Neo-Malthusian Theory

Abstract

In the late 18th century, Thomas Malthus, an English political economist, advanced a theory of crisis in his Essay on the Principle of Population,1 based on a posited relation of disproportion between the rate of demographic growth and the rate of growth of food supply. According to this thesis, population naturally increases in geometric ratio but the means of subsistence, or agricultural production increases only in an arithmetic ratio making it impossible for agricultural production to sustain growing populations indefinitely. These two opposing natural tendencies generate periodic crises of food supply corrected by reduction of population size. Malthus describes two distinct forms of checks on population size: ‘positive’ checks such as war, epidemics, famine, and ‘preventive’ checks such as various forms of birth control, including abortion, and infanticide. Since food scarcity, however, is the condition for the operation of these checks, it is the ultimate check on population increase.