Thomas Malthus was an 18th Century Economist who did some fantastic work on populations. His main contribution was to illustrate the relationship between food supply and population and showed how natural population increases faster than food supply. For you math majors out there, population increases geometrically while food supply grows arithmetically (see below). The term “Malthusian” is used as a rather unsightly forward looking scenario where humanity grows too fast and many starve due to lack of food.
However, what Malthus actually pointed to was that despite population growth, humans on balance don’t perish, so economic choices must be at work. Perhaps Malthus was smarter than the pessimistic term that bears his name, gives him credit for. We see these economic choices alive and well today, manifesting themselves as technological progress, not only in agriculture with new ways to farm to the burgeoning energy sector here in the US. The surge in domestic energy production, in our view, was a result of people making an economic choice to invest and develop new ways of extracting oil that was previously unrecoverable. Maybe it’s time to give the term Malthusian a positive connotation.
I need to be responsible. I always had it that Malthus was the guy that said we were gonna run out of food and die...I misunderstood him like a lot of other people.
