From Malthus' Stagnation to Sustained Growth


Book Description

A detailed exploration of the influence and utility of Thomas Malthus' model of population growth and economic changes in Europe since the nineteenth century. This important contribution to current discussions on theories of economic growth includes discussion of issues ranging from mortality and fertility to natural resources and the poverty trap.




Population, Technology, and Growth


Book Description

This paper develops a unified model of growth, population, and technological progress that is consistent with long-term historical evidence. The economy endogenously evolves through three phases. In the Malthusian regime, population growth is positively related to the level of income per capita. Technological progress is slow and is matched by proportional increases in population, so that output per capita is stable around a constant level. In the post-Malthusian regime, the growth rates of technology and total output increase. Population growth absorbs much of the growth of output, but income per capita does rise slowly. The economy endogenously undergoes a demographic transition in which the traditionally positive relationship between income per capita and population growth is reversed. In the Modern Growth regime, population growth is moderate or even negative, and income per capita rises rapidly. Two forces drive the transitions between regimes: First, technological progress is driven both by increases in the size of the population and by increases in the size of the population and by increases in the average level of education. Second, technological progress creates a state of disequilibrium, which raises the return to human capital and induces patients to substitute child quality for quantity.







From Malthus to the Club of Rome and Back


Book Description

This collection of articles on population growth spans 20 years of the author's thinking and research on a wide range of issues. The book opens with a presentation of the early history of demography before Thomas Malthus wrote his essay on the principles of population (1798) that marked the beginnings of modern demography as a science. The author follows up with a chapter on the estimates made at various times in the past hundred years about the maximum number of people who could live on earth. Four papers deal with the debates about global models of population growth and the limits to growth. Sharp swings in population policy in China from the Communist Revolution under Mao in 1949 to the one child-per-family rule in 1979 are also considered. Another chapter compares population policy in Japan, China and India. A chapter is devoted to the role of oil and the soaring price of this basic input into agriculture as a constraint on food production and, as a result, on population growth. A closing chapter considers the great migrations of the 19th and 20th centuries, including the transatlantic and transpacific movements, the mass migrations after World Wars I and II, and those of recent decades. This book will interest scholars and students in economics and other social sciences dealing with the issues of demography, population growth, and economic development.




Malthus


Book Description

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), one of the most influential of modern thinkers, is also one of the most misunderstood. Malthus' Essay on Population is a work that everyone cites but typically without having read it. This book offers a comprehensive and accurate exposition of his thought, integrating his better-known theory on population with his somewhat neglected analysis of economic development and social structure. In Petersen's Malthus both the general reader and the social scientist are given a basis for contrasting Malthus with competing theories. As a background to his exposition, Petersen discusses the trends since Malthus' day in fertility, mortality, and population growth. The book also has an accessible comparison of Malthus' economics with that of his contemporary, David Ricardo, as well as the links to the Keynesian thought of recent time. Petersen also comments on Malthus' stand on birth control, as well as on the rise of the neo-Malthusian movement and its successor in today's less developed countries. The review of both population trends and demographic theory over the past century and a half gives the reader a base from which he can judge in what respects Malthus did, or did not, forecast the future accurately. As Petersen points out, Malthus also influenced the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, as well as its offshoot, Social Darwinism. Malthus is an essential work not only for demographers and economists but for anyone interested in intellectual history. The late Robert Nisbet, in his review of the book for the New Republic, called it "the best exposition of Malthus to be found anywhere." William Petersen, Robert Lazarus Professor of Social Demography Emeritus at Ohio State University, is known throughout the profession as a leading demographer. He is also an elegant writer.




Malthus


Book Description

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), one of the most influential of modern thinkers, is also one of the most misunderstood. Malthus' Essay on Population is a work that everyone cites but typically without having read it. This book offers a comprehensive and accurate exposition of his thought, integrating his better-known theory on population with his somewhat neglected analysis of economic development and social structure. In Petersen's Malthus both the general reader and the social scientist are given a basis for contrasting Malthus with competing theories. As a background to his exposition, Petersen discusses the trends since Malthus' day in fertility, mortality, and population growth. The book also has an accessible comparison of Malthus' economics with that of his contemporary, David Ricardo, as well as the links to the Keynesian thought of recent time. Petersen also comments on Malthus' stand on birth control, as well as on the rise of the neo-Malthusian movement and its successor in today's less developed countries. The review of both population trends and demographic theory over the past century and a half gives the reader a base from which he can judge in what respects Malthus did, or did not, forecast the future accurately. As Petersen points out, Malthus also influenced the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, as well as its offshoot, Social Darwinism. Malthus is an essential work not only for demographers and economists but for anyone interested in intellectual history. The late Robert Nisbet, in his review of the book for the New Republic, called it "the best exposition of Malthus to be found anywhere." William Petersen, Robert Lazarus Professor of Social Demography Emeritus at Ohio State University, is known throughout the profession as a leading demographer. He is also an elegant writer.




The Malthusian Moment


Book Description

Although Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) is often cited as the founding text of the U.S. environmental movement, in The Malthusian Moment Thomas Robertson locates the origins of modern American environmentalism in twentieth-century adaptations of Thomas Malthus’s concerns about population growth. For many environmentalists, managing population growth became the key to unlocking the most intractable problems facing Americans after World War II—everything from war and the spread of communism overseas to poverty, race riots, and suburban sprawl at home. Weaving together the international and the domestic in creative new ways, The Malthusian Moment charts the explosion of Malthusian thinking in the United States from World War I to Earth Day 1970, then traces the just-as-surprising decline in concern beginning in the mid-1970s. In addition to offering an unconventional look at World War II and the Cold War through a balanced study of the environmental movement’s most contentious theory, the book sheds new light on some of the big stories of postwar American life: the rise of consumption, the growth of the federal government, urban and suburban problems, the civil rights and women’s movements, the role of scientists in a democracy, new attitudes about sex and sexuality, and the emergence of the “New Right.”




Population and Economy


Book Description

Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population has for the past two centuries been a constant source of inspiration and debate for scholars working on relationships between population and economy in historical perspective. This book of collected essays–an outcome of an A-session held at the 12th International Congress of Economic History in Madrid, 1998–sets a new standard in this active and influential field of research. The contributors go beyond the conventional European and North American geographical boundaries, bringing out new empirical findings and developing new arguments. The volume is divided into three parts. The first section takes up classical issues, the 'positive' and the 'preventive' checks and their determinants, raised by Malthus himself, and examines the issues against fresh evidence from Europe, America, and Asia. These issues are also themes of the second part, devoted to short-term fluctuations in mortality and fertility in relation to prices, wages, and other economic indicators. The final set of chapters is a coherent collection of technically sophisticated articles from an on-going international joint project concerned with how households respond to economic stress in different economic, social and cultural settings, in traditional China, Japan, Sweden, Belgium and Italy. With a brief but well organized introduction, this collection of scholarly essays offers both demographers and economic historians a wealth of exciting findings and stimulating insights.




The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus


Book Description

This book is a sweeping global and intellectual history that radically recasts our understanding of Malthus's Essay on the Principle of Population, the most famous book on population ever written or ever likely to be. Malthus's Essay is also persistently misunderstood. First published anonymously in 1798, the Essay systematically argues that population growth tends to outpace its means of subsistence unless kept in check by factors such as disease, famine, or war, or else by lowering the birth rate through such means as sexual abstinence. Challenging the widely held notion that Malthus's Essay was a product of the British and European context in which it was written, Alison Bashford and Joyce Chaplin demonstrate that it was the new world, as well as the old, that fundamentally shaped Malthus's ideas.