Word: malthus
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...mobilize technological and financial aid from the wealthy industrial and oil-exporting states to help the 100 poorest nations increase their own food output. Also certain to be discussed is the critical problem of curtailing births. This is urgently needed to avoid fulfilling the nightmare of Parson Thomas Malthus, the English economist who predicted nearly two centuries ago that population would outrun man's capacity to produce food...
Between 1750 and 1850, the population of Europe doubled. The population might have increased by considerably more had certain checks on its growth been absent. Of course the major checks were a variety of natural human phenomena: famine, disease and war. And when Malthus warned that population growth would proceed at a much greater pace than the means of subsistence, he cited these as the otherwise absent limiting forces...
Meadows is no latter-day Malthus prophesying doom on the basis of intuition; instead he has produced the first vision of the apocalypse ever prepared by computer. His team built a computer model of the world, fed the machine masses of data on population and industrial growth rates, farm yields and the like, and constructed "feedback loops" to gauge the effects of changes in one variable, like food production, on another, like birth rates. In restrained, nonhysterical, at times almost apologetic language, the team insists that unchecked growth can have only one outcome: "A rather sudden and uncontrollable decline...
...inevitable: the population of the world, which required centuries to reach 1 billion, took only 80 years to double that number, and only 41 years more to reach today's 3.7 billion. If the progression continues, it is widely and gloomily predicted by the spiritual heirs of Thomas Malthus, there will be 7 billion people standing in line for their rations in the year 2000. By 2050, perhaps 30 billion will be fighting like animals for a share of the once-green earth...
...midshipmen, starched and polished, march smartly to the drum and bugle of dress parade. It is a traditional display of martial crispness for academy brass and visiting VIPs. But these Wednesdays, after the last salute is snapped, many a middie returns to the not-so-traditional company of Machiavelli, Malthus or Montesquieu-required reading in such brand-new majors as literature, economics and political science. The marriage of military discipline and academic freedom is uneasy at best, but Rear Admiral James F. Calvert, now in his second year as academy superintendent, has proved himself a talented matchmaker...