On “An Essay on the Principle of Population” by Thomas R. Malthus ***

This famous work essentially espoused the idea that there was an upper limit to the degree to which the earth could sustain human population, one that Malthus felt was, even in his life around 1800, substantially already at the brink of being reached. That's the popular understanding of it, at least, that I'd always gleaned. And to some extent, the book is about that sort of thing, but to me it seemed really the musings of a consumant pessimist.

The basic theory/idea that starts off and informs everything else in the work is one in which Malthus claims that population increases at a faster than the ability of humans to find ways to supply food for that population. If we were to graph the two items, one could imagine the food supply increasing as a constant rate—a straight line going slowly upward; meanwhile, the population line would go up at an accelerating rate—a line like the right half of a parabola. This is because, essentially, people love sex. We just can't help ourselves. So whether there's food or not, we're going to keep making more people. (The issue, of course, is that when the two lines meet, that parabola will come to an end: population wouldn't keep going up; rather, a lot of folks will die of hunger. In a sense, overpopulation takes care of itself. Malthus never really addresses this.)

Beyond that, Malthus argues against various other writers who espouse various rosy ideas about humanity. We won't ever put off our reproductive desire or our wish to have more. We will continue toward greed and avarice. Society is ever headed toward a bad end. If and when things do improve (temporarily), that will just encourage more population and more desire. That is, even as we increase our resources, it's inevitable that our desires and our population will always outstrip capacity. Efforts to alleviate suffering of less fortunate only further the problem by encouraging more population among the less fortunate and thus more suffering. Is there a solution? Malthus doesn't really propose much that's workable. The essay seemed more a head exercise and set of opinions than anything substantiated in statistical anaysis.