The first version of British economist Thomas Malthus’s
An Essay on the Principle of Population appeared anonymously in 1798 and
achieved instant notoriety. Malthus predicted that the productive capacity of
the world’s resources, especially agriculture, ultimately could never increase
quickly enough to sustain the needs of a human population that was undergoing
unchecked growth. This excerpt from A Summary View of the Principle of
Population (1830) revealed several finer points in Malthus’s philosophy. For
example, Malthus stated that natural checks on population growth, such as the
limited availability of food and productive land, could work to prevent
overpopulation by causing people to marry later in life and to have fewer
children. Malthus''s main contribution to economics was his theory of population, published
in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). According to Malthus,
population tends to increase faster than the supply of food available for its
needs. Whenever a relative gain occurs in food production over population
growth, a higher rate of population increase is stimulated; on the other hand,
if population grows too much faster than food production, the growth is checked
by famine, disease, and war.