An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Robert Malthus
Malthus gets a lot of recognition for having his dystopian projections turn out ot be very wrong. When he lived, there were less than a billion people on earth. He predicted imminent doom and gloom. The book is filled with detailed mathematical analysis. People would have more kids. More kids would require more food. This would reduce the quality of life for everyone and lead to starvation and a significant drop in the quality of life for everyone. Today we have over 8 billion people on the earth and one of the big problems is overconsumption of food.
How wrong was he? Could the industrial revolution just delayed a day of reckoning? Have we mortgage future through consumption of fossil fuels? Or will we just find additional technology that can continue to help us work forward? Will there be a new "Malthusian trap"?
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