ABSTRACT
Thomas Robert Malthus was an important economist and is remembered for a series of debates with David Ricardo in the 1820s about political economy. Non-economists tend to know about him because of a pamphlet he published in 1798. Malthus was convinced that the availability of good agricultural land was limited, and so would not be able to keep up with the number of people demanding to be fed. For economists who follow Malthus's ideas today, natural resource scarcity remains a key idea, even though the human disaster that was foreseen has yet to come to pass. And many today, faced by a rapidly changing climate, remain worried that agriculture will fail at some point, perhaps more accurately, do not see how it can continue to cope with a growing world population that will soon be 10 billion/so. Soil is being eroded, fish stocks are threatened, biodiversity is being lost, and billions more people are aspiring to a middle-class lifestyle.
