Malthus Principle Of Population Analysis

Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population offers a grim hypothesis regarding the world’s future based on our continuously increasing population growth, but a look around at the current state of humanity raises questions about the validity of these claims. The main principle underlying Malthus’s argument is that there simply is not enough, and there never has been enough, resources on this earth to sustain the indefinitely increasing world population, but there are still naysayers who reject this particular line of thinking. Over the past few years, major technological improvements have pushed the hypothetical doomsday scenario further and further away, leading many to wonder when and if it will ever really arrive, or, in contrast,

Some have even gone so far as to call this the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Event and indicate that the primary cause of this extinction is human overpopulation and overconsumption (Carrington, 2017). Despite what may seem like compelling evidence that we are nearing or have already passed the point of extreme overpopulation, Malthus’s theories still have their critics.

A major argument against Malthus’s predictions about population growth is that all predictions regarding the future of the population are made without adequate knowledge of technological and cultural changes to come. As population growth rates have been on the decline over the past years and we have steered far away from predicted widespread famine with the Green Revolution, there is less of a reason to trust the supposed imminence of overpopulation and its grim consequences (Briney,

However, the truth-claim of Malthus’s essay remains in the eye of the beholder. One may assume that the decline in population growth means that we have already passed the precipitous point of no return, at which humans have gone too far in their overpopulation to continue life as we know it, but one may also hold reasonable doubts about the existence of such a point. But regardless of one’s interpretation of modern population challenges and whether or not one believes Malthus’s theories to be true, the fact remains that An Essay on the Principle of Population set forth economic theories previously unheard of by the general population. Malthusian economics still poses questions that have had and will continue to have major importance in the coming years, regardless of whether that importance is simply theoretical or