Word: malthus
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...world had better listen to Malthus and Toynbee. The main problem is not one of food. Sooner or later the world will have to face up to birth control...
...since 1798, when the Rev. Thomas Malthus gloomily concluded that "the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man," had Western statesmen and thinkers been so preoccupied with the physical problem of feeding the world's people. At the Rome meeting, British Historian Arnold Toynbee apocalyptically declared: "Sooner or later food production will reach its limit. And then, if population is still increasing, famine will do the execution that was done in the past by famine, pestilence and war combined." In Washington, NATO Secretary General Paul-Henri Spaak of Belgium...
Newman's commentaries deftly introduce such diverse figures as Physicists Galileo and Newton, Economists Keynes and Malthus, Mathematicians von Neumann and Russell, Humorists Carroll (who also taught geometry) and Leacock. The subject matter is equally varied, includes Daniel Bernoulli's kinetic theory of gases, Clement Durell's discussion of Einstein's theory of relativity ("It is against common sense," says Newman of the theory, "but so at first were the ideas of vaccination and of men living upside down in the Antipodes"), a mathematical assessment of military strength by Frederick Lanchester (Newman notes that abstract theories...
...scientists with the philosophy of their subject. Latest reports have it that they are reading about expanding universes. Even Professorial families may expand to keep pace with the fashion; professors may soon be able to get special grants to educate their children--provided they have children. We agreed with Malthus in approving this kind of growth...
...Curiouser and curiouserl" cried Alice, when, after eating the cake in the rabbit's cavern she began to grow nine feet tall. While most Harvard people would correct Alice's grammar, and blame Malthus rather than the cake, the note of incredulity usually remains as they watch the University's policy toward the rapidly rising demand for a Harvard College education...