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Thomas Malthus
(1766-1834)
An early warner against overpopulation.
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Demographers distinguish between human fertility and human fecundity. The word “fertility” refers here to the number of actual births while “fecundity” refers to potential births. Obviously, fertility has never matched fecundity or, in other words, no human population has ever reproduced to its full capacity.
This is generally true not only for groups such as tribes or nations, but also for individual families. People have always tried to limit the number of their children by various methods. Among those were prohibitions of early marriage, separation of the sexes, a high esteem for chaste and celibate lifestyles, contraception, abortion, and infanticide.
Limiting the size of populations became a topic for learned disputes especially through the work of the English parson Thomas Malthus. In his “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1798) he speculated that the growth of the world population would eventually outrun the world food supply because the latter could only grow at an arithmetic rate (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) while the population would grow at a geometric rate (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.). In this particular instance, Malthus was eventually proven wrong. However, many of his other gloomy observations have stimulated an increasingly sophisticated debate that continues to this day. Indeed, he is now considered the father of “the dismal science” of economics.
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