How did the prophecies of Thomas Robert Malthus, a pioneer in the field of demography, come true? Detailed answer

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How did the prophecies of Thomas Robert Malthus, a pioneer in the field of demography, come true? Detailed answer

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How did the prophecies of Thomas Robert Malthus, a pioneer in the field of demography, come true?

In 1798, when the world's population was still approaching the first billion, the English economist and priest Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) anonymously published his famous Essay on the Law of Population, in which he wrote: "Population, if not controlled, increases exponentially. Means of subsistence increase only in arithmetic progression. Even a superficial acquaintance with numbers will show that the first sequence is incommensurable with the second."

According to the logic of the British scientist, the population of England was to double every 25 years, and by 1950 this country should have had 704 million inhabitants, while its territory can only feed 77 million. Therefore, some drastic measures must be taken to contain the population.

History, however, quickly showed that not everything is so simple with the notorious arithmetic and geometric progressions. At the end of the 200th century, not 38 million people lived in England, as follows from the calculations of Malthus, but only 12 million, and they lived, by the way, much better than 1950 million a century earlier. By 50, the terrible figure predicted by Malthus had also not materialized: the population of the United Kingdom had just reached 60,2 million people. And even today, the number of people living in the UK - XNUMX million - completely allows this country to feed itself.

Thus, Malthus was mistaken both in terms of outpacing the growth of population compared to the growth of agricultural production, and in relation to the coming population explosion. The world's per capita food production is now higher than at any time in history, and world prices for basic foodstuffs have fallen by more than 1800 percent (at comparable prices) since 90. If in 1949 in developing countries 45 percent of the population was hungry, now it is 18 percent, and according to forecasts for 2010, this proportion will decrease to 12 percent.

As for the population explosion predicted by Malthus, the peak rate of human growth was reached in the 1960s - 2 percent per year. Now it is 1,26 percent, and the forecast for 2050 is 0,46 percent. At the same time, the population of the Earth in 2150 (according to the "average" estimates of the UN Population Division) should be 10,8 billion people.

Speaking about the prospects for agricultural production, one can cite the opinion of Sergei Petrovich Kapitsa: "Under reasonable assumptions, the Earth can support up to 15-25 billion people for a long time."

Author: Kondrashov A.P.

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