Malthusianism is just so damned tiresome. The constant stream of predictions that a growing human population will soon crash because we are about run out of food and/or other resources has always failed to come true. Now, a new People and Planet report by researchers operating as part of the Earth4All initiative of The Club of Rome projects in two different scenarios—Too Little Too Late versus Giant Leap—that the world population will peak around the middle of this century. Good news, but the authors just can't help inflecting their report with a touch of good old-fashioned Malthusianism. Call it Malthusianism-lite.
Eponymously, Malthusianism begins with the claims made by the 18th-century economist Thomas Robert Malthus in his 1798 An Essay on the Principle of Population. "Population," Malthus famously asserted, "when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio…. This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence." This differential in the growth rates of population and food supplies meant that some portion of mankind would always be on the verge of starvation.
