Malthus Revisited

The excessive weight that our total human population and economy have imposed on the global environment

Our total human population and economy have imposed on the global environment an excessive weight.

Malthus’ Essay on the principle of population

27 June 2020 (Wall Street International)* — T.R. Malthus’ Essay on the principle of population, the first edition of which was published in 1798, was one of the first systematic studies of the problem of population in relation to resources. Earlier discussions of the problem had been published by Botero in Italy, Robert Wallace in England, and Benjamin Franklin in America.

However, Malthus’ essay was the first to stress the fact that, in general, powerful checks operate continuously to keep human populations from increasing beyond their available food supply. In a later edition, published in 1803, he buttressed this assertion with carefully collected demographic and sociological data from many societies at various periods of their histories.

The publication of Malthus’ essay coincided with a wave of disillusionment which followed the optimism of the Enlightenment. The utopian societies predicted by the philosophers of the Enlightenment were compared with reign of terror in Robespierre’s France and with the miseries of industrial workers in England; and the discrepancy required an explanation.

The optimism which preceded the French Revolution, and the disappointment which followed a few years later, closely paralleled the optimistic expectations of our own era, in the period after the Second World War, when it was thought that the transfer of technology to the less developed parts of the world would eliminate poverty, and the subsequent disappointment when poverty persisted.

Science and technology developed rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, but the benefits which they conferred were just as rapidly consumed by a global population which today is increasing at the rate of one billion people every fourteen years. Because of the close parallel between the optimism and disappointments of Malthus’ time and those of our own, much light can be thrown on our present situation by rereading the debate between Malthus and his contemporaries.