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Thomas Robert Malthus, after whom Malthusianism is named. Malthusianism is a theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline.
By now, it is a widely accepted view to analogize Malthusian growth in Ecology to Newton's First Law of uniform motion in physics. [8] Malthus wrote that all life forms, including humans, have a propensity to exponential population growth when resources are abundant but that actual growth is limited by available resources:
The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798, [1] but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert Malthus.The book warned of future difficulties, on an interpretation of the population increasing in geometric progression (so as to double every 25 years) [2] while food production increased in an arithmetic progression, which would leave a ...
Malthus argued in his Essay (1798) that population growth generally expanded in times and in regions of plenty until the size of the population relative to the primary resources caused distress: Yet in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment [i.e., marriage] is so strong that there is a constant ...
Malthus also notes that the checks on the human population are more complicated than those on animals and plants. [25] Malthus explains, for example, that a human check on population growth is the conscious decision not to reproduce because of financial burden. [25] Malthus then explains that the main check on population growth is food.
The beginning of population dynamics is widely regarded as the work of Malthus, formulated as the Malthusian growth model. According to Malthus, assuming that the conditions (the environment) remain constant ( ceteris paribus ), a population will grow (or decline) exponentially .
Theory of population may refer to: Malthusianism, a theory of population by Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) An Essay on the Principle of Population, the book in which Malthus propounded his theory; Neo-Malthusian theory of Paul R. Ehrlich (born 1932) and others; Theory of demographic transition by Warren Thompson (1887–1973)
Population growth is the increase in the number of people in a population or dispersed group. The global population has grown from 1 billion in 1800 to 8.2 billion in 2025. [ 3 ] Actual global human population growth amounts to around 70 million annually, or 0.85% per year.