Word: malthus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Doctor's Discovery. As much as nuclear energy, the population explosion is a product of the Western scientific revolution. In 1798-the year that the Rev. Thomas Malthus "proved" that the earth's capacity to produce food was no match for man's capacity to reproduce -Britain's Dr. Edward Jenner discovered that smallpox could be prevented by vaccination, and thereby opened the road to modern medicine's many techniques of "death control." This knowledge, when transferred from the industrial nations of the West to Latin America, Africa and Asia-where a medical investment...
...only safe generalization about long-range population predictions is that they have always proved wrong. When Malthus foresaw mass starvation in Europe unless its people stopped breeding, he failed to reckon with the industrial revolution and the agricultural potential of the Americas. Latter-day players of the Malthusian numbers game, who foresee global economic ruin in one, two or six centuries, usually fail to reckon sufficiently on the unknowable potentialities of science and the unpredictable turn of events. Says the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: "With the present rate of increase, it can be calculated that...