Word: malthus
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...Darwin's view, the human molecules have one fundamental property that dominates all others: they tend to increase their numbers up to the absolute limit of their food supply. This is the familiar thesis of Thomas Malthus, a senior contemporary of Grandfather Darwin whose gloomy predictions of starvation have haunted mankind for 150 years...
Grandson Darwin restates Malthus. Human increase, he says, is a "geometrical progression." The more it has increased, the faster it will increase in the future. Food supply, on the other hand, increases only "arithmetically" by simple addition. Past increases do not add to its speed of increase...
...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...