Word: malthus
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...TIME'S ENTHUSIASM HAS RUN TOO FAR. FORECAST OF MALTHUS IS STARK REALITY FOR AT LEAST HALF OF THE WORLD POPULATION. OBSTACLES TO GREATER PRODUCTION ARE NO LESS REAL BECAUSE THEY ARE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RATHER THAN TECHNICAL. HOW IS THE APPLIED SCIENCE ESSENTIAL TO GREATER OUTPUT TO BE CONVEYED TO A BILLION ILLITERATES...
After more than a century of intermittent haunting, the ghost of a gloomy British clergyman, Thomas Robert Malthus, was on the rampage last week. Cresting a wave of postwar pessimism, it flashed through the air on the radio, rode through the mails in magazines. Publishers opened their arms and presses to "Neo-Malthusian" manuscripts prophesying worldwide overpopulation and hunger. Two "scarce books"-Our Plundered Planet, by Fairfield Osborn, and Road to Survival (a Book-of-the-Month selection), by William Vogt-were glowingly reviewed and selling like hot cakes. Their influence has already reached around the world...
...Malthus, who died in 1834, predicted that the world's population would soon outgrow its food supply. Then war, pestilence and famine, caused by overpopulation, would slap down presumptuous man. This did not happen. The world's population had doubled since Malthus' time, from one billion to two, but new lands were cultivated and old lands made more productive. Better transportation brought surplus food from afar to feed the hungry industrial cities. There were local famines, as there had always been, but the world never ran out of food. The gloomy Malthus, who had underestimated both nature...
...Malthus' "Essay on Population" will be the basic text for the discussion...
...difficulties in conversation will strike a responsive chord in the cochlea of every hard-of-hearing person. She admired Malthus but could not understand him; he had a harelip and a cleft palate. Wordsworth took his teeth out after dinner, which made his most inspired words unintelligible to poor Harriet...