ABSTRACT

When Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science,” he had in mind the classical Malthusian prophecy that population would always expand to offset any technological progress and to thwart any rise in real wages above a definable minimum of subsistence level. So to speak, the ultimate real wage rate was exogenously set by man’s biological superfecundity. And just as rabbits grow up to the determinate carrying capacity of Darwin’s jungle, so will there be for each stage of technology an asymptotic population level in classical economic theory.