Word: malthusianism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Malthusian Menace. But more improvement in food production must be matched by population control if India is ever to feed herself. Nehru's first Five-Year Plan was meant to make the nation self-sufficient agriculturally, but without a firm program of family planning, it fell sadly short of the mark. Shastri, too, has failed to face up to the Malthusian menace of India's birth rate. Every year the country's crop of new babies exceeds the population of New York City. When pressed about birth control, Shastri smiles: "I hesitate to give advice on this...
Ireland is the only nation in Europe whose population has shrunk in that time. While Irishmen left the country in waves, they entered it in a trickle, for Ireland has the lowest marriage rate, and one of the lowest birth rates, in all Europe. To the Neo-Malthusian, the Irish would seem models of ecological balance. In a country where food production is barely increasing, 66% of all Irish males between 20 and 39 are bachelors, and vast numbers of men and women die single...
Decades ago, Fuller (who is now 66) drew from the Malthusian and Darwinian theses the implication that man, in order to survive, has adopted a "you-or-me" philosophy. To continue living in an over-populated world, man has taken to war. The consequent development of "weaponry" has, however, also produced improvements in the art of "livingry": progress has been especially notable, for example, in transportation and in mass production...
...Squeezed to Death." Does this mean that the Malthusian limit will never be reached? Not so, says Physicist Heinz von Foerster, 48, of the University of Illinois, the latest to cry extinction of the human race. He does it, not as a mystic does, having undergone some shattering revelation, but with earnest and scholarly equations. His doomsday is the year 2026. In the November 4 Science, Professor von Foerster calculates by elaborate mathematics what will happen if the human species avoids large-scale disaster (e.g., nuclear war), sets up a cooperative world society, develops technical methods that yield an unlimited...
...only safe generalization about long-range population predictions is that they have always proved wrong. When Malthus foresaw mass starvation in Europe unless its people stopped breeding, he failed to reckon with the industrial revolution and the agricultural potential of the Americas. Latter-day players of the Malthusian numbers game, who foresee global economic ruin in one, two or six centuries, usually fail to reckon sufficiently on the unknowable potentialities of science and the unpredictable turn of events. Says the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs: "With the present rate of increase, it can be calculated that...