Malthusian Population Theory Research Articles

Population Growth as a Cause of Human Development in Zambia (1992-2022)

This article investigates population growth as a cause of human development in Zambia from 1992-2022, with the substantive objective being to examine whether population growth causes income inequality, poverty and unemployment in Zambia. The study was built on two theories: Malthusian theory of population and demographic transition theory. It employed a mixed research method, utilizing both qualitative and quantitative data. Using the granger causality as the estimation technique specifically utilized the Vector Autoregressive model and correlation tests; the results show that population growth causes human development and poverty. Furthermore, that population growth does not cause income inequality and unemployment in Zambia. The study recommends that the government of Zambia invests in Research, Development and Technology so as to be in touch with the needs of the people, equally investing in education and health infrastructure and human resource, and be deliberate about setting up manufacturing industries and revamping existing ones.

Assessing the Role of Population Size on GDP Growth Rate: A Concise Review with Lessons from China

While population size can determine the size of human capital of a country which is essential for economic growth. It may not necessarily be a major factor to influence GDP growth rate. Malthusian theory of population postulates that increase in population size would create hunger, starvation and therefore stagnate economic prosperity. On the other hand, the Endogenous growth theory demonstrates the significance of population growth in facilitating economic growth via human capital development, entrepreneurial skills and innovation among others. China demonstrated during its rising economic prospects that the size of population significantly and directly influences economic growth. However, this review shows that over the past few years the dynamics has shifted with recent data indicating that China’s growth is not dependent on its population size. Therefore, for population size to increase GDP growth rate, good policies that target human capital development must be put in place.

The man-land relationship in Qing China: an overview

ABSTRACT The Qing era witnessed a continuation of the man-land problem that had haunted Chinese history. Since the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, China has developed a unique mode of small-scale peasant production, which required enormous manpower on the one hand and could support a huge population on the other. Taking the Taiping Rebellion arising in 1850 as the watershed, this paper examines the changes in the man-land relationship during two periods of the Qing era and criticizes both the Malthusian Theory of Population from the West and the “overpopulation” argument indigenous in China. This paper concludes that the Malthusian Theory cannot fully explain the complexities of man-land relationship in China and that “overpopulation” was not the root cause for the collapse of dynasties in the Chinese history.

Population Backfire: Hindsight to Malthusian Catastrophe

The basic tenet of Economics lies in the scarcity principle and unlimited nature of human wants, but allocating a definite amount of resources to satisfy the growing per capita needs in an economy is a difficult task. Things become more complicated when the population pressure generates backfire. The global population has increased to 7.8 billion, and it is essential to ensure sufficient food supply for the growing human population as well as for other species without destroying ecological balance is a serious matter to consider. An evaluation of Malthusian population theories has great importance in this context. This paper intends to analyze the Malthusian theory of population and what happens if population backfire happens and also looks into the intensity of positive checks on population along with the Malthusian trap and its effect on the present as well as the future generation.

An Econometric Assessment of T.R. Malthusian Theory of Population, Empirical Evidence in India

An Econometric Assessment of T.R. Malthusian Theory of Population, Empirical Evidence in India

The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Michael Parrish Lee

Reviewed by: The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Michael Parrish Lee Parama Roy (bio) The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Michael Parrish Lee; pp. x + 246. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, £79.99, $109.99. It has long been a truism that courtship and marriage constitute the very marrow of nineteenth-century British fiction; without the marriage plot, the realist novel may be said to have little plot at all. Theorists of the novel as disparate as Ian Watt and Nancy Armstrong have concurred with Whiggish historians of marriage such as Lawrence Stone in insisting on the emergence of companionate marriage and its valorization of individualism, self-determination, and erotic fulfilment within marriage as the defining characteristic of the realist novel. If the marriage plot corresponds with narrative or plot itself, its opposite is made up of scenes of eating, which Franco Moretti (among others) defines as the "perfect filler" (qtd. in Lee 4). Yet, if the marriage plot exemplifies "the power of desire to consolidate identity, motivate action, and drive narrative toward a resolution," it is attended and besieged by what Michael Parrish Lee in The Food Plot in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel denominates as a "food plot," which threatens to frustrate the narrative closure and future-oriented maturity that the former has as its goal (2). The food plot is one in which the inexorability of bodily hunger and eating functions as a powerful narrative principle, overcoming sexual desire as the engine of plot. In juxtaposing these two plots he takes his inspiration from Malthusian population theory, which famously posits the heterosexual instinct and the necessity of eating as the two irreconcilable hungers that govern human nature. Like Catherine Gallagher in The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (2006), Lee underscores Thomas Malthus's capacious understanding of (hetero)sexuality as encompassing intellectual and emotional and not just physical fulfilment, and existing on an equal footing with self-preservation. In this the political economist is, he suggests cannily, "almost . . . an early theorist of the marriage plot" (12). At the same time, Malthus also insists on the tragic result of heterosexual passion, which is "a never-ending need to eat" such that "the reproductive future threatens to devour itself" (12). Insofar as the nineteenth-century British novel assumes "a double form," oscillating between desire and appetite, Malthusian thought may be said to constitute the very grammar of novelistic narrative (3). Jane Austen's novels constitute for Lee the paradigm of the marriage plot, in which "heterosexual interiority . . . is defined against gustatory appetite" (22). Romantically viable protagonists establish themselves as such by holding bodily hunger in contempt relative to the consolations of emotional responsiveness and literary taste. Hence the [End Page 488] young Fanny Price's refusal of the consolation of gooseberry tart when she first arrives at Mansfield Park assures us of her fate as a heroine. In contrast, figures outside the circuit of reproductive sexuality—childless men like Mansfield Park's (1814) Dr. Grant, or widowers and spinsters like Emma's (1815) Mr. Woodhouse and Miss Bates—demonstrate an avid interest in food and eating that is entirely at odds with such refusal. In the Victorian novel, however, hunger becomes a more pressing matter, calling for a new kind of narrative attention to the travails of the hungry in an era of increasing scrutiny of the physical deprivations of the impoverished classes; it cannot be dismissed with the insouciance that belongs to the Austenian model. The narrative force of appetite features in the work of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Makepeace Thackeray, and George Eliot, but of all the Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens comes closest to portraying "the need for food as the primal driving force of human nature" (80). Novels of the fin de siècle such as those by Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, produced in the crucible of evolutionary thought, underscore the sheer difficulty of maintaining an apartheid between marriage and food plots, and even of distinguishing between the two. And late-Victorian romances like those of Bram Stoker and H. G. Wells jettison the marital drive of the realist...

Revisiting population growth and food production nexus in Nigeria: an ARDL approach to cointegration

Purpose. This study focused on the relationship between the increasing population and level of food growth in Nigeria.
 Methodology / approach. Agriculture’s contribution to GDP was used to proxy food production alongside population growth rate. The ARDL Model was used to estimate both long and short run population-food growth relations over a 35-year period of 1982–2016. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller, Philip Peron and Kwiatkowski-Philips-Schmidt-Shin stationarity tests were carried out to ensure the stationarity of the variables.
 Results. The results showed that the variables are integrated of mixed order. The Bounds test established cointegration between population growth and food production in Nigeria which validated the Malthusian theory. However, the estimates revealed that population growth had a positive and significant relationship with food growth in both the long and short run. This implies that increase in population is yet to take a negative effect on availability of food against Malthus postulation.
 Originality / scientific novelty. This study is the only study on the validation of Malthusian theory of population which employed a rigorous means to establish the order of integration of the variables required for the validation test. It also looked at the place of agriculture in the midst of growing population.
 Practical value / implications. This outcome is a call to intimate the populace on the dangers of population explosion on one hand and on another hand, the government to ensure provision of adaptable and adoptable technology in the agricultural sector to ensure that food production increases as Nigeria is blessed with the land and weather to make this happen.

Validity of Malthusian Theory of Population in 20th Century in Terms of Using Scientific Technology to the Economic Growth and Strength

In the late eighteenth century, in 1798, England's renowned economist Thomas Malthus, in his book ‘Essay on the Principal of Population’1, propounded a stirring theory about population, according to his name, it is called the Malthusian Population Theory. Malthus discussed the problem of population increase in the food supply and the scarcity of production rule. According to Malthus, population increases in geometric rates and food production increases at arithmetical rate. In the twentieth century, we will see how logical the population theory of Malthus is in today's world and how unreasonable. Although the population theory of Malthus is somewhat true for the underdeveloped countries. Due to the development and use of science and technology in the present world, the population theory of Malthas has been criticized by various modern economists.

Carlyle and Boulding: The Two Economists Largely Responsible for Their Discipline Becoming Known as ‘The Dismal Science’

This article disproves the common contention that Thomas Carlyle dubbed economics ‘the dismal science’ in response to the Malthusian theory of population. It demonstrates that Carlyle was instead reacting to what he saw as the constraining effects on human behaviour of the endorsement of the market system by contemporary economists, known at the time as practitioners of political economy. It shows that it was Kenneth Boulding who was mainly responsible for the association of the phrase ‘the dismal science’ with the Malthusian theory of population. Looking at each of the historians of economic thought cited by Dixon (2006) as supporting the association of the phrase ‘the dismal science’ with both the Malthusian theory of population and Carlyle, it finds that none provides any evidence for the view that such an association exists. It concludes with speculation as to what Carlyle would have thought of neoclassical economics.

Malthus and the Philanthropists, 1764–1859: The Cultural Circulation of Political Economy, Botany, and Natural Knowledge

Modernity does not possess a monopoly on mass incarceration, population fears, forced migration, famine, or climatic change. Indeed, contemporary and early modern concerns over these matters have extended interests in Thomas Malthus. Yet, despite extensive research on population issues, little work explicates the genesis of population knowledge production or how the process of intellectual transfer occurred during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This paper examines the Delessert network’s instrumental role in cultivating, curating, and circulating knowledge that popularized Malthusian population theory, including the theory’s constitutive elements of political economy, philanthropy, industry, agriculture, and botany. I show how deviant, nonconformist groups suffered forced migration for their political philosophy, particularly during the revolutionary 1790s, resulting in their imprisonment and migration to America. A consequence of these social shifts was the diffusion and dissemination of population theory—as a pursuit of scientific knowledge and exploration—across both sides of the Atlantic. By focusing on the Delesserts and their social network, I find that a byproduct of inter and intra continental migration among European elites was a knowledge exchange that stimulated Malthus’s thesis on population and Genevan Augustin Pyramus Candolle’s research on botany, ultimately culminating in Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and human evolution.

World and Indian Agriculture: Revolutions & Multi Speed Strategies for Future

The act of Malthusian theory of population and his prediction ‘population tended to outstrip the food supply’ did not happen in most parts of the globe and in India due to revolutions in agriculture. This research paper attempts to analyze and demonstrate various agricultural revolutions that occurred in India and across the globe. On this account the history of Indian agriculture has been glorious attributable mainly to green revolution and subsequent revolutions like white, blue, yellow, brown, feather and red revolutions. Similarly, the world super agriculture attributes Neolithic, Arab, Scottish, British and Green revolutions. This study emphasizes that scientists and policymakers can take significant steps towards achieving sustainable food security for the entire world’s populations by adopting the strengths of the various Agricultural Revolutions while seeking to avoid its weaknesses. The production and productivity of Indian all crops were increased at increasing rate in post green revolution period witnessing operation of Law of increasing production.

Population Education for Better Quality Life

This paper, Population Education for Better Quality Life review the importance of Population Education when it reflects in the Curriculum of our Schools from Junior Secondary to Tertiary Institutions as this would guaranteed Better Quality life in terms of regulating human populations through the practice of methods that ensure proper family planning vis-a-vis food production. Better quality life is defined as a type of life in which the major needs of man whether physical, social and emotional are adequately satisfied. It further involves a standard of living that provides for adequate feeding, adequate clothing and adequate housing, together with other provisions in life that ensure adequate education, adequate health services, adequate leisure, that make possible the attainment of family welfare, social security, happiness and physical and mental well being of individual and his family. lso, the aim of population education were listed and readiness of Male and Female for reproduction were also discussed with respect to Malthusian theory of population. DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n6p153

Agriculture Production Pattern, Disposal of Products and Ethnology: An Empirical Study in a Village of Himachal Pradesh

The study conducted in a rural area of Himachal Pradesh state in India to measure the development aspect along with consumption pattern and socio-economic concern. The study provides the exhaustive data of rural labor, which proves the Malthusian Theory of population: “population increases geometrically and the resources increases arithmetically.” It is a difficult task to compare a socio economic study to the core economic theories. In this study it is clear that the resources are very few and the demand of the population increases rapidly likewise education consumption occupation employment.

Malthusian Population theory and the Nigerian Economy: A Political Economy Approach

Malthusian population theory was developed as a result of the rapid population growth rate and diminishing return in agricultural sector. Malthus observed geometric ratio growth in population vis-a-vis arithmetic ratio growth in food production and envisaged world “misery” or “vice” if not checked. Subsequent development in the world however, proved the theory wrong. But this work discovers that the predicted doom of population theory is manifesting in Nigeria - rapid population growth rate, food crises, large scale poverty, ethnic and religious conflict, HIV/AIDS epidemics, etc. Although, the aforementioned are in line with the theory’s predictions, Nigerian government operational modus favors these manifestations over the years. The work therefore, recommended that the judicial arm of government be made more efficient at law-enforcement, education sector be given appropriate budgetary attention to subdue poverty, diseases and health care predicaments. Thus, conclude that although, the theory is looked upon as primitive and wrong, the forecasted melancholies still exist in the 21st century Nigeria. Keywords: Population, Political Economy, Economic Growth

Henry George and Immigration

Henry George's opposition to free immigration may be surprising in light of his positions on other aspects of economic theory and policy. This essay reviews George's statements on immigration policy, discusses inconsistencies of these statements with his positions on free trade and Malthusian population theory, compares George's views with the neoclassical economic perspective on immigration, and suggests that implementation of George's policy of taxing land values would share the gains from immigration in a manner that might reduce opposition to open borders.

Theory’s Failure: Malthusian Population Theory and the Projected Demise of Slavery

Theory’s Failure: Malthusian Population Theory and the Projected Demise of Slavery James L. Huston (bio) During his debates with Abraham Lincoln in 1858, Stephen A. Douglas hit upon a weak spot in his opponent’s argument. In his “House Divided” speech, Lincoln had uttered the famous words: “Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction,” or it would grow and overwhelm republican institutions. Douglas, trying to tie Lincoln to abolitionism, asked how restricting slavery in the territories was going to produce emancipation in the slave states. He gave a partial answer: “When he thus gets it confined, and surrounded, so that it cannot spread, the natural laws of increase will go on until the negroes will be so plenty that they cannot live on the soil.” Thus the slaves will die by starvation and by that means “he will put slavery in the course of ultimate extinction.” “This is,” Douglas scoffed, “the humane and Christian remedy that he proposes for the great crime of slavery.”1 Recent scholars have agreed that Douglas had a point and that instead of abandoning this line of thought in the next debate he should have continued to [End Page 354] press Lincoln for an explanation.2 How was slavery restriction going to produce emancipation? Douglas intimated the answer, in a crude way, that was widespread in the decades of the early republic: population pressure, an offshoot of Thomas Malthus’s theory of the effect of population growth on economic undertakings, was behind the public’s expectation that slavery if kept confined would eventually experience a natural death. But population theory, in either a general form or in a specifically Malthusian guise, generated considerable confusion among American leaders as to what effects population growth would have on the peculiar institution.3 The subject wove itself into considerations of agrarianism, wage rates, and emancipation, and it produced interesting conjectures from proslavery advocates, free traders, and protectionists–but not, intriguingly, from either British or American abolitionists. When David Wilmot offered his proviso in 1846 to restrict slavery to its then existing boundaries, the debate over the impact of population growth upon the future of slavery took a decisive and ominous turn. Northerners often did not react like Lincoln in seeing a demise of slavery by some natural mechanism; instead, they pictured a more complicated scenario. Most important, southerners, though exhibiting some confusion in their predictions, believed that limiting slavery to its existing boundaries would produce poverty, depopulation [End Page 355] of whites, and ultimately race war. In their search for an understanding of what the future might bring under the Wilmot prohibition, southerners were misled by classical economic theory; and thus they read into the Wilmot Proviso a more grim outcome than was likely. By this route, by leading southerners to miscalculate the effects of a prohibition against slavery’s geographical expansion, Malthusian population theory, and classical political economy in general, helped push the South to secession and the nation to civil war. A widespread discussion of Malthusian population theory occurred in the early republic because, aside from the slavery question, it had implications for the stability of a republican form of government. Malthus’s theory was not difficult to grasp. The masses had bestial procreative instincts; they reproduced mindlessly at a faster rate than the growth of food production. Eventually, the population outstripped the food supply, and the only way equilibrium could be restored between the food supply and the number of people was to eliminate some people. At first, Malthus said this was done by wars, famines, and plagues; later he admitted that people might be trained to control their lusts and thereby halt the tendency to outstrip food supplies. The aspect of his theory that would play a prominent role in the sectional debate over slavery expansion was an economic argument about wages; wages for common people plunged to a subsistence (starvation) level because the supply of workers always exceeded the demand for them.4 In the United States after the Revolution, the two subjects of population growth...

Sex, Scandal, Satire, and Population in 1798: Revisiting Malthus's FirstEssay

^ or two centuries, Malthusian population theory has led many Britons and Americans to view illicit sexuality?particularly female sexuality?as the JLcause and embodiment of social breakdown. From England's New Poor Law (1834) to recurrent U.S. outrage over queens, Malthusians, both popular and academic, have condemned poor women for conceiving expensive children out of wedlock. Although Malthus himself wrote relatively little about mothers, as opposed to fathers, sexually unrestrained females have borne the brunt of Malthusian outrage. In the words of historian Lisa Forman Cody, The bastardy clauses of 1834 are perhaps the most notable example in which a vast cluster of issues related to poverty and welfare boiled down to one dramatic figure?the illegitimate mother?as the most controversial and potent example of 'sex' rep resenting all of society's social ills.1 These well-known aspects of Malthusianism have been analyzed fruitfully by recent scholars who have illuminated many aspects of Malthus's texts and influence.2

Context of the Malthusian Theory of Population

Context of the Malthusian Theory of Population

15 Rutherford: “The Devil Quotes Scripture”

Reuben C. Rutherford's only book, Henry George versus Henry George, is fascinating for several reasons. (1) First, it is a full-length, 326-page critique of Progress and Poverty. Second, each of the major elements of George's system of political economy--labor and wages, capital and interest, population, property rights, human nature and social progress, and so on--is examined at length. Third, Rutherford's approach to the critique is intriguing. As the title of his book suggests, Rutherford proposed to demonstrate George's system was logically inconsistent and filled with contradictions by juxtaposing passages of George's. That is, he proposed to show George contradicts almost all of his own ideas and that all he builds up at one time, he pulls down at another (p. vi). Fourth, the time element associated with the book is interesting. It was published in 1887, yet Rutherford says almost all of it was written in 1882, when he first read George's book. He explains the delay in publication by stating he was persuaded by friends the fame of Progress and Poverty would be transitory and that, hence, the book was not worth criticizing. When it appeared the fame of George's book would endure, Rutherford issued his critique. From an analytical viewpoint, however, several of Rutherford's main arguments had become obsolete well before 1882. Labor and Wage Theory Rutherford was a staunch defender of the unmodified classical wagesfund theory. (2) It is, however, generally agreed the unmodified classical version of theory disappeared from the mainstream of analysis when John Stuart Mill recanted it in 1869. There were, to be sure, numerous efforts to modify the theory to salvage some parts of it. (3) Rutherford seems to have been unaware of the second round of the controversy. At least he never cited, or even alluded to, any of the discussion. * The prerecantation version of the wages-fund theory, defended by Rutherford, presupposed an agricultural economy. (Indeed, it was precisely as agriculture ceased to be the main sector of the economy the theory encountered the most devastating criticism.) It is interesting and perhaps suggestive when Rutherford speaks of people being paid for a job, he speaks of boys who were paid in apples, an agricultural commodity, for their labor. Later, farming is explicitly mentioned as a characteristic industry (pp. 2, 7, 63). The classical theory assumed there was a fixed production period--however long it took the crops to grow. Further, it assumed once the harvest was in, the amount of food available was fixed. No more would be available until the next harvest. That food had to provide for needs of all agricultural laborers until the next harvest since there was simply no other source of food. It then seemed to the classicists the real wages, or means of subsistence, had to be advanced to the laborers. That is, the product of current labor would not be available until the next harvest. But since the laborers had to live day-today from one harvest to the next, the food they received could come only from the last harvest. Last year's crops, then, maintained labor until this year's crops were harvested. Since real wages were paid to the laborers before the product of their current labor was harvested, the term advanced seemed appropriate. Although Rutherford does not always use the word advanced, he surely does speak of labor's being maintained out of a previously accumulated fund while the product is being produced (p. 8). Once the total amount of food, or real wages, was known, the average amount per worker was found by dividing total by the number of workers. Here Malthusian population theory seemed to fit perfectly. If the means of subsistence were fixed and divided among a larger number of people, the average must decrease. It seemed to be a simple arithmetic problem--and we do find Rutherford claiming it to be just that. …

Culture and Economics

In a recent review essay in this journal (25.2), Timothy Morton considered a number of works of literary criticism on the centrality of commodification in Victorian literature and culture. This essay will look at the intersection of work in which economists and literary critics have interrogated Victorian economics and their afterlife: models of production and reproduction (classical political economy and Malthusian population theory), consumption (the calculation of pleasure, happiness, and taste), labor (as a theory of value), value (in relation to price), “Economic Man” (as productive pursuer of gain or, after the 1870s, rational chooser among scarcity), and so forth. This work, which has brought into dialogue economists, literary and cultural critics, and historians and philosophers of science, has flourished in the past decade, and this essay will focus on aspects of it relevant to the study of Victorian Britain.