Malthusian Quotes

Despoilers obey the Malthusian law; they multiply with the means of existence, and the means of existence of knaves is the credulity of their dupes. ~ Frederic Bastiat

A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas. ~ Trofim Lysenko

Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine. ~ Gregory Clark

The whole action of the laws tended to increase the number of consumers of food and to diminish the number of producers, was due the invention of the Malthusian theory of population. ~ Henry Charles Carey

The people who see the population explosion in the Malthusian way - as a geometric progression - forget that population growth is not a biological issue. People are not increasing in numbers out of stupidity and ignorance. Population growth is an ecological phenomenon linked very intimately to other issues, such as the usurpation of the resources which allow people to live. ~ Vandana Shiva

Malthus has been buried many times, and Malthusian scarcity with him. But as Garrett Hardin remarked, anyone who has to be reburied so often cannot be entirely dead. ~ Herman E. Daly

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw smelled the Malthusian morbidity underlying natural selection, lamenting, "When its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you." Shaw lamented natural selection's "hideous fatalism," and complained of its "damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration."4 ~ Christopher Ryan

Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread." 79 So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared ~ Steven Pinker