Word: malthus
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...course on cultural history, admired the way "his thoughts progressed in a rational manner from beginning to end." A student who took that Barzun-Trilling course remembers most vividly the moment when some unfortunate victim cited the motto of the Order of the Garter during a class on Malthus. Said Barzun: "Honi soil qui Malthus pense." Said Trilling: "Honi soil qui mal thus puns...
Some of the thinkers who followed Adam Smith had made capitalism seem heartless indeed. The Rev. Thomas Malthus grimly announced that no person has any claim on society for a "right to subsistence when his labor will not fairly purchase it." David Ricardo worked out what became known as the "iron law of wages." His thesis: workers in the long run would get only the bare minimum necessary to keep themselves and their families alive. If they temporarily should earn more, they would breed so many children that competition for jobs eventually would drive wages down again. Ricardo...
...this year: Thomas Robert Malthus...
This grim prognosis has led to apocalyptic warnings from some of the world's top food experts. "We will see increasing troubles, not declining troubles," predicts Dr. John Knowles, president of the Rockefeller Foundation. "We will see increasing famine, pestilence, the extermination of large numbers of people. Malthus has already been proved correct." The most vulnerable to such disasters: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Sahel nations, Ethiopia, northeast Brazil, the high regions of the Andes and the poor parts of Mexico and Central America...
...stage is set for such a situation right now." Indeed, in parts of Central America, in ten sub-Saharan nations and in some rural areas of India, the 20-year trend of declining death rates and infant mortality is being reversed. Death rates are rising. This, according to Malthus, is nature's brutal way of redressing the balance when population exceeds food supply-if man himself does not first redress it voluntarily...