Essay on the principle of population
by Thomas Robert Malthus · first published 1798
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…thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world. — Malthus T.R. 1798. An essay on the principle of population. Chapter VII, p61 This was 1798 mind you when he wrote that, and much has been written that shows that food production increases in line with population growth [1] It is certainly true that the Great…
on “Did The Harappan Civilization Avoid War for 2,000 Years?” ↗…population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition". — Malthus T.R. 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter II. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_P...
on “Request For Research: Basic Income” ↗I'm always skeptical about predictions of a coming food shortage. It's been predicated for the last 200 (Malthus' An Essay on the Principle of Population was published in 1800), and it hasn't happened yet.
on “The Experience Economy” ↗…and was therefore a pessimist who nonetheless was of a sunny disposition and the life and soul of dinner parties in London. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10483171-the-beginning-o... [2] An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf
on “The limitations of Steven Pinker’s optimism” ↗…Ferdinand Lassalle in the mid-nineteenth century. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attribute the doctrine to Lassalle (notably in Marx's 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme), the idea to Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population, and the terminology to Goethe's "great, eternal iron laws" in Das Göttliche.[1][2][3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_wages Law of Rent: the rent of a land site is equal to the economic…
on “Minimum-wage worker needs 2.5 full-time jobs to afford a one-bedroom apartment” ↗…wonder if there are similar projections from, say, 1950 that we could look at and see how they turned out. Thomas Malthus attempted to describe the future of the world population in 1798 in his book, An Essay on the Principle of Population. He predicted a doubling of the global population every 25 years until a lack of food limited the population through hardship or famine and death. Pierre François Verhulst went on to mathematically model…
on “The global population pyramid” ↗An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus, 1798
on “American Schools Are Training Kids for a World That Doesn’t Exist” ↗…b. Check climate data; Iceland was (and is) a hard place for farming, etc. Check population density and add that to that until quite recently, Malthus' description of human deaths/births ruled (the "Essay on the Principle of Population" in itself also answers your theory that people don't generally emigrate to places where life is harder).
on “Medieval Iceland and the Absence of Government” ↗…have to replace "world demographics" with "politics" and "geometric population growth" with "we're always one step away from (civil) war"). Or maybe I like Malthus just because my dad had bought his "Essay on the Principle of Population" and I read it when I was 16.
on “How I got into MIT when I was 14” ↗Darwin and Wallace both thought of natural selection on reading Malthus's essay on the principle of population. I guess that's a reproducible route to the idea -- send a curious British naturalist to South America and some islands, then loan them a copy of Malthus. I'd like to read Malthus myself someday and see…
on “Another person that discovered evolution besides Darwin” ↗…of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world." — Thomas Malthus, 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population
on “The Rush to Stop the Asian Giant Hornet” ↗…point: https://www.wired.com/1997/02/the-doomslayer-2/ >The classical case against population growth was expressed in 1798 by Thomas Malthus, the British economist and country parson who wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population: "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison…
on “My take on the study from MIT that predicts “societal collapse”” ↗…constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind. -Thomas Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798] > The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent…
on “The Myth of Scarcity and Its Threats to Human Society [pdf] (2023)” ↗…predictive programming, life imitating art -- what's the difference, if in the end the artistic predictions come true? People have been thinking apocalyptic thoughts like these since.. at least Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). That's 227 years if you're keeping score. Probably longer; Malthus might only have been the first to write them down and publish them.
on “Horses: AI progress is steady. Human equivalence is sudden” ↗…Therefore society can never deal with some change that is happening and must collapse into a sad pile of misery. Oh and to prevent it you must give me power. Uh ... no. Just no. In the original book, "An Essay on the Principle of Population", Thomas Malthus proposed that the fact that food production could not be increased when population rises due to unavailability of soil productivity. A trivial mathematical argument (the geometric series)…
on “The Collapse of Complex Societies” ↗