Word: malthus
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...mind being called a "Modern Malthus" [Jan. 12]. Unlimited population growth will indeed present an overwhelming challenge to environmental quality. Unfortunately, your article implies that the nation cannot afford to combat water pollution now. But the total costs you derive lump together highest priority and lowest priority items; together they represent the accumulated debt for past neglect and apathy-with interest...
...life. Technology can ease the pressure for now, added S. Fred Singer, a high official in the Interior Department, but the cost will be enormous-for example, between $43 billion and $66 billion just to curb U.S. water pollution over the next five years. Sounding like a modern Malthus, Singer said: "A level exists beyond which a nation devotes too much of its productive capacity to simply keeping its head above dirty water...
...Thomas Robert Malthus (1798) This famed warning has been widely revived in recent years. Only the prospect of universal nuclear destruction is viewed with more horrified relish by pessimistic social prophets than the prospect of man's inability to feed an unchecked population. The latest authority to update the Malthusian theory is British Novelist C. P. Snow (The Corridors of Power, The Two Cultures), who is celebrated for his observations on the disparity between the worlds of science and the humanities. Lord Snow issued his warning last week as he delivered the John Findlay Green lecture at Westminster College...
...storage space for it. The new American maxim, Columbia University's John Kouwenhoven has suggested, should be: "Waste not, have not." This does not signify that waste has become accepted in the U.S.-on the contrary. It is only that its meaning has changed. Neither Cotton Mather nor Malthus nor Marx anticipated a society in which only 15% of the population would produce all the food and goods that the whole nation could reasonably need or, for that matter, a society so productive that it could afford, for the first time in history, to have more people in services...
...more successful than his predecessors in seeing it whole. Great theorists before him had tried to take a wide view of economic forces, but they lacked the 20th century statistical tools to do the job, and they tended to concentrate on certain specialties. Adam Smith focused on the marketplace, Malthus on population, Ricardo on rent and land, Marx on labor and wages. Modern economists call those specializations "microeconomics"; Keynes was the precursor of what is now known as "macroeconomics"?from the Greek makros, for large or extended. He decided that the way to look at the economy...