That’s a little ridiculous don’t you think?
Imagine that you went back in time and found a hunter gatherer tribe living in a small secluded valley, whose game population is high enough to support a small band of hunters in a relatively sedentary lifestyle. Even without technology, these people are not dumb - they understand the land and what sort of population it can support. So when you tell their leader that in 10,000 years, the forests of the valley will be stripped away, but rather meaning starvation for the tribe this will mean that ten thousand people can live in the valley where only a few hundred live now - of course, they will think you mad. How is that possible? That’s not how the world works!
The hunter gatherers may point out that in order to accomplish this “humans will have to exhibit a level of discipline, behavior, and global cooperation far above anything they have ever attained before”, and they’d even be write - yet, that turned out to be no problem.
Malthus believed that yhe population was growing out of control, that attempts to aid suffering caused by overpopulation (such as starvation) would only make things worse (by temporarily alleviating the starvation, allowing more kids to be born, who would then eat all the food and starve).
Of course, it’s understandable why Malthus was concerned. After all, world population in his day had grown to the staggering, unmanageable, unimaginable size of - err, 1 billion.
Turns out Malthus was full of shit.
Quick aside - based on the way things were taught when I was in high school, I’d always assumed that Jonathan Swift’s essay A Modest Proposal. The two concepts were always presented together, with Malthus first and Swift presented as a rebuttal. However, it turns out that Swift’s essay predates Malthus’ birth by decades! Learn something new every day…
