Answered: What were Malthus views on…

Social Psychology (10th Edition)

10th Edition

ISBN:9780134641287

Author:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers

Publisher:Elliot Aronson, Timothy D. Wilson, Robin M. Akert, Samuel R. Sommers

Chapter1: Introducing Social Psychology

Section: Chapter Questions

Problem 1RQ1

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What were Malthus views on overpopulation?

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Early in the 19^th century, the English scholar Reverend Thomas Malthus published “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” He wrote that overpopulation was the root of many problems industrial European society suffered from poverty, malnutrition, and disease could all be attributed to overpopulation. According to Malthus, this was a mathematical inevitability. Malthus observed that, while resources tended to grow arithmetically, populations exhibit exponential growth. Thus, if left unrestricted, human populations would continue to grow until they would become too large to be supported by the food grown on available agricultural land. In other words, humans would outpace their local carrying capacity, the capacity of ecosystems or societies to support the local population.

As a solution, Malthus urged “moral restraint.” That is, he declared that people must practice abstinence before marriage, forced sterilisation where necessary, and institute criminal punishments for so called unprepared parents who had more children than they could support. Even in his time, this solution was controversial. According to Malthus, the only alternative to moral restraint was certain disaster: if allowed to grow unchecked, population would outstrip available resources, resulting in what came to be known as Malthusian catastrophes: naturally occurring checks on population growth such as famine, disease, or war.

Over the two hundred years following Malthus’s projections, famine has overtaken numerous individual regions. Proponents of this theory, Neo-Malthusians, state that these famines were examples of Malthusian catastrophes.