Question

Thomas Malthus presented a dismal forecast for man-kind, largely due to the effects of population growth. Show how the composition of output changes as a result of population growth.

Answer 1

As per Malthusian theory, population increases exponentially but food supply arithmetically. Increase in food production enhances the well being of the economy but this would be temporary because there would be population growth. Population tends to grow until the poor class suffered.

Thomas Malthus theorized that populations grew in geometric progression. A geometric progression is a sequence of numbers where each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed, non-zero number called the common ratio. For example, in the sequence 2, 10, 50, 250, 1250, the common ratio is 5.

Additionally, he stated that food production increases in arithmetic progression. An arithmetic progression is a sequence of numbers such that the difference between the consecutive terms is constant. For example, in series 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, the common difference of 3. He derived this conclusion due to the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Thomas Malthus found that food production did not increase at an exponential rate but instead increased more slowly. As a result of these differences in population and food growth rates, Malthus predicted that the human population would eventually grow too large to be sufficiently supported by the food available.

As a result of the growing population and limited food, Thomas Malthus thought that the world would begin a downward spiral. Overall, he predicted that the uncontrolled population growth would lead to a depletion of resources, increased pollution, overcrowding, and increased unemployment. He thought these problems would then lead to larger problems, such as starvation, increased diseases, crime, poverty, and eventually war. Malthus predicted that these unfortunate circumstances would be how the Earth would control the human population. He thought that these problems would lead to increased death rates and lower birth rates, which would help return the human population to a manageable size where there would be enough resources to support the entire population.

From this, we can conclude that populations will grow faster than the supply of food. This exponential population growth will lead to a shortage of food.

MALTHUSIAN TRAP

The Malthusian Trap (or “Malthusian Population Trap”) is the idea that higher levels of food production created by more advanced agricultural techniques create higher population levels, which then lead to food shortages because the higher population needs to live on land that would have previously used to grow crops.

Even as technological advancement would normally lead to per capita income gains, theorizes Malthus, these gains are not achieved because in practice the advancement also creates population growth. Once the population exceeds what food supplies can support, this supposedly creates a Malthusian crisis with widespread famine as well as rampant disease. This ends up decreasing the population to earlier levels.