Thomas Malthus

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Dec 22, 2005

Thomas Robert Malthus on Populartion Control

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Thomas Robert Malthus:The Statistics of Population Control

In Malthus' Essay on Population he discussed the importance of birth control, and also discussed the future problem, as he saw it, of the fast growing population outgrowing it's supply of food and resources. Malthus lived during the enlightenment period of human history. William Godwin and the marquis di Condorcet also wrote theories on population. Their theories said that humans would progress eternally and that there would be no end to humanity. When Malthus released his essay, which he did not put his name on, he said that human population grows arithmetically (2,4,8,16,32...) while the food supply grows arithmetically (2,3,4,5...). Taking a look at the numbers that were used as examples, it is easy to see that the population could very easily run out of resources.

Malthus' essay discussed the problem of disease, war and famine. He said that the population, obviously, would not increase at such a rate if one of the listed disasters happened. This theory has proven true because the current world does not currently have a huge problem feeding all of its people and we have had two world wars, and many armed conflicts are taking place in the world even though the everyday person may not know about the war. Disease is also taking it's toll on the human population. Diseases such as the deadly Ebola virus, and the fairly new AIDS virus, with no cure for either, are starting to come out of basically nowhere and is killing people at an alarming rate. The AIDS virus is making people use protection during sex and this protection also stops pregnancy, which in turn slows down the growth of the population.

What Malthus did not seem to take into consideration is urbanization and economic situations that tell the modern world if they can have children. In an urban situation it is more costly to have