ABSTRACT
Knut Wicksell’s lecture at Hoppets Här had pointed unequivocally to population growth as the cause of poverty, but, excepting the references to Malthus, it had not dwelt in any detail on what made the population grow. Ten years after the speech, however, Wicksell, who by then was an advanced student of economics, had an occasion to produce a more scientific piece on the economics of population growth. Despite the fact that it is completely central among his writings on population, this essay has remained unpublished and untranslated, so we will devote some space to a scrutiny of its contents.
