ABSTRACT
Between 1798 and 1826, British mathematician Thomas Malthus published six editions of An Essay on the Principle of Population.1 In this influential tract, Malthus inveighed against the possibility of perpetual human progress. He argued that human populations would always expand to consume all available resources. Indeed, times of prosperity tended to encourage an excess of births over deaths. But since the amount of arable land remained fixed and improvements to agricultural productivity were assumed to be gradual and limited, population growth would quickly exhaust available resources and produce growing immiseration as food supplies were divided among a growing number of mouths. Equilibrium would be restored as famine and disease raised the death rate to match births. For Malthus, the possibilities for lifting the mass of peoples above an economic state of bare subsistence were dim.
