of course, the rain in the 48th minute will be twice as large, so you are likely to get soaked in the car park. And if you make it to the car, the deluge in the 50th minute will comprise 5 billion litres of water. It would weigh 5 million tons. Frankly, if exponential rain is forecast, you’re best off staying at home. Exponential processes are counterintuitive. And we struggle to grasp them. Thomas Malthus, the eighteenth-century political economist, first articulated the problem. According to Malthus, the human population tends to grow exponentially – but we won’t realise the power of that exponential growth until too late. Eventually, human needs will outgrow our ability to produce food, bringing famine and pestilence.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking
by Michael Bhaskar
Published 2 Nov 2021

He built on theories from the likes of Anaximander and Lucretius, Erasmus Darwin (his grandfather) and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin read Adam Smith, and was thus familiar with the idea that an undirected process with numberless small instances of local competition could have extraordinary results: in Smith's case this was economic growth. Darwin was familiar with Thomas Malthus and his studies of population. Charles Lyell's key work on geology had radically shifted the perception of time. Darwin specifically acknowledged that ‘descent with modification’ had been recognised by thirty-four predecessors.25 Indeed, he was a generalist relying on an extensive communication with specialised experts – he maintained a continuous discussion with hundreds of correspondents (at least 231).26 His research was the work of a lifetime – a gradual realisation over years on the Beagle and decades of patient study.

Cities Are Good for You: The Genius of the Metropolis
by Leo Hollis
Published 31 Mar 2013

Amongst this traffic, going by foot seemed the best of all possible methods of getting around. Hanging on to the train’s door jamb, it was easy to think that at that moment the world was too full. Mega-cities can be seen both as a sign of increasing efficiency in our management of lives and proof that we are over-populated. In 1789 the Reverend Thomas Malthus warned that mankind was doomed if it ever reached 1 billion, because ‘the power of population is infinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man’.3 In 1968 Paul Ehrlich came up with the same cry for help in his influential book, Population Bomb, whose first editions started with the prediction: ‘The battle to feed all of humanity is over.

Philanthrocapitalism
by Matthew Bishop , Michael Green and Bill Clinton
Published 29 Sep 2008

The economist David Ricardo argued that handouts to the poor pushed up the wages at which people were willing to work, and so increased unemployment. By saving today’s poor from hunger, charity was only perpetuating or worsening the problem by ensuring there would be more mouths to feed tomorrow, argued the Reverend Thomas Malthus in his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” in which he predicted that demand for food would outstrip supply as the population continued to grow. Although neither critique stood the test of time particularly well, Malthus and Ricardo shook the confidence of philanthropists in the rectitude of what they were doing, helping to bring the second golden age of philanthropy to an end with a whimper.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

But food comes from agriculture, so the price of food regulates wages: a low price of food (or ‘corn', as Ricardo wrote in the language of the day) will permit lower wages and therefore higher profits and incentives to invest in future production (for example in manufacturing) and promote economic growth. A high wage due to low productivity in agriculture will mean lower profits, and hence little investment in future production, which in turn leads to slower economic growth. Ricardo inherited this ‘dismal theory' of wages from his contemporary Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), another English writer on political economy, who proposed that whenever real wages are above subsistence level, the population will grow until it is so large that the demand for food will push up food prices enough to bring wages back to subsistence level.35 In Ricardo's view, then, wages depended heavily on the productivity of agriculture: if productivity rose and food became cheaper, wages would fall.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life
by Ozan Varol
Published 13 Apr 2020

As rocket scientist David Murray explains, Darwin argued that organic material “evolves just as inorganic material does: with minute changes in each descendant that, over time, accumulate to form new biological appendages like eyes, hands, or wings.”67 Darwin also drew inspiration from the late-eighteenth-century economist Thomas Malthus. Malthus argued that humans tend to outgrow resources like food, creating a competition for survival. This competition, Darwin believed, drove the evolutionary process, leading the species best adapted to their environment to survive.68 Combinatory play is also the hallmark of great musicians.

Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously About the Planet
by Roger Scruton
Published 30 Apr 2014

Arthur Young began publishing the monthly Annals of Agriculture in 1784, and counted among his contributors Jeremy Bentham, the pioneering Coke of Holkham and King George III (who adopted Ralph Richardson, the name of his shepherd, as his nom de plume). At the end of the eighteenth century began to appear Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, which sounded the first of many alarm-bells about growth – in this case the growth of population, made apparent by the flight to the towns and the sudden visibility of the ordinary people. The plight of the land and of those who were employed on it was a leading concern of William Cobbett, the farmer and pamphleteer whose Rural Rides (summarizing two decades of environmental activism between bouts of hare coursing and fox hunting) appeared in 1830.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
by Robert H. Frank
Published 15 Jan 1999

For instance, if there were too many carriage makers and not enough automobile assembly workers, wage adjustments in these and other labor markets would quickly restore the proper balance—all without government bureaucrats ever having to lift a finger. Eighty-three years after publication of The Wealth of Nations, Charles Darwin launched a series of books that analyzed competition not among human traders but among animals in the wild. Darwin was much influenced by the British economist Thomas Malthus, an intellectual descendant of Smith’s. It is therefore no surprise that Darwin’s view of competition was in many ways similar to Smith’s. For example, in Darwin’s scheme, the beneficial mutation played the role of Smith’s cost-saving innovation, and transmission was accomplished not by emulation but by relative reproductive success.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma
by Mustafa Suleyman
Published 4 Sep 2023

Crops could be ruined by disease or pests, spoil after harvesting, or get stolen by invading armies. Most farmers lived hand to mouth, often working as serfs, giving up much of their scant crop. Even in the most productive parts of the world, yields were low and fragile. Life was tough, lived on the edge of disaster. When Thomas Malthus argued in 1798 that a fast-growing population would quickly exhaust the carrying capacity of agriculture and lead to a collapse, he wasn’t wrong; static yields would and often did follow this rule. What he hadn’t accounted for was the scale of human ingenuity. Assuming favorable weather conditions and using the latest techniques, in the thirteenth century each hectare of wheat in England yielded around half a ton.

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
by Alice Schroeder
Published 1 Sep 2008

Carnegie built 2,509 libraries (costing $56 million) and established other public works using over 90% of his $480 million steel-made wealth. 42. Ruane’s first wife, Elizabeth, suffered from a mood disorder and committed suicide in 1988. 43. Bill Ruane and others recalled this speech. 44. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb. New York: Ballantine Books, 1968; Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principles of Population. The Population Bomb was based on the work of the nineteenth-century demographer and statistician Thomas Malthus, who said that humans procreate in a geometric rather than arithmetic progression; thus the earth’s population would inevitably expand beyond the point at which its resources could support it. At some point, Malthus postulated, misery and vice (e.g., war, pandemic, famine, infant mortality, political unrest) would reduce the population to a sustainable level.

…

The debate essentially centered over whether technology could outpace population growth, species extinction, and global warming. Buffett looked at the problem of expanding population and diminishing resources in terms of a “margin of safety.” “There is a carrying capacity to the earth. It’s far, far, far, far, far greater than [Thomas] Malthus ever dreamed. On the other hand, there is some carrying capacity, and the one thing about carrying capacity is that you want to err on the low side. If you were provisioning a huge rocket ship to the moon and had enough for two hundred people and didn’t know how long the journey would take, you probably wouldn’t put more than a hundred fifty people on the ship.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

It was after the Hamburg fire of 1842 that reinsurance was developed as a way for insurance companies to share the risk of major disasters. ag Wallace was also a member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, to which he presented his ‘Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times’, a work which in some respects anticipated Thomas Malthus’s later Essay on the Principle of Population. ah Scott was a victim of the financial crisis triggered by the first Latin American debt crisis (see Chapter 2). Perhaps he was also a victim of his own appetite for real estate. To help finance the cost of his beloved country seat at Abbotsford, the author had become a sleeping partner in the printers that published his books, James Ballantyne and Co., and the associated publishing house of John Ballantyne & Co.

Why geography matters: three challenges facing America : climate change, the rise of China, and global terrorism
by Harm J. De Blij
Published 15 Nov 2007

It is not enough to produce a quantity of food for people to sustain themselves; they must also be able to A FUTURE GEOGRAPHY OF HUMAN POPULATION 105 afford to buy it. Well-stocked markets most of whose local customers cannot pay for a pound of rice do not reflect an absence of malnutrition. MOMENTOUS TRANSITION When the English economist Thomas Malthus in 1798 published a warning that the population in Britain was growing faster than the means of subsistence, he predicted that population growth would be checked by hunger within 50 years, leading to the disintegration of the social order. For three decades after sounding the alarm, Malthus faced severe criticism from those who saw the future differently, but he gave as good as he got.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey Sachs
Published 1 Jan 2008

The pressures on the ecological systems are intensifying, and development and dissemination of sustainable technologies are far too slow. If we do little more than scale up what we are consuming today, we will drive many of the planet’s ecosystems, and countless species, to the point of collapse. The most famous early doomsday prediction came in 1798 from the Reverend Thomas Malthus, who noted that populations tend to rise geometrically (in compounded multiples) while food production only rises arithmetically (in added increments). Populations would be held in check mainly by misery. Gains in productivity, Malthus opined, would be quickly swallowed up by further population growth, which would drive temporary advances in living standards back down to subsistence.

A People's History of Poverty in America
by Stephen Pimpare
Published 11 Nov 2008

60 The households in Beverly Stadum’s study of relief applicants from 1900 to 1930 are also ones in which addicted, philandering, and abusive men are common, men whose presence, as often as not, is deemed by women to be more harmful than beneficial; sometimes even by caseworkers who usually sought to enforce a “traditional” family structure—even they could see that a two-parent home was not always the best solution.61 Finally, as Raphael writes:The presence of abusers in the lives of large percentages of women on welfare means that we need to seriously rethink conventional wisdom about the large numbers of single mothers supposedly raising their children without the presence of a male.62 Sex, Power, Poverty Throughout American history, relief policy has been obsessed with the sexual and reproductive behavior of poor women, if not always in a consistent or coherent fashion. Some of this might be traced back to English Parson Thomas Malthus and his fear that the unchecked reproduction of the lower classes would lead to scarcity in the food supply. Malthus had a profound influence on the English Poor Law of 1834 (which sought to end cash relief and provide aid only in the workhouse) and, by extension, on ours.63 Much of his line of argument was adopted by the morality-minded reformers of the Gilded Age, like Josephine Shaw Lowell:While the acknowledgment is made that every person born into a civilized community has a right to live, yet the community has the right to say that incompetent and dangerous persons shall not, so far as can be helped, be born to acquire this right to live upon others.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity
by Anthony Berglas , William Black , Samantha Thalind , Max Scratchmann and Michelle Estes
Published 28 Feb 2015

It is difficult to appreciate just how grim life was for ordinary people for most of man’s recorded history. If families had an average of five children each, then on average three of them had to die in order to maintain a stable population that could be supported by the available resources. This was famously documented by Thomas Malthus, who wrote in 1798 that “the power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man … that the actual population is only kept equal to the means of subsistence by misery and vice”. Providing more food for the destitute merely increases their number and thereby multiplies their misery.

Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
by Charles Wheelan
Published 18 Apr 2010

In short, fostering productivity growth is like raising children: We know what kinds of things are important even if there is no blueprint for raising an Olympic athlete or a Harvard scholar. The study of human capital has profound implications for public policy. Most important, it can tell us why we haven’t all starved to death. The earth’s population has grown to six billion; how have we been able to feed so many mouths? In the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus famously predicted a dim future for humankind because he believed that as society grew richer, it would continuously squander those gains through population growth—having more children. These additional mouths would gobble up the surplus. In his view, humankind was destined to live on the brink of subsistence, recklessly procreating during the good times and then starving during the bad.

Who Owns the Future?
by Jaron Lanier
Published 6 May 2013

Is there really something essential and vital about acoustic instruments that computers can’t touch? Another incarnation of Pascal’s bargain presents itself. I don’t really know, but the cost of holding on to my perception of a difference is manageable, while the cost if I let go might be great, even if the resulting amnesia would hide the loss from me. CAN WE HANDLE OUR OWN POWER? Thomas Malthus articulated fear of an apocalypse in a naturalistic framework instead of the established supernatural ones. The future he dreaded from the perspective of the 18th century was one where our own successes grant us gifts we cannot absorb, leading to catastrophe. In a typical Malthusian scenario, agriculture, public health, medicine, and industrialization enable an unsustainable population explosion, which leads to catastrophic famine.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
by Merlin Sheldrake
Published 11 May 2020

Rudolf Virchow understood the organism to be made up of a community of cooperating cells, each working for the good of the whole, just as a population of interdependent cooperating citizens underpinned the operation of a healthy nation-state (Ball [2019], ch. 1). to exist at all: For “close to the margins” see Sapp (2004). The relationship between Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, Thomas Malthus’s analysis of food supply and human populations, and Adam Smith’s theory of the market has received considerable scholarly attention. See for example Young (1985). “bodily, intellectual, and moral”: Sapp (1994), ch. 2. “for this year’s Symposium”: Sapp (2004). free of cultural bias: For Needham see Haraway (2004), p. 106; Lewontin (2000), p. 3.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility
by Robert Zubrin
Published 30 Apr 2019

Indeed, it has been responsible for most of the worst human-caused disasters of the past two hundred years. So let's take it apart. Figure 12.1. Contrary to Malthus's theory, human global well-being has increased with population size, and at an accelerating rate. Two hundred years ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus set forth the proposition that population growth must always outrun production as a fundamental law of nature. This theory provided the basis for the cruel British response to famines in Ireland and India during the latter part of the nineteenth century, denying food aid or even regulatory, taxation, or rent relief to millions of starving people on the pseudoscientific grounds that their doom was inevitable.1 Yet the data show that the Malthusian theory is entirely counterfactual.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

Meanwhile the planned obsolescence of software means that earlier versions of major programs may no longer be supported. Computer managers are moving users to Windows without always giving them the processor power, memory, or disk space to work effectively. For many users, computer software seems related to hardware as Thomas Malthus believed population responded to food resources: software does not just match but eventually outstrips hardware in their respective rates of growth. Users who do not have enough computer power spend more and more time waiting for their systems to finish work or struggling with messages that protest, accusingly, "out of memory."'

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

By following the long-term trends in evolution we can show what technology wants. 7 Convergence In 2009, the world celebrated the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and honored his theory’s impact upon our science and culture. Overlooked in the celebrations was Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with the same theory of evolution, at approximately the same time, 150 years ago. Weirdly, both Wallace and Darwin found the theory of natural selection after reading the same book on population growth by Thomas Malthus. Darwin did not publish his revelation until provoked by Wallace’s parallel discovery. Had Darwin died at sea on his famous voyage (a not uncommon fate at that time) or been killed by one of his many ailments during his studious years in London, we would be celebrating the birthday of Wallace as the sole genius behind the theory.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 13 Mar 2012

But in this chapter I’ll simplify it as a dual-process model, pitting reason (above the neck) against the two sets of passions (below). 10. This famous phrase was coined by Herbert Spencer, but Darwin used it too. 11. Darwin 1998/1871, part I, chapter 5. More on this in chapter 9. 12. The idea was developed by Herbert Spencer in the late nineteenth century, but it goes back to Thomas Malthus in the eighteenth century. Darwin did believe that tribes competed with tribes (see chapter 9), but he was no social Darwinist, according to Desmond and Moore 2009. 13. Hitler was a vegetarian too, but nobody would argue that endorsing vegetarianism makes one a Nazi. 14. Pinker 2002, p. 106. 15.

The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking and the Future of the Global Economy
by Mervyn King
Published 3 Mar 2016

A woman who was sixty in 1902, and subject to that year’s mortality rates, would have expected to live for another fourteen and a half years. By 2012 that expectation had increased to over twenty-five years. Changes in average longevity have proved hard to predict. In 1798, the English cleric and scholar Thomas Malthus wrote that ‘with regard to the duration of human life, there does not appear to have existed, from the earliest ages of the world, to the present moment, the smallest permanent symptom, or indication, of increasing prolongation’.10 That past experience was to prove a poor predictor of the future.

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010
by T M Devine
Published 25 Aug 2011

As national populations rose and social tensions increased because of economic change, so governments became more interested in emigration, seeing it not as a source of loss, as previously, but rather as a potential safety-valve for emerging demographic problems. In Britain, the ideology of ‘systematic colonization’ became a fashionable set of ideas and theories associated with Edward Gibbon Wakefield and others. Building on the theories of Thomas Malthus, it was argued by advocates such as Wakefield that emigration could be a blessing rather than a curse, creating markets abroad for British industry while, at the same time, easing population pressures at home. These views became widely influential and in 1837 the New Zealand Association was formed in London along the lines suggested by Wakefield to support emigration to the Antipodes.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith
Published 19 Jun 2012

In his ‘Builder’s Creed’ (1917), Eaton said – somewhat immodestly – that he aspired to create ‘God’s garden’: ‘I shall try to build at Forest Lawn a great park, devoid of mis-shapen monuments and other customary signs of earthly Death, but filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers.’73 With its wide roads, carefully manicured lawns and ornamental flowering shrubs, the memorial park was thoroughly suburban and for many Americans this final resting place felt just like home. The Urban Graveyard Effect Cities were once decidedly bad for your health. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, more people died in cities than were born in them, a situation referred to as the ‘urban graveyard effect’. It was Thomas Malthus, in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1803), who first described the urban graveyard effect. He calculated that half of all children born in Manchester and Birmingham died before the age of three. Malthus put this high mortality rate down to the ‘closeness and foulness of the air’. In 1861, the life expectancy of a male baby born in Liverpool was twenty-six years compared to fifty-six for one born in the rural community of Okehampton, Devon.

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 1 Jan 2002

Charles Buller, his private secretary, had been born in Calcutta, studied history with Thomas Carlyle and had won a reputation as a brilliant barrister before entering the House of Commons; while Durham’s principal adviser, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, had written extensively on land reform in Australia – ironically, while languishing in Newgate prison, where he had been sent for three years for abducting an under-age heiress. He was just one of many thinkers of his generation who were haunted by the spectre, conjured up by the statistician Thomas Malthus, of unsustainable population growth at home. To Wakefield, the colonies were the obvious answer as an overflow for surplus Britons. But to encourage free settlement, as opposed to continued transportation, he was convinced that some kind of accommodation had to be reached with the settlers’ inherently British sense of independence.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

As far as I know, the first economist to recognize the fundamental problem and its relation to the money system was Frederick Soddy, a Nobel laureate and pioneer of nuclear chemistry who turned his attention to economics in the 1920s. Soddy was among the first to debunk the ideology of infinite exponential economic growth, extending the reasoning of Thomas Malthus beyond population to economics. Herman Daly describes Soddy’s view succinctly: The idea that people can live off the interest of their mutual indebtedness … is just another perpetual motion scheme—a vulgar delusion on a grand scale. Soddy seems to be saying that what is obviously impossible for the community—for everyone to live on interest—should also be forbidden to individuals, as a principle of fairness.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World
by Oliver Morton
Published 26 Sep 2015

But even though Britain had thus assured itself preferential treatment, by the 1890s the best guano was largely gone and the nitrates were going. Crookes warned that ever-increasing demand would use up the desert’s best beds in just a few decades. The worry that the supply of food could not keep up with the growth of the population was not new. Crookes was speaking exactly a century after the parson Thomas Malthus had first voiced concerns on the matter in his Essay on the Principle of Population. Nor was it new to worry that a mineral resource might run out. As Crookes noted, Stanley Jevons had warned decades before that Britain could run out of coal, arguing that the more efficiently the stuff was used, the greater the demand for it would be.

God Is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 31 Mar 2009

In Britain the number of people who attend mosques every week is closing in on the number who attend Anglican churches—despite the fact that Muslims only make up 3 percent of the population and Britain has two thousand years of history as a Christian nation. The Muslim population is bound to grow. The continent that gave the world Thomas Malthus, the first great worrier about overpopulation, is suffering from a birth dearth. Over the next twenty-five years the number of Europeans of working age will decline by 7 percent while the number of retired people will increase by 50 percent. Europe has little choice but to import workers from the Muslim societies on its southern periphery, where birth rates are high and job opportunities limited.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire
by Danny Dorling and Sally Tomlinson
Published 15 Jan 2019

Trade is never free, and freedom means far more than having the right to trade. WHAT WAS FREE TRADE? What are the British actually good at? One thing the British produce is an unusual number of economists, including those who later came, through their work, to define the academic subject. Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus and James Mill are remembered now, perhaps unfairly, for talking about the magical invisible hand of the market (Smith), the problem of poor people having too much sex (Malthus), and how India was a basket case until the British arrived (Mill).5 Their ideas all had great influence, but none of those ideas have actually survived the test of time as much as those of their contemporary David Ricardo and his theories about free trade.6 David Ricardo, son of a Dutch stockbroker, was born in London in 1772.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
by Janek Wasserman
Published 23 Sep 2019

Even if Menger and the other marginalists saw their work as groundbreaking, a gradualist picture better characterizes the social scientific landscape.21 At the turn of the nineteenth century, political economy developed rapidly, primarily under the influence of Scottish and English scholars such as Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. Their work introduced a new level of abstraction and theorization to questions of trade, industry, and exchange. These classical economists sought to explain the fundamental principles of human interaction: how human self-interest benefited society, how the division of labor led to greater productivity and wealth, how competition in the marketplace ensured the best prices and outcomes for producers and consumers.

Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution
by Emma Griffin
Published 10 Jun 2013

With characteristic style, the historian Thomas Carlyle deplored the degradation of the ‘working body of this rich English Nation’. 4017.indd 10 25/01/13 8:21 PM introduction: ‘a simple naritive’ 11 And writers from across the political spectrum took up their pens to join Carlyle in debating the ‘Condition of England’. The educated few had been muttering about the failure of the nation’s increasing wealth to better the condition of the labouring poor since the end of the eighteenth century. In the 1790s, Thomas Malthus’ gloomy predictions concerning the consequences of unchecked population growth, and the investigations of the Rev. Mr David Davies and Sir Frederick Eden into the hardships created by rising food prices, opened a new line of enquiry into the living standards of the poor. By the early nineteenth century, interest in the question extended beyond political economists.

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves
by Matthew Sweet
Published 13 Feb 2018

It was a hint of the secret project that the royals have pursued for decades through their manipulation of the Commonwealth, the European Union, and the global financial system—a conspiracy to reshape the world with a brutal form of laissez-faire economics adapted from the ideas of the British philosophers Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham. “You mean utilitarianism?” I asked. “You may want to call it that,” he laughed. “Maybe ‘fascism’ would be a better word.” And he reflected on a state visit to Germany that the queen had made that June. Did I think it was a coincidence that she had gone to meet Angela Merkel just a few days before the Greek referendum on a financial bailout from the European Union?

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

Specialization in meat production for the English market led to an excessive dependence on the potato to feed the rural workforce and therefore acute vulnerability to the blight of that vegetable, Phytophthora infestans, which struck in the mid-1840s. True to Ricardian principles, the British government declined to send emergency food to alleviate the famine; a million people died, vindicating not Ricardo but Thomas Malthus, the author of the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which predicted such calamities. The surviving Irish were reduced to exporting themselves, mostly to America. * The ‘dark Satanic mills’ of the text may well refer to the Albion Flour Mills, built by Boulton & Watt in London in 1769 and destroyed by fire in 1791

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
by Richard Dawkins
Published 21 Sep 2009

We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth. * Darwin told us that he derived his original inspiration for natural selection from Thomas Malthus, and perhaps this particular phrase of Darwin was prompted by the following apocalyptic paragraph, called to my attention by my friend Matt Ridley: ‘Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.

The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth
by Robin Hanson
Published 31 Mar 2016

But as hardware supply is very elastic, and may even be downward sloping, em wages should stay low, at least in the absence of strong wage or population regulations. Malthusian Wages Thus the introduction of competitively supplied ems should greatly lower wages, to near the full cost of the computer hardware needed to run em brains. Such a scenario is famously called “Malthusian,” after Thomas Malthus who in 1798 argued that when population can grow faster than total economic output, wages fall to near subsistence levels. Note that in this section we are assuming that enough ems are willing to copy themselves to fill new job openings, and that they have not organized to avoid competing with each other.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions
by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths
Published 4 Apr 2016

It’s true that you’re unlikely to find the needle the majority of the time, but optimal stopping is your best defense against the haystack, no matter how large. Lover’s Leap The passion between the sexes has appeared in every age to be so nearly the same that it may always be considered, in algebraic language, as a given quantity. —THOMAS MALTHUS I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children they just about throw up. —BARBARA BUSH Before he became a professor of operations research at Carnegie Mellon, Michael Trick was a graduate student, looking for love. “It hit me that the problem has been studied: it is the Secretary Problem!

The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State
by James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg
Published 3 Feb 1997

Adam Smith may not have been the first writer on economic matters to reduce the welfare of nations to the action of individuals, but he put it most succinctly and with the greatest authority: Every individual is continually exerting himself to find out the most advantageous employment for whatever capital he can command. It is his own advantage, indeed, and not that of the society, which he has in view But the study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to the society. Thomas Malthus, the founder of population studies, saw that the Adam Smith argument could be applied not only to the development of the economy of nations but also to the survival of human populations. He is well known for his proposition that "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 1 Jan 2004

We will consider in more detail in the next section some of the political institutions that rule over these hierarchies of the global system. Finally we should add, as in a sinister cookbook, one final ingredient that completes the recipe of the global topography of poverty and exploitation, one final portion about demography, the social science most firmly linked to biopower. Already in nineteenth-century England, Thomas Malthus, an economist and Anglican minister, warned of the catastrophic consequences of overpopulation. It is not uncommon today to hear similar calls for population control from international aid organizations and the NGO community. What these organizations propose (in charitable and humanitarian tones) is often in fact dictated and enacted in much more sinister terms by the major international agencies and national governments.

The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 1 Jan 2000

On August 29, a 38-yearold stockbroker as spokesman for this community submitted the first of three letters on this matter to the Morning Chronicle, complaining that the public "do not seem to be sufficiently impressed with the importance of the subject, nor of the disastrous consequences which may attend the further depreciation of the paper."" His name was David Ricardo, and this was the first time his name had appeared in print. The letters and additional commentary subsequently appeared as a tract titled "The High Price of Bullion." Ricardo was born in 1772, when Adam Smith was fifty years old and Thomas Malthus, Ricardo's beloved friend and unremitting intellectual opponent, was six years old; Ricardo first met Malthus in 1809 at the very moment he was sending in his letters to the Morning Chronicle.19 Ricardo's father was a Jewish merchant banker and stockbroker jobber, as the English call it-who took his son in as an employee when the boy was only fourteen.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them
by Philip Collins
Published 4 Oct 2017

In 1795, in the midst of the revolutionary terror instigated by Robespierre, the Marquis de Condorcet used his enforced period of hiding to write a book called Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Human Mind. It is, to this day, one of the great accounts of the idea of human progress. Condorcet argued that social evils were the result of ignorance. He eschewed belief in a utopian end-state, writing that human history was a permanent state of adaptation. The book inspired Thomas Malthus to write An Essay on the Principle of Population, which he published in 1798. Malthus infamously argued that the world could not cope with population growth were it not for periodic natural disasters and social catastrophes such as famine. Condorcet thought human societies were flexible enough to adapt; Malthus thought population growth would bring disaster.

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Mancur Olson argued that democracies inevitably become the prisoners of powerful interest groups. “On balance,” he concluded, “special interest organizations and collusions reduce efficiency and aggregate income in the societies in which they operate and make political life more divisive.”3 A group of MIT academics, who mysteriously called themselves the Club of Rome, outdid Thomas Malthus by arguing that the world was about to run out not only of food but also of all the basic materials of life, from oil to water; The Limits to Growth (1972) sold more than 12 million copies. In 1975, Time magazine published a cover story asking, “Can Capitalism Survive?” A nation that had emerged from the Second World War believing firmly that it was successful and good came to believe that, at the very least, it was unsuccessful and bad, and that, quite possibly, it was doomed.

Model Thinker: What You Need to Know to Make Data Work for You
by Scott E. Page
Published 27 Nov 2018

Moore’s law has persisted because spending on research and development has generated a near constant rate of improvement. Demographers apply the exponential growth model to human populations. A population that grows at 6% a year doubles in size in twelve years. In thirty-six years, it doubles three times, and in one hundred years, it doubles eight times (increasing 256-fold). In 1798 British economist Thomas Malthus noticed that the population was growing exponentially and wrote a model showing that if the economy’s ability to produce food only increased linearly, then a crisis loomed. The short version goes as follows: Population was growing like 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,.… Food production was growing like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,.… Malthus foresaw disaster.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

His final act of forewarning came just a few months before his death in 2010, when he told the Australian newspaper that the human population explosion and “unbridled consumption” had already sealed our species’ fate. Humanity would be gone in the next hundred years, he said. “There are too many people here already.”10 We’ve heard this song before, of course. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as the global human population was screaming past the 1 billion mark, the English scholar Thomas Malthus warned that advances in food production inevitably led to population growth, placing increasing numbers of poor people at greater risk of starvation and disease. Viewed from the developed world, it often looks as though a Malthusian catastrophe has largely been avoided; agricultural advances have kept us one step ahead of disaster.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

Roger Scruton once wrote that ‘Left-wing people find it very hard to get on with Right-wing people, because they believe that they are evil. Whereas I have no problem getting on with Left-wing people, because I simply believe that they are mistaken.’18 It’s hard to make this point without sounding smug but it’s obviously true, and not a recent phenomenon. Thomas Sowell cited this pattern going back to the eighteenth century, when Thomas Malthus said of his critics that ‘I cannot doubt the talents of such men as Godwin and Condorcet. I am unwilling to doubt their candor.’ In return the radical William Godwin called Malthus ‘malignant’ and questioned ‘the humanity of the man . . . I profess myself at a loss to conceive of what earth the man was made.’

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future
by Ed Conway
Published 15 Jun 2023

7 Now in some senses these two men were rehashing a very old debate, one that has raged since at least the era of ancient Greece. Confucius, Plato and Aristotle had all expressed fears about humankind’s propensity to throw the natural world out of balance. In the late eighteenth century such worries were given a name and a framework by English economist Thomas Malthus, whose 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population warned that humans tended to multiply far faster than the ability of the land to produce enough food to feed them. We were, warned Malthus, stuck in a trap, and the bigger the population grew, the more likely we were to face famines, shortages and destruction.8 Some took the other side, both before and after Malthus.

The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World
by David Deutsch
Published 30 Jun 2011

The terms can also refer to moods, such as cheerfulness or depression, but, again, moods do not necessitate any particular stance about the future: the statesman Winston Churchill suffered from intense depression, yet his outlook on the future of civilization, and his specific expectations as wartime leader, were unusually positive. Conversely the economist Thomas Malthus, a notorious prophet of doom (of whom more below), is said to have been a serene and happy fellow, who often had his companions at the dinner table in gales of laughter. Blind optimism is a stance towards the future. It consists of proceeding as if one knows that the bad outcomes will not happen.

Coming of Age in the Milky Way
by Timothy Ferris
Published 30 Jun 1988

14 Darwin’s second premise is that all living creatures tend to produce more offspring than the environment can support. It’s a cruel world, in which only a fraction of the wolves and turtles and dragonflies that come into existence manage to find sustenance and avoid predators long enough to reproduce. The English economist Thomas Malthus had quantified these harsh facts of life by pointing out that most species reproduce geometrically, while the environment can support no better than a linear increase in their populations.* Darwin read Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population in London in 1838—“for amusement,” he recalled—and the hypothesis of evolution by natural selection began to take form in his mind.

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William J. Bernstein
Published 5 May 2009

(Note that pleasure and preference do not enter into Ricardo's analysis. Our attorney may enjoy carpentry and decide to do the job himself-a valid emotional choice, but not an economically rational one.) Alas, Principles, and Ricardo himself, arrived too late to save England from the draconian Corn Law of 1815. In response to a pro-Corn Law tract by Thomas Malthus, Ricardo wrote an anti-Corn Law pamphlet, "An Essay on the Influence of a low Price of Corn on the Profits of Stock." In it, he pointed out that the major advantage of the "real" England (as opposed to the hypothetical England of Principles) lay in its factory machinery. The corn laws, he wrote, impeded the purchase of foreign grain and forced England to waste its precious labor in less productive farmwork.

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World
by Ruchir Sharma
Published 5 Jun 2016

Just before oil prices started to plunge that year, President Putin was celebrated on magazine covers as “the most powerful man in the world” following a string of apparent foreign policy successes including the occupation of the Crimea.8 It was a classic case of hype peaking after the end of a trend: Russia was already falling behind the West in average income, and its oil-fueled recession would accelerate the slump. The Rosy Disaster Scenarios Although the fortunes of commodity economies have strong links to volatile price swings, the hype for them is often driven by an emotional form of straight-line thinking derived from the Malthusian disaster scenario. Ever since the English scholar Thomas Malthus first predicted in the early nineteenth century that rising global population would outpace farm output and lead to mass starvation, experts have put forth pessimistic theories every few decades, if not every few years, despite Malthus’s prediction never having been realized. Just after a spurt in food prices in 2011, the international organization Oxfam warned that a slower rate of increase in farm output amid rising population would lead to food shortages.

Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
by Kevin Davies
Published 5 Oct 2020

While most of the fanfare centered on CRISPR’s potential for treating human disease, some commentators, including British author and politician Matt Ridley, were struck by the implications for crops. Ten thousand years ago, farmers in what is now Turkey used cross-breeding to select a random mutation in wheat plants in the Q gene on chromosome 5A, which rendered the seed head less brittle and the seed husks easier to harvest efficiently.9 In 1798, English political economist Thomas Malthus published a famous treatise in which he showed that human population growth was outstripping the increase in agricultural productivity. The growing competition for resources leads inevitably to a Malthusian collapse caused by war, famine, or pestilence. In her book The Age of Living Machines, MIT president emerita Susan Hockfield argues that Malthus was wrong because of the repeated invention of new technologies that have increased agricultural productivity.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race
by Walter Isaacson
Published 9 Mar 2021

Darwin and Wallace had a key trait that is a catalyst for creativity: they had wide-ranging interests and were able to make connections between different disciplines. Both had traveled to exotic places where they observed the variation of species, and both had read “An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Thomas Malthus, an English economist. Malthus argued that the human population was likely to grow faster than the food supply. The resulting overpopulation would lead to famine that would weed out the weaker and poorer people. Darwin and Wallace realized this could be applied to all species and thus lead to a theory of evolution driven by the survival of the fittest.

Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World
by Nick Bostrom
Published 26 Mar 2024

If the number of humans (like the number of robots) were permitted to grow freely, then average human income would fall to subsistence level (like the robot’s income falls to their subsistence level) once the size of the human population attains its evolutionary equilibrium. We would then have a situation in which there is a vast number of robots, a vast number of humans, very high world GDP, and mere subsistence-level average incomes. This would be essentially just a scaled-up version of the bleak picture of the world that Thomas Malthus presented. * * * This simple three-factor model makes a number of assumptions which can of course be questioned. The assumptions that there is no technological progress and no increase in land are, I think, less rickety than might initially appear. I expect that the rate of economically relevant technological progress will eventually asymptote to zero (once most useful inventions have already been made).

Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay
Published 2 Jan 2009

You see serious people overreacting so they can claim they’re ‘doing something,’ and they’re doing something before they assess the real costs of whatever it is they’re doing, not to mention the benefits of what we already have. We could go back to the Stone Age if we really wanted to reduce our carbon footprints to zero, but the cure would be worse than the disease. “People seem to be very Malthusian right now,” he added. “Thomas Malthus argued food supply would increase, and so would population— only faster—until the latter outraced the former and then you would have famine and catastrophe. Instead, for the last two hundred years, population grew, standards of living went up, and life expectancy soared. Connectivity was the key—connectivity and trade.

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

An extraordinary proportion of work came out of the rector, the English parish priest with no worries, erudition, a large or at least comfortable house, domestic help, a reliable supply of tea and scones with clotted cream, and an abundance of free time. And, of course, optionality. The enlightened amateur, that is. The Reverends Thomas Bayes (as in Bayesian probability) and Thomas Malthus (Malthusian overpopulation) are the most famous. But there are many more surprises, cataloged in Bill Bryson’s Home, in which the author found ten times more vicars and clergymen leaving recorded traces for posterity than scientists, physicists, economists, and even inventors. In addition to the previous two giants, I randomly list contributions by country clergymen: Rev.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

He concluded: “My opinion is against an over-Â�doing of any sort of administration, and more especially against this most momentous of all meddling on the part of authority; the meddling with the subsistence of the Â�people.”26 By far the most detailed and influential critique of public assistance to the poor, the Essay on the PrinciÂ�ple of Population (1798) penned by Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), was published just two years Â�after Pitt’s attempt to generalize Speenhamland. Its empirical basis was largely drawn from Frederic Morton Eden’s State of the Poor (1797), a lengthy history and critique of the Poor Laws that came to the conclusion that a Â�legal provision for the poor “checks that emulative spirit of exertion, which the want of the necessaries, or the no less powerÂ�ful demand for the superfluities of life, gives birth to: for it assures a man, that, Â�whether he may have been indolent, improvident, prodigal, or vicious, he Â�shall never suffer want.”27 Malthus’s essay developed this analyÂ�sis, arguing that the generalization of public aid to the poor Â�causes them to work and save less, encourages them to marry younger and have more Â�children, and pushes up the price of the goods they consume, thereby reducing their real wages.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

All this was a rehearsal of the debate which followed the end of the First World War, with the arguments and sequence of policies being almost identical. Jacob Viner noted that Ricardo was blind to the short-run consequences of the policies he advocated. The Ricardian vice of abstraction from reality is beautifully illustrated by an exchange between Ricardo and his friend Thomas Malthus in January 1821 concerning the causes and consequences of the great depression in trade which had followed the Napoleonic wars. Ricardo accused Malthus of having ‘always in your mind the immediate and temporary effects of particular changes – whereas I put these immediate and temporary effects quite aside, and fix my whole attention on the permanent state of things which result from them’.24 Malthus admitted his tendency to ‘refer frequently to things as they are, as the only way of making one’s writing useful to society’ and 48 t h e f ig h t for t h e g ol d s ta n da r d of avoiding the ‘errors of the tailors of Laputa, and by a slight mistake at the outset arrive at conclusions most distant from the truth’.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson
Published 15 May 2023

These difficult times for ordinary people were the result of the religious and aristocratic elite structuring technology and the economy to make it hard for most of the population to prosper. Day-to-day sway over the population through persuasion power rested on a strong bedrock of religious belief reinforced by court action and coercion. A Malthusian Trap An alternative interpretation of stagnant living standards during the Middle Ages is rooted in the ideas of Reverend Thomas Malthus. Writing at the end of the eighteenth century, Malthus argued that the poor were feckless. If you gave them enough land for a cow, they would just have more children. As a result, “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio.

A Short History of Nearly Everything
by Bill Bryson
Published 5 May 2003

For a start, evolution as a concept was already decades old by the 1830s. Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus, had paid tribute to evolutionary principles in a poem of inspired mediocrity called “The Temple of Nature” years before Charles was even born. It wasn't until the younger Darwin was back in England and read Thomas Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population (which proposed that increases in food supply could never keep up with population growth for mathematical reasons) that the idea began to percolate through his mind that life is a perpetual struggle and that natural selection was the means by which some species prospered while others failed.

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann
Published 11 Apr 2016

So the creation of life annuities and the imagining of a future in which they could help everyone in society—not just those who could afford to buy them—led to the realization of another previously un-imagined consequence: humanity would become the victim of its own success. The negative shadow of Thomas Malthus hovered over the shining hope of finance. 16 EFFICIENT MARKETS Nineteenth-century print of the Paris Bourse. The Enlightenment tradition of mathematical inquiry was stimulated by the financial markets and the variety of unusual securities traded in them and vice versa. In this chapter, we take a look forward in time.

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

We now have to consider yet another leveler—the Fourth Horseman, epidemic disease. It differs from the other three in that it involves other species but not in violent terms: yet some bacterial and viral assaults on human societies were much more lethal than almost any human-caused disaster. How do epidemics reduce inequality? They do so by acting as what the Reverend Thomas Malthus in his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population called “positive checks.” In its barest outlines, Malthusian thinking is rooted in the premise that in the long run, population tends to grow more quickly than resources. This in turn triggers checks on further population growth: “preventive checks” that depress fertility through “moral restraint”—that is, delayed marriage and reproduction—and “positive checks” that raise mortality.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning
by Jeremy Lent
Published 22 May 2017

Perhaps Moore's law, combined with the explosive potential of converging technologies, has given our civilization, in effect, a new energy source, one that is potentially limitless and therefore doesn't conform to Tainter's theory. The favorite whipping boy of these technology optimists, known as cornucopians, is the hapless Thomas Malthus, a late-eighteenth-century English cleric who was the first to warn of the dangers of exponential growth. Malthus reasoned that if the human race were to transcend the diseases and wars that kept population in check, their numbers would expand exponentially, but the resources to feed them were finite, so the result would inevitably be mass starvation.

The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
by Edward E. Baptist
Published 24 Oct 2016

The easily accessible firewood was being burned up; and the acres needed for raising the flax or wool to clothe the increasing population was being turned over to marginal subsistence agriculture. Costs rose. Living standards dropped. Famine, epidemic disease, war, political instability, and full-scale social collapse were next. English clergyman Thomas Malthus wrote about this cycle in a famous 1798 pamphlet. Food production, he argued, could increase arithmetically at best, while population could expand geometrically. Thus, no increase in the standard of living was sustainable. It would always run up against resource limits. Western societies acquired massive new resources between 1500 and 1800.

The Age of Wonder
by Richard Holmes
Published 15 Jan 2008

Cambridge was also Newton’s shrine, and the base of the powerful ‘Trinity and John’s’ group of scientific academics. This time the list of those attending included almost all those who would soon become the rising stars in the firmament of early Victorian science: Michael Faraday, Sir John Herschel, John Dalton, Charles Babbage, Sir David Brewster, Adam Sedgwick, William Whewell, Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Malthus and William Somerville. The only notable absentee was Charles Darwin, just then botanising in Uruguay during the Beagle’s voyage.34 Some of ‘the ladies’ were also pressing for admittance, including several powerful scientific wives, like Margaret Herschel and Mary Somerville. They pretended to be fully engaged in hosting receptions and choosing the menus, while unofficially they listened at the back of the lecture halls, took notes, and critically judged the quality (and appearance) of the speakers.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
by Steven Pinker
Published 1 Jan 2002

The modern mind can conceive of a substance as a combination of atoms, the plan for a living thing as the combination of DNA nucleotides, and a relationship among quantities as a combination of mathematical symbols. Language, itself a combinatorial system, allows us to share these intellectual fruits. The combinatorial powers of the human mind can help explain a paradox about the place of our species on the planet. Two hundred years ago the economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) called attention to two enduring features of human nature. One is that “food is necessary for the existence of man.” The other is that “the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state.” He famously deduced: The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

Instead, profound and conscientious thinkers in successive generations groped toward some kind of understanding of both the real world of economic activity and the intellectual concepts that would make it possible to study such things systematically. The supply and demand analysis that can be taught to today’s beginning students in a week took at least a century to emerge from the controversies among early nineteenth-century thinkers like David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and Jean-Baptiste Say. In one of many letters between Ricardo and his friend Malthus, discussing economic issues over the years, Ricardo said in 1814: “I sometimes suspect that we do not attach the same meaning to the word demand.” He was right; they did not. {xxxix} It would be decades after both men had passed from the scene before the term could be clarified and defined precisely enough to mean what it means to economists today.

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress
by Steven Pinker
Published 13 Feb 2018

There is still hunger (including among the poor in developed countries), and there were famines in East Africa in 2011, the Sahel in 2012, and South Sudan in 2016, together with near-famines in Somalia, Nigeria, and Yemen. But they did not kill on the scale of the catastrophes that were regular occurrences in earlier centuries. None of this was supposed to happen. In 1798 Thomas Malthus explained that the frequent famines of his era were unavoidable and would only get worse, because “population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetic ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second.”

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
by Robert Tressell
Published 31 Dec 1913

The 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws (which had excluded cheaper foreign wheat) was often understood as the symbolic initiation of Victorian free trade. As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone had by 1860 removed import duties on over 400 categories of goods, leaving only a few luxury items subject to tariffs. ‘Over-population!’: Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), in his influential Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), argued that population grows faster than food supply and that poverty was thus a condition with the force of a law of nature. 19 poverty in France?: French fertility levels moved down from 38 to 40 per thousand before the French Revolution (1789), to 25 per thousand by the 1870s.

Why the West Rules--For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future
by Ian Morris
Published 11 Oct 2010

British and Dutch commerce and institutions: Brenner 2003, H. Cook 2008, de Vries and van der Woude 1997, Jardine 2008, Pincus 2009. Anglo-French trade and war: Findlay and O’Rourke 2007, Simms 2008. Mercantilism: Tracy 1990, 1991. Political economy: the classic texts are Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776), Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population (1st ed., 1798), and David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), all republished many times. 10. THE WESTERN AGE Bayly 2004 and Darwin 2008 and 2009 are outstanding recent surveys on the global scale, but Eric Hobsbawm’s four-volume treatment (1964, 1975, 1987, 1994) remains my favorite.

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin
by H. W. Brands
Published 1 Jan 2000

But politics, postmastering, and other interests intervened, and the polishing never took place. Finally, in 1754, Franklin consented to its publication as it stood, and the next year it was printed in Boston. It quickly crossed the Atlantic and was reproduced in London, Edinburgh, and Dublin. Economists Adam Smith and later Thomas Malthus, among many others, read it appreciatively. Franklin’s central idea was simple: that the increase of population depended on the availability of land. The critical element in reproductive rates was the age of marriage; couples who married young had more children than couples who married old. (Needless to say, Franklin’s observation antedated convenient contraception.)

Africa: A Biography of the Continent
by John Reader
Published 5 Nov 1998

The plan to settle British emigrants along the eastern border of the Cape Colony has been described as ‘nothing but a political manoeuvre by a Tory Government, desperate to demonstrate public concern for the unemployed in order to stave off pressures for more radical reform’.1 Certainly there was widespread social unrest in Britain at the time, and the government was under pressure to act. Mass unemployment and political riots had followed the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, and theories of ‘overpopulation’ derived from Thomas Malthus's gloomy Essay on the Principles of Population, published in 1798, provided a convenient explanation for these troubles. Malthus had pointed out that in all creatures – including humans – the potential to produce offspring exceeds the growth of the resources needed to feed them. If overpopulation was the problem, a growing body of influential opinion surmised, emigration was the solution.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

At its present 7.2 billion people, or its predicted peak of 10 billion, I have noted, the global population is an order of magnitude below the carrying capacity of the earth. And the angry biologist needs to be reminded that life itself is a local exception to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, precisely because it is not a closed system. Or again, an angry remark by another apparent scientist: “Thomas Malthus was always logical, just subject to delays for his worst-case scenarios. . . . It’s unclear if Simon understood [in 1971 at the first edition of his pathbreaking book The Ultimate Resource (executive summary: not oil, but human creativity)] that U.S. oil production had already peaked in 1970.”15 But Malthus’s scenarios were not “worst-case.”

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)
by Robert J. Gordon
Published 12 Jan 2016

The most distinctive aspect of U.S. demography was the rapid rate of population growth, which from the founding of the Republic in 1790 to the eve of the Civil War in 1860 had averaged 3.0 percent per year, an unprecedented rate that implied a doubling of the population every twenty-three years.12 After 1860, the population growth rate slowed to 2.3 percent during 1860–1890, 1.9 percent during 1890–1910, and 1.4 percent during 1910–1930. Nevertheless, these rates were high compared to the developed countries of western Europe, where population growth rates during 1870–1913 were 1.2 percent per annum for Germany, 0.9 for the U. K., and a mere 0.2 for France. As early as 1798, Thomas Malthus commented on the high fertility and large family sizes in the United States, which he attributed to the extreme cheapness of farm land: And on account of the extreme cheapness of good land a capital could not be more advantageously employed than in agriculture…. The consequence of these favorable circumstances united was a rapidity of increase probably without parallel in history.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

After two massive crises of mortality in the 1770s and again in the famine of 1815–16, with death rates soaring respectively to more than fifty and just under forty per thousand, before the late 1840s Sweden experienced no more major peaks in the death rate, which declined unevenly but steadily from just under thirty per thousand in a normal year in the late eighteenth century to just over twenty per thousand by 1840. In the late eighteenth century the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) had warned that in an agrarian society, population tended to grow beyond the capacity of the land to sustain it. Dearth and famine would be the result. In Britain this threat was averted not merely by agricultural improvement but also by the increasing ability to use income from the export of industrial goods to import foodstuffs, above all following the abolition in 1846 of grain duties.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
by Frank Trentmann
Published 1 Dec 2015

For ‘the ordinary individual’, the ‘normal expectation was to live on the edge of starvation’, the economist John Kenneth Galbraith assured us. ‘Progress would enhance the wealth of those who, generally speaking, were already rich but not of the masses. Nothing could be done about it.’95 Not even the Revd Thomas Malthus, the poster-boy of the ‘dismal science’ was that gloomy. In the first edition of his Essay on Population in 1798, Malthus did indeed have no hope for improvement: higher wages and more children would end in a subsistence crisis and famine. In subsequent editions, however, there were rays of hope.

Andrew Carnegie
by David Nasaw
Published 15 Nov 2007

Slave countries are comparatively poverty-stricken all over the world…. West-Indian history has been a history of distress and complainings…. The southern states of America are far behind their northern neighbors in prosperity.”18 The natural world and human society were governed by “beneficent necessity.” Turning Thomas Malthus on his head even more radically than Darwin would seven years later, Spencer argued in 1852 that population growth led not to accelerating destitution, but to “greater production of the necessities of life.” “From the beginning pressure of population has been the proximate cause of progress….

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
by Daniel Yergin
Published 23 Dec 2008

Ibn Saud and the other leaders of the time, as well as the various potentates since, were under the thrall of David Ricardo, a fantastically successful stockbroker in late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century England. (Among other things, he made a killing on Wellington's defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo.) By origin a Jew, Ricardo became a Quaker, then a learned member of the House of Commons, and was one of the founding fathers of modern economics. He and Thomas Malthus, his friend and intellectual rival, constituted between themselves the successor generation to Adam Smith. Ricardo developed the concept that was to provide the framework for the battle between nation-states and oil companies. It was the notion of "rents" as something different from normal profits.

Europe: A History
by Norman Davies
Published 1 Jan 1996

In brute terms, the population rose from c.150 million in 1800 to over 400 million by 1914. The accelerating rate of increase was more than twice as great as in the previous three centuries (see Appendix III, p. 1294). Europeans were reminded of the implications from the start. In 1816 the English economist Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) published the final edition of his depressing Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted that, while the production of food might rise arithmetically, the growth of population would proceed geometrically. If he had been correct, Europeans would have begun to starve to death within a few decades.

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach
by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig
Published 14 Jul 2019

The differences between L1 and L2 regularization are analyzed by Ng (2004) and Moore and DeNero (2011). The term logistic function comes from Pierre-Francois Verhulst (1804–1849), a statistician who used the curve to model population growth with limited resources, a more realistic model than the unconstrained geometric growth proposed by Thomas Malthus. Verhulst called it the courbe logistique, because of its relation to the logarithmic curve. The term curse of dimensionality comes from Richard Bellman (1961). Logistic regression can be solved with gradient descent or with the Newton–Raphson method (Newton, 1671; Raphson, 1690). A variant of the Newton method called L-BFGS is often used for large-dimensional problems; the L stands for “limited memory,” meaning that it avoids creating the full matrices all at once, and instead creates parts of them on the fly.