Since this Covid 19 started becoming serious hence declared a global pandemic, I found myself going back to the Thomas Malthus theory of Population Control. I’ve been watching the spread of this virus and the subsequent deaths very closely and to be sincere, Thomas Malthus theory is being proven right.
For those that are getting to hear of this guy for the first time, Thomas Robert Malthus was an English cleric and scholar who published this theory (An Essay on the Principle of Population) in his 1798 writings.
In a nut shell, it is a theory of exponential population growth and arithmetic food supply growth.
Thomas Malthus theorized that populations grew in geometric progression while food production increases in arithmetic progression. Through the Law of Diminishing Returns (This is Economics, you can google what that means), he concluded that populations will grow faster than food supply. This exponential population growth will then, eventually lead to food shortage.
The argument was that because there will be a higher population than the availability of food, many people will die from the shortage of food & that nature would basically correct these excesses. He theorized that this correction would take place in the form of Positive Checks (or Natural Checks) and Preventative Checks.
Malthus believed that natural forces would correct the imbalance between food supply and population growth in the form of natural disasters such as floods and earthquakes and human-made actions such as wars and famines & other factors (Covid 19). These checks would lead to the Malthusian catastrophe, which would bring the population level back to a ‘sustainable level.’
Isn’t this what is happening? Isn’t mother nature doing exactly this?