# Malthusianism The doctrine descending from Thomas Robert Malthus's *An Essay on the Principle of Population* (1798), holding that population tends to grow faster than the food supply and is checked only by famine, disease, and war unless limited deliberately. Malthus's own policy conclusion — that poor relief prolongs the problem — made the doctrine politically useful to opponents of social provision from the start, and that dual character has never left it. **Neo-Malthusianism** is the twentieth-century revival, secular and environmental rather than moral, running through [[Paul Ehrlich]]'s [[The Population Bomb]], [[Garrett Hardin]]'s [[Lifeboat Ethics]], and [[Zero Population Growth]]. It supplies the scarcity premise that [[Carrying Capacity]] operationalizes and that [[Passive Eugenics]] converts into demographic policy. The relationship to [[Eugenics]] is adjacency rather than identity: Malthusianism is a claim about **numbers**, eugenics a claim about **quality**. The two fused historically because a movement organized around reducing births must eventually answer whose, and hereditarian answers were available. ## Malthus and his critics Malthus wrote the *Essay* against William Godwin's perfectibilism: population grows geometrically, subsistence arithmetically, so misery is a law of nature and schemes of improvement are vain. Later editions added the "preventive check" — later marriage, continence — and the claim that the Poor Laws, by feeding the poor, encouraged them to breed. Marx and Engels called the doctrine a libel on the species — the problem was distribution, not numbers — and the argument between them has been re-run ever since. The strong version is falsified by the demographic transition: as societies industrialize, death rates fall and then birth rates fall further, so that the countries Malthus would have predicted to starve now worry about depopulation. Ester Boserup's counter-thesis (1965) inverted the causation — population pressure drives agricultural innovation — and the Ehrlich–Simon wager (1980–90), in which Julian Simon bet that five metals would be cheaper in a decade and won, became the emblem of the cornucopian case. The weak version — that a finite planet has limits somewhere — survives, which is why the doctrine never dies. ## The lineage in the vault The nineteenth century is [[Social Darwinism]]: Darwin took the struggle for existence from Malthus, [[Herbert Spencer]] took it back into society. The twentieth is the environmental revival — [[The Population Bomb]] (1968), [[Tragedy of the Commons]] (1968), [[Lifeboat Ethics]] (1974), the Club of Rome's *Limits to Growth* (1972) — which supplied the scarcity premise that [[Carrying Capacity]] operationalizes and that [[Zero Population Growth]], [[John Tanton]] and the [[Tanton Network]] carried into immigration restriction. The question "whose births" is where it meets [[Eugenics]] and [[Passive Eugenics]]; the [[Nativism]] page has the American form. The current revival is split: a left degrowth argument that treats limits as a reason to redistribute, and an [[Ecofascism]] that treats them as a reason to exclude — the two policy conclusions Malthus's own text has always been able to support. ## See Also - [[Paul Ehrlich]] · [[The Population Bomb]] · [[Garrett Hardin]] · [[Lifeboat Ethics]] · [[Tragedy of the Commons]] · [[Zero Population Growth]] - [[Carrying Capacity]] · [[Passive Eugenics]] · [[Eugenics]] · [[Social Darwinism]] · [[Herbert Spencer]] · [[Charles Darwin]] - [[Nativism]] · [[Tanton Network]] · [[John Tanton]] · [[Ecofascism]]