Like Thomas Malthus, whose work he cited, Knowlton was worried about the hazards of fertility.
The debate between Say and Malthus, between Scrooge and the Ghosts, continues to this day.
He has a lot of company in that view, going back to Thomas Malthus.
So Malthus looks beatable even when he sits astride the apocalyptic horse of climate change.
By 1968 Malthus and his wrong ideas had been dead long enough to make a comeback.
The industrial revolution gave us the Reverend Thomas Malthus, that most fearful of latter-day apocalyptics.
Since Malthus wrote his first edition in 1798, the world has grown both in population and prosperity.
We may have outrun Malthus for a couple of centuries but he is still in the race.
Like Malthus, Ehrlich, who is now a professor at Stanford University, failed to appreciate the ingenuity of humanity.
And it still faces the classic constraints, identified by Thomas Malthus in the 19th century, of land and water.
We often hear that Thomas Malthus' dire predictions about population growth were wrong because humans innovated solutions to food shortages.
Unlike Malthus, who saw no remedy except plague or abstinence, Knowlton believed that a more agreeable solution was at hand.
Malthus famously argued that in a world in which economies grew arithmetically and population grew geometrically, mass want would be inevitable.
Thomas Robert Malthus was then at the height of his fame and the harvest failure seemed to bear out his pessimism.
Thomas Malthus also make predictions, and revised them repeatedly during his lifetime.
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In papers written between 1798 and 1826 the British economist and demographer Thomas Malthus said the world would run out of food.
The growth of human population, which Malthus believed had peaked during his lifetime, has risen relentlessly and rapidly over the past three centuries.
It is not surprising that some philosophers, such as Thomas Malthus and Jeremy Bentham, tried to remove emotion from their visions of social reform.
Written about a generation before Malthus was born, it captures what Malthus missed, because of his obsessive theological focus on the cursed state of mankind.
For humanity as a whole, even now, Malthus is the future.
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Malthus, himself, had joined the surplus generation only nine years before.
In 1798, Malthus argued that human population always grows more rapidly than the human food supply until war, disease or famine reduces the number of people.
Why are academics such as Krugman, Ehrlich and Malthus so prone to believe the world is limited by finite resources when any read of history shows the opposite?
These challenges have contributed to a rebirth of the profoundly misguided philosophy espoused by Thomas Malthus, an English priest and economist who lived during the late 18th Century.
The ugly spirit of Reverend Thomas Malthus is lurking again.
Malthus did not anticipate the development of powerful new vaccines for diseases like small-pox and equally powerful advances in public health infrastructure like modern sewage systems and so forth.
Its sorrowful tone echoes the writings of Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, Thomas Malthus and the sob sisters of the 1850s who decried the end of cheap whale blubber.
Answer: He was weighing in on one of the central economic debates of his time, the one that raged between Thomas Malthus and one of the disciples of Adam Smith.
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