Word: malthus
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...materialistic" 20th century, he is exhilarated. He is excited by "humanity's epochal graduation from the inert, materialistic 19th century into the dynamic, abstract 20th century." He feels that there is an "important reorientation of mankind, from the role of an inherent failure, as erroneously reasoned by Malthus, and erroneously accepted by the bootstrap-anchored custodians of civilization's processes, to a new role for mankind, that of an inherent success." He is sure the whole world can be fed, housed and happy, if designers can just put to work all the world's skills with Fuller...
...corporation in 1963 defies the logic of Adam Smith, the absent-minded professor who believed that hired managers would become negligent and sloppy and be overwhelmed by men in business for themselves. The expansion of U.S. markets through a steady population growth belies the gloomy forebodings of Parson Malthus, and modern capitalism's increasing ability to adapt itself readily to change has proved that Karl Marx was a better journalist than prophet. Today's U.S. economy would surprise even those who helped to shape its past. Alexander Hamilton would be shocked by the size of its mounting debt...
...theories of Malthus and Darwin, he said, gave man the idea that he was reproducing himself faster than technology could raise production, and that life was a matter of the "survival of the fittest" a "you-or-me" question. The fundamental mandate of political leaders was to assure that "it wasn't their country that went down." Wars became the order...
Ever since the time of Malthus (1766-1834), prophets of doom have warned that if the human race does not stop reproducing so fast it will eventually outbreed its available food supply. But whenever the pessimists of the plundered-planet school have set a date for this unhappy event, they were proved to be wrong. In advanced countries the technology of food production has kept well ahead of population growth (TIME, Nov. 8, 1948). The U.S., with its burdensome crop surplus, is farther from starvation than ever before, and other countries are in the same condition. Only technologically backward countries...
Karlinsky is brooding about world population. He has just heard of the theories of Malthus and has read somewhere that, at a certain stage of development, the human embryo has gills like a fish. With these things in mind, he thinks: "Why should the country waste its potential fish reserves? In the Splendid Future, the fishlike embryo would be turned to good account. Carefully extracted from the womb, they would be conditioned to a separate existence in pools set aside especially for them. There they would grow scales and fins under the supervision of the State. And next door...