Word: malthus
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...professors of the "dismal science" have always scotched this sunny Stevenson couplet. To such economists as Thomas Robert Malthus and John Stuart Mill in the 19th Century and John Maynard Keynes in the 20th, the world did not seem so full. Any economic system, said the Mill school, would either become static or it would fail to provide for its own. Lesser Cassandras, including New Dealers, have foretold the depletion of the world's oil and coal reserves, the exhaustion of soils, have pronounced the U.S. economy to be "mature," i.e., incapable of further expansion. Most of these experts...
...demographer or biologist would deny the validity of the Malthusian Law. Malthus postulated that populations tend to increase faster than do the means of subsistence, and must be controlled by either positive checks or preventive checks. The positive checks are those which increase the death rate-famine, disease, epidemics, excessively hard labor, and war. The preventive checks are those which reduce the birth rates-celibacy, delayed marriage, "prudential restraint" in married life, and other forms of birth control. Although Malthus underestimated man's capacity to increase the means of subsistence, he did not underestimate man's capacity...
While most soil men have never taken Malthus' theory too literally, it was a useful tool to frighten farmers into soil conservation. For this reason, those of us who are crusading for conservation believe that your analysis of William Vogt's theories, while essentially sound and correct, will be a damaging blow. Farmers will now sleep late, plow up and down the hill. Most of them have to be frightened into action, and now our bogie man is dead by the hand of TIME...
...TIME'S ENTHUSIASM HAS RUN TOO FAR. FORECAST OF MALTHUS IS STARK REALITY FOR AT LEAST HALF OF THE WORLD POPULATION. OBSTACLES TO GREATER PRODUCTION ARE NO LESS REAL BECAUSE THEY ARE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RATHER THAN TECHNICAL. HOW IS THE APPLIED SCIENCE ESSENTIAL TO GREATER OUTPUT TO BE CONVEYED TO A BILLION ILLITERATES...
...Malthus, who died in 1834, predicted that the world's population would soon outgrow its food supply. Then war, pestilence and famine, caused by overpopulation, would slap down presumptuous man. This did not happen. The world's population had doubled since Malthus' time, from one billion to two, but new lands were cultivated and old lands made more productive. Better transportation brought surplus food from afar to feed the hungry industrial cities. There were local famines, as there had always been, but the world never ran out of food. The gloomy Malthus, who had underestimated both nature...