No Oil for Pacifists (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
Thai's joking comment about Keynes's perpetual motion machine reminded me of Brendan O’Neill's "Too many people? No, too many Malthusians" : In the year 200 AD, there were approximately 180 million human beings on the planet Earth. And at that time a Christian philosopher called Tertullian argued: ‘We are burdensome to the world, the resources are scarcely adequate for...
The Rumbler Report (Free subscription) | 12/01/2009
From time to time we get angry posters here at the Rumbler Report screaming about population growth and how we are all going to die because some of us believe in the right to life. "You believe in magic," they scream, "we are running out of resources and we have to regulate who gets to have children!" They are living up to Thomas Malthus's famous quote: "Life...
Ignorance Is Futile! (Free subscription) | 12/02/2009
... husbands and wives. McKibben’s acclaimed book is a tribute to the theories of British economist Thomas Malthus . Exactly 200 years ago, Malthus-the original dismal scientist-wrote that “the power of population is . . . greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” McKibben’s application of this idea was to rush out and have a vasectomy. He urges his fellow...
The Guardian (Free subscription) | 11/27/2009
... III's soirees, Darwin rubbed shoulders with his great intellectual influences, the economist Thomas Malthus, the botanist Joseph Hooker and the geologist Charles Lyell. And in its 234-year history, which began 21 years before the French revolution but sadly ended in 2002, the publishing house played host to the likes of Benjamin Disraeli, John Betjeman, Kenneth Clark, David Livingstone...
New York Times (Free subscription) | 11/28/2009
The notions of excess capacity and malinvestment were common in business-cycle theory of the 19th and early 20th centuries, when growing Western economies had frequent crashes of this kind. Numerous writers, from the Rev. Thomas Malthus to the Austrian economist Friedrich A. von Hayek, warned about the overextension of unprofitable capital deployments and the pain from the inevitable...
Post-Darwinist (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
... forests and related habitats. They witnessed a struggle for existence that matched the description Thomas Malthus had given of human communities. Using the same logic, Darwin and Wallace were stimulated to think about winners and losers in populations of animals and plants. The Russian scientists lived in a different world. [They] "investigated a vast under-populated continental...
Circle of 13 (Free subscription) | 11/21/2009
From: Meanwhile, in bleaker moments, scientific authorities have predicted the end of the world and civilization as we know them at the hand of pandemics or environmental catastrophe. And yet we are still here, in defiance of Thomas Malthus's eighteenth-century warnings about overpopulation and ecologist Paul Ehrlich's prophesy in his 1968 book The Population Bomb that “In the 1970s and...
MARRIAGEDEBATE.COM--MAIN BLOG (Free subscription) | 11/17/2009
piece: THOMAS MALTHUS first published his “Essay on the Principle of Population”, in which he forecast that population growth would outstrip the world’s food supply, in 1798. His timing was unfortunate, for something started happening around then which made nonsense of his ideas. As industrialisation swept through what is now the developed world, fertility fell sharply,...
Uncommon Descent (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
... forests and related habitats. They witnessed a struggle for existence that matched the description Thomas Malthus had given of human communities. Using the same logic, Darwin and Wallace were stimulated to think about winners and losers in populations of animals and plants. The Russian scientists lived in a different world. [They] “investigated a vast under-populated continental plain....
Spiked Online (Free subscription) | 11/19/2009
Brendan O’Neill Too many people? No, too many MalthusiansSince 200 AD, scaremongers have been describing human beings as ‘burdensome to the world’. They were wrong then, and they’re still wrong today.Last week, on 12 November, spiked editor Brendan O’Neill debated Roger Martin, chairman of the Optimum Population Trust, at the Wellcome Collection in London. To kick off ’s campaign against neo-Malthusianism...
The Oregon Economics Blog (Free subscription) | 10/30/2009
... The Economist's take: Astonishing falls in the fertility rate are bringing with them big benefits THOMAS MALTHUS first published his “Essay on the Principle of Population”, in which he forecast that population growth would outstrip the world’s food supply, in 1798. His timing was unfortunate, for something started happening around then which made nonsense of his...
The Economist (Free subscription) | 10/29/2009
Astonishing falls in the fertility rate are bringing with them big benefits THOMAS MALTHUS first published his “Essay on the Principle of Population”, in which he forecast that population growth would outstrip the world’s food supply, in 1798. His timing was unfortunate, for something started happening around then which made nonsense of his ideas. As industrialisation...
