IS MALTHUS STILL ALIVE? This paper is a faithful and unbiased restatement of Malthus’s original 1798 ‘An Essay on the principle of Population as it affects the future improvement of society with remarks on speculations of Mr Godwin, Mr Condorcet and others’ aiming to rehabilitate this man’s reputation. Now why I say reputation is because Jaffery Sachs (2008), a development theorist of repute says Malthusian reasoning was a target of mockery, held up by his professors as an example of a naïve forecast gone wildly wrong! #ORIGINS: Malthus published six versions of his famous treatise “An Essay on the principle of population” appearing first in 1798 while the last edition came out in 1826. He acknowledges his work as a reaction to the work of …show more content…
By inductive reasoning he claims them “Fixed” since we haven’t seen any alteration in them by seeing man’s history on earth and therefore have no right to conclude that they will ever cease to be what they are now. Population & Subsistence He refers to the fixed laws which makes food necessary to the life of man and concludes that effect of these two unequal powers must be kept equal from where one finds his “Principle of Population” whereby population must always be kept down to the level of means of production. He states that having assumed his postulates granted the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man which is true since geometric progression definitely leads ahead of arithmetic progression. Population when Unchecked, increased in a geometrical ratio which he takes from his observation of USA population and since there was little scarcity and land was abundant, he takes the time of 25 years in which USA population doubled as the standard time for doubling of population when unchecked and the growth of subsistence in an arithmetic …show more content…
Others critique that Malthus was wrong since he didn’t foresee the dramatic increase in production of food, but it is clear in his writings that he anticipated this well in advance, ‘No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase for ever and be greater than any assignable quantity, yet still the power of population being a power of a superior order, the increase of the human species can only be kept commensurate to the increase of the means of subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity acting as a check upon the greater power. It makes no difference how much productivity increases, Malthus writes, it could not long keep up with unrestrained reproduction. Population must be constantly checked to keep it in line with what the earth can