Thomas Malthus

An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society

1798. A book in which Malthus wrote all of his ideas. In it, he wrote that everything boils down to population. He believed that we should limit population growth otherwise there isn't going to be enough food to supply our huge population. What's going to happen is that population will boom and our resource base will be outstripped, causing war and famines, and then the population will bust and soon after the population will boom again starting the cycle all over.

Birth control

Also slowed the population increase.

Paul Ehrlich

An advocate of Malthus' ideas. Started the ZPG movement (only replace yourself; limit yourself to two children). This also limited population growth.

Doubling

Based his predictions of the future through math techniques called geopopulation growth or overdoubling. This meant that if someone has 4 children, those children will have 4 children, and essentially the population is being doubled.

Applied technology

Believed to solve the problem of overpopulation and resource technology.

Thomas Carlyl

Criticized his work and saw Malthus as a pessimist.

Green Revolution

Greatly increased productivity of food per acre of land and brought formerly unusable parts of land into production through fertilizers and technology. This presented a setback to Malthus' prediction.

Scarcity

He thinks doubling will lead to us outstripping our food supply in response, causing scarcity.

Economic scale

Malthus believe this cycle was unstoppable. He was the first person to look at economic scale - the idea that there are limits to the resources of planet Earth.

Env Significance

Malthus's paradigm talks about food supply, suggesting that there isn't enough food for the current population and that eventually we will completely run out of resources. In fact, he says that we are already outstripping our resource base. This is significant because it urges us to take the matter into our own hands and stop outstripping our resource base; otherwise we will run out of resources soon enough.

Ecological economists

People who believe the population is already too large and that we've already outstripped our resource base.

Poverty

Then poverty since the industrial society can't employ that many people.

The dismal science

What Carlyle said was Malthus' type of interpretation.