Thomas Malthus :: essays papers

Thomas Malthus two hundred years ago, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote An Essay on the principle of community in which he argued that the world tribe would increase faster than the fodder supply. This would cause disastrous results for the general human welfare. A world world of 250 million at the time has now gone up to round 6 billion. This is in spite of wars, plagues, famine, and epidemics. World food production has been safekeeping pace with population growth until recently. If the world food supply had been distributed as to each member of society in the mid 1980s, with a population of 4.7 billion heap, each person would have gotten a weekly regimen of 11 ponds. This included meat, grains, and fish. In todays society, the population has increase over one billion and the food supply has gone fine-tune to about 10 pounds per person per week. A world population of 10 to 11 billion by mid century would leave each person with only 6 to 7 pounds per week. This is th e same as the diet that populate living in poverty get in our fork out day society. However, by trying to help poverty, we are (according to Malthus) making the pip worse. IN the short run, there seems to be an improvement because those poor people are better off and can do well. This situation would fill to a larger population than before. This in turn would top out to more people becoming impoverished due to lack of food supply. Malthus believed that if people left poverty alone, it would take care of itself. At the start of the twenty-first Century, it is very easy to debunk his starting point that population grows geometrically while food supply only arithmetically. This will lead to a widening gap between population and food supply. However, by saying that, he was mistaken, the improving technology has meant that food supply has excessively increased geometrically. If we were to take a mathematical approach to this, population, food production, slide fastener use, industrial production, waste production, etc. are all increasing nether mechanisms that can shown on an exponential curve like a parabola, past all will be approaching a vertical asymptote.