Thomas Malthus :: essays papers

Thomas Malthus Two hundred years ago, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote â€Å"An Essay on the principle of population† in which he argued that the world population would increase faster than the food supply. This would cause disastrous results for the general human welfare. A world population of 250 million at the time has now gone up to about 6 billion. This is in spite of wars, plagues, famine, and epidemics. World food production has been keeping pace with population growth until recently. If the world food supply had been distributed equally to each member of society in the mid 1980’s, with a population of 4.7 billion people, each person would have gotten a weekly diet of 11 ponds. This included meat, grains, and fish. In today’s society, the population has increased over one billion and the food supply has gone down to about 10 pounds per person per week. A world population of 10 to 11 billion by mid century would leave each person with only 6 to 7 pounds per week. This is the same as the diet that people living in poverty get in our present day society. However, by trying to help poverty, we are (according to Malthus) making the situation worse. IN the short run, there seems to be an improvement because those poor people are better off and can do well. This situation would lead to a larger population than before. This in turn would lead to more people becoming impoverished due to lack of food supply. Malthus believed that if people left poverty alone, it would take care of itself. At the start of the 21st Century, it is very easy to debunk his starting point that population grows â€Å"geometrically† while food supply only â€Å"arithmetically†. This will lead to a widening gap between population and food supply. However, by saying that, he was mistaken, the improving technology has meant that food supply has also increased geometrically. If we were to take a mathematical approach to this, population, food production, energy use, industrial production, waste production, etc. are all increasing under mechanisms that can shown on an exponential curve like a parabola, then all will be approaching a vertical asymptote.