Was Malthus just off a few decades?

In 1798, Robert Malthus, in his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” concluded that as population grows, “the price of labor must tend toward a decrease, while the price of provisions would at the same time tend to rise.”

In 1968, Paul Ehrlich in the book “The Population Bomb,” predicted disaster for humanity owing to the “population explosion.” Ehrlich was also one of the first to talk about rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and introduced the Impact Formula: I=PAT (where I=Environmental Impact, P=Population, A=Affluence and T=Technology).


In 1969, the Rockefeller Commission Report on the U.S. population concluded “that our country can no longer afford the uncritical acceptance of the population growth ethic that ‘more is better.’ And beyond that, after two years of concentrated effort, we have concluded that no substantial benefits would result from continued growth of the nation’s population.”

President Nixon, who appointed the commission but never released the report, nevertheless said, “One of the most serious challenges to human destiny in the last third of this century will be the growth of the population. Whether man’s response to that challenge will be a cause for pride or for despair in the year 2000 will depend very much on what we do today.”

In 1972, The Club of Rome, an independent think tank, in its book “The Limits to Growth,” suggested that a growing population can approach carrying capacity and adjust to it before it is reached, can over-shoot the carrying capacity and then die back in either a smooth or oscillatory way, or can overshoot the limits and in the process decrease the ultimate carrying capacity by consuming some necessary nonrenewable resource.

Times-Argus