Some Examinations of Malthus's Views on Population

               Thomas Robert Malthus was a cleric and an economist which has works about the political economy. One of the things that makes Malthus famous is that his theory of population and resources. In that theory which he compares these two measures, he concluded that, from his perspective because it is not a true observation, due to population increases exponentially and resources increase arithmetically after a certain time population will exceed the total amount of resources production and will cause some catastrophic scenes.                                                                       

               As you can see the graph above, it simply explains the Malthus’s theory of population. I would give quotation from Malthus’s book An Essay on The Principal of Population “Let us now take any spot of earth, this Island for instance, and see in what ratio the subsistence it affords can be supposed to increase. We will begin with it under its present state of cultivation. If I allow that by the best possible policy, by breaking up more land and by great encouragements to agriculture, the produce of this Island may be doubled in the first twenty-five years, I think it will be allowing as much as any person can well demand. In the next twenty-five years, it is impossible to suppose that the produce could be quadrupled. It would be contrary to all our knowledge of the qualities of land. The very utmost that we can conceive, is, that the increase in the second twenty-five years might equal the present produce. Let us then take this for our rule, though certainly far beyond the truth, and allow that, by great exertion, the whole produce of the Island might be increased every twenty-five years, by a quantity of subsistence equal to what it at present produces. The most enthusiastic speculator cannot suppose a greater increase than this. In a few centuries it would make every acre of land in the Island like a garden. Yet this ratio of increase is evidently arithmetical.” Which you can see the basic sets of equations that Malthus arrived from nowhere but his mind. But he couldn’t imagine the improvements of technology, knowledge of chemistry and biology that lead us to increase the productivity of whatever you can think of that we have achieved in the last century. Because he was just trapped between the fear of the increasing population in the century which he lived in, it is understandable that he created this theory. However, I think it is another missing point that Malthus have been wrong about is that the green area called “abundance” is just simply wrong representation and signs of ignorance of the fact that in the history of humankind as we go to the past times people simply didn’t have enough resources to feed themselves and their families. It is not a matter of the population it is just matter of how humans can increase their productivity over these lands of the earth.

I would countinue to my essay with another quote from same book. “By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two (Population and Subsistence) unequal powers must be kept equal. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.” As you can understand with the idea of subsistence increases arithmetically and population increases geometrically Malthus is an advocate of controlling the population of humankind. He again acted like an ignorant that doesn’t want to know the truth. If there is high resource and the high capacity of production, there wouldn’t be no bigger increase in the population or attempting to increase as Malthus stated in his book. USA has really high capacity of the production of subsistence when we compare to the Central Africa. Even in Africa the capacity of production is really low, they try to increase their population because of the lack of improvement in agricultural industry that makes human power obligatory in agriculture. Also, even the production capacity is really high in USA, the population increase is not as high as Malthus has predicted. Another issue will appear within the Malthus’s theory. “The impending food scarcity would, without a preventive check, generate positive checks in the form of food shortages, hunger, and poverty. However, thanks to mankind’s cognitive abilities, people would see these dire consequences and, before they arose, impose on themselves a preventive check in the form of having fewer children.” With this quote the complicated narrates of Malthus become more complicated than ever. When I saw that quote I couldn’t handle myself and asked that what an earth would someone makes an argument and then acted with ignorance what he said. What, when we are making a contribution do we have to ignore the facts of “mankind’s cognitive abilities”?

As final point, Malthus did some wrong inferences, which might also give the idea of controlling of human population in order to establish an equilibrium between population and subsistence, would be concluded with disastrous events. Even if he said that there are obstacles that prevent human population to increase geometrically like preventive and positive checks, these statements actually make him more complicated and useless when it comes to evaluation of population, he undermined the capacity of human development in the areas of positive sciences and the application of these sciences to our lives. 

07/02/2022