Summary of malthus an essay on the principle of population

Precious Metals Population is not of concern if there are enough resources to go around.

The author is professor of biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. This article is based on a presidential address presented before the meeting of the Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Utah State University, Logan, 25 June At the end of a thoughtful article on the future of nuclear war, Wiesner and York 1 concluded that: It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution.

If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation. An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution.

A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality. In our day though not in earlier times technical solutions are always welcome. Because of previous failures in prophecy, it takes courage to assert that a desired technical solution is not possible.

Wiesner and York exhibited this courage; publishing in a science journal, they insisted that the solution to the problem was not to be found in the natural sciences. They cautiously qualified their statement with the phrase, "It is our considered professional judgment.

Rather, the concern here is with the important concept of a class of human problems which can be called "no technical solution problems," and, more specifically, with the identification and discussion of one of these. It is easy to show that the class is not a null class. Recall the game of tick-tack-toe.

Consider the problem, "How can I win the game of tick-tack-toe?

Put another way, there is no "technical solution" to the problem. I can win only by giving a radical meaning to the word "win. Every way in which I "win" involves, in some sense, an abandonment of the game, as we intuitively understand it.

I can also, of course, openly abandon the game--refuse to play it. This is what most adults do. The class of "No technical solution problems" has members. My thesis is that the "population problem," as conventionally conceived, is a member of this class. How it is conventionally conceived needs some comment.

It is fair to say that most people who anguish over the population problem are trying to find a way to avoid the evils of overpopulation without relinquishing any of the privileges they now enjoy. They think that farming the seas or developing new strains of wheat will solve the problem--technologically.

I try to show here that the solution they seek cannot be found. The population problem cannot be solved in a technical way, any more than can the problem of winning the game of tick-tack-toe. What Shall We Maximize? Population, as Malthus said, naturally tends to grow "geometrically," or, as we would now say, exponentially.

Is ours a finite world? A fair defense can be put forward for the view that the world is infinite; or that we do not know that it is not. But, in terms of the practical problems that we must face in the next few generations with the foreseeable technology, it is clear that we will greatly increase human misery if we do not, during the immediate future, assume that the world available to the terrestrial human population is finite.

A finite world can support only a finite population; therefore, population growth must eventually equal zero. The case of perpetual wide fluctuations above and below zero is a trivial variant that need not be discussed. When this condition is met, what will be the situation of mankind? No--for two reasons, each sufficient by itself.

The first is a theoretical one. It is not mathematically possible to maximize for two or more variables at the same time. The second reason springs directly from biological facts. To live, any organism must have a source of energy for example, food. This energy is utilized for two purposes:Thomas Robert Malthus FRS (/ ˈ m æ l θ ə s /; 13 February – 23 December ) was an English cleric and scholar, influential in the fields of political economy and demography.

Malthus himself used only his middle name, Robert. In his book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus observed that an increase in a .

Thomas Robert Malthus - Wikipedia

An Essay on the Principle of Population An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M.

Condorcet, and Other Writers. Thomas Malthus London Printed for J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard In Malthus published An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr.

Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other initiativeblog.com hastily written pamphlet had as its principal object Academic development. Malthus was born into a prosperous family. In the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus devotes many pages to refuting the ideas of Godwin and other Enlightenment thinkers on the perfectibility of initiativeblog.com Updated 13 March, The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin, Published in Science, December 13, For copyright permission, click here..

The author is professor of biology, University of California, Santa Barbara. The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in , but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert initiativeblog.com book predicted a grim future, as population would increase geometrically, doubling every 25 years, but food production would only grow arithmetically, which would result in famine and .

• Navigate Guide
• An Essay on the Principle of Population - Wikipedia
• Orion Magazine | Dark Ecology