Will humanity eventually eat itself?
Just five days after the storming of the Bastille, the Rev. Thomas Malthus rose to the pulpit with the text from the Gospel of Matthew: “whatsoever you wish that others would do to you, do also for them”. He was, by all accounts, a rather dull preacher, and was seemingly unaffected by the tumultuous events of the revolution taking place over in France. Keep calm and carry on could have been his motto. But within a decade he was to publish a book that would make him possibly among the most cancelled men in history, An Essay on the Principle of Population.
Populations grow exponentially, he argued, but food supply grows in a more linear way. And so, at some point there are more people alive than there is food to support them, whereupon there will be some crisis — plague, famine, war — that will reduce the population so that it comes back into line with the amount of food there is to support it. One way of avoiding this is to take preventative measures to reduce the population, including cutting support for the poor so that they are encouraged to have fewer children. As such, Malthus famously opposed the Poor Laws of the 18th century, a primitive form of welfare provision.
