Population Growth

Thomas Malthus

One of the most influential and popular scholars of population growth was the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. He published “An Essay on the Principle of Population” between 1798 and 1826, [Page 694]where he stated his basic principles that population grows at a geometric rate and food production increases at an arithmetic rate.

This would mean that sooner or later population would have to face famine, disease, and widespread mortality. He based his theory on the population increase that was already becoming evident in the 18th century and argued that the number of people would increase faster than the food supply. Population would eventually reach a resource limit, and any further increase (overpopulation) would result in a population crash, caused by famine, disease, or war.

Malthus, as a political economist, was concerned about what he saw as the decline of living conditions in 19th-century England. For him, this decline was due to three main elements: the increase of population, the inability of resources (mainly food supply) to grow at the same rate as the population, and the irresponsibility of the lower classes who were having more children that they could feed. For these reasons, if not able to constrain the population growth, human beings would be condemned to famine, disease, and war because eventually there would not be enough food for everyone. His writings were produced to oppose the utopian way of many 18th-century philosophers who, like William Godwin and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat (the Marquis de Condorcet), believed that the almost limitless improvement in capabilities of modern society would be able to overcome the problems and limitations related to population growth. The Malthusian population theory faced a number of critiques, but it was an important contribution for the discussion of population trends and remains an influential guideline for population policies around the world.

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