Why Malthus Was Wrong

Nour Elqaq

EN131-003

Essay One

Instructor: Amy Murre

October 13, 2013

Why Malthus was Wrong

When Thomas Malthus said that the booming population, which in his time was around one billion, would doom the world to famine and disaster, he couldn’t have been more wrong. Two centuries later, the global population exceeds seven billion and Malthus’s theory has been discredited. Thomas Malthus was a British scholar who became known for his theories about population. His fame skyrocketed with his Essay of the Principle of Population of 1798 which proposed the idea that mankind will reproduce exponentially (McDonough and Braungart). Malthus argued that the population will soon outgrow the ability of the earth to provide for it. He predicted that if population was not kept in control, the future will hold war, poverty, famine and disease (McDonough and Braungart). However, Malthus underestimated human inventiveness and thus was not aware of agricultural improvements and their impact on food production (Mayhew). Malthus’s essay had many flaws throughout it and he did not take into account many of the important details.

First and foremost, Malthus assumed that human would have no control over their reproductive behavior. Malthus thought women will have as many children as physically possible even though he emphasizes the fact that in modern civilization, preventative checks were being used to keep fertility down such as abstinence. He did not envision that the growth of the population would slow down over time because of effective contraception, the change in a women’s role in society and also an individual’s reproductive decision (Marsh and Alagona). According to Malthus, the growth rates would produce these types of relationships between people and food in the future: Today: One person, one unit of food, 25 years: Two persons, two units of food, 50 years: Four persons, three units of food, and 75 years: Eight persons, four units of food (Marsh and Alagona).

Malthus was fully aware of human inventiveness and that increasing population spurred this inventiveness. He showed a keen awareness of the agricultural and industrial improvements taking place in his own era, which we now label as the age of the Industrial Revolution, but did not feel this would exempt mankind from feeling resource pressures (McDonough and Braungart), (Mayhew). Unfortunately his theory did not predict the innovations within the industrial and 2nd agricultural revolutions which made food production much more efficient and allowed food production to outpace population growth. We now have more than enough food to feed the population.

The Industrial Revolution marks a major turning point in human history; almost every aspect of