Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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 ...
The neo-Malthusian controversy, comprising related debates of many years later, has seen a similar central role assigned to the numbers of children born. [27] The goal of Malthusian theory is to explain how population and food production expand, with the latter experiencing arithmetic growth and the former experiencing exponential growth. [28]
P 0 = P(0) is the initial population size, r = the population growth rate, which Ronald Fisher called the Malthusian parameter of population growth in The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection, [2] and Alfred J. Lotka called the intrinsic rate of increase, [3] [4] t = time. The model can also be written in the form of a differential equation:
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)
In the 20th century, population planning proponents have drawn from the insights of Thomas Malthus, a British clergyman and economist who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Malthus argued that, "Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence only increases in an arithmetical ratio." He also ...
The Population Bomb has been characterized by critics as primarily a repetition of the Malthusian catastrophe argument that population growth will outpace agricultural growth unless controlled. Ehrlich observed that since about 1930 the population of the world had doubled within a single generation, from 2 billion to nearly 4 billion, and was ...