Word: malthus
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rapidly and inexorably changing. I do not mean that our numbers are exploding – a topic that has been attracting attention since Malthus. Nor do I mean that life expectancy is rising – a fact that is widely appreciated. I mean a very modern and massive set of changes in the composition of the human population...
...going to become the defining measure of a country’s economic standing.” This argument may be forward-looking, but it has already gone mainstream. If Friedman is trying to become the Energy Climate Era’s Rachel Carson, Garrett Hardin, and Thomas Malthus all in one, he seems to have forgotten that figureheads like Al Gore have already made his arguments accessible to the masses and, perhaps, in an even more appealing fashion. Friedman’s knowledge of the science behind a hot, flat, and crowded world is relatively deep, and he expresses...
...infallibility of economic growth. Clearly the two overlap, but the recognition that our natural resources are very, very limited does not necessarily mean that economic growth should stagnate. There’s something almost Malthusian about Stoll’s argument, and indeed his brief history of Malthus is not decidedly dismissive of Malthus’s infamous “trap.” Innovation is usually heralded as the solution to the problem of limited resources; after all, if Malthus could have foreseen the genetic engineering that was employed in the Green Revolution, would he have been...
...Development is all about the long term - about building up the skills and infrastructure that sustain economic growth. Food aid was never meant to be more than a temporary stopgap before the implementation of slower, lasting solutions. In his 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Malthus argued that famines were simply a case of too many people with not enough food. Malthus noted that populations tended to grow faster than food supply - and predicted global catastrophe without drastic population reductions. In 1981, the economist and Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen outlined an alternative view, arguing that lack...
...Wherever the potato has been adopted populations have boomed. In 1798 pioneering demographer Thomas Malthus complained that more food brings more mouths, and warned that the potato would depress wages and living standards by pushing Europe's population far beyond the opportunities of employment. What Malthus didn't know was that Europe was already in the throes of a development that would quickly swallow any labor surplus: the Industrial Revolution...