Those of us who have been fortunate enough to have been born in what is often still referred to as the Western World (Europe and North America) rarely appreciate the historical uniqueness of our ...

Thomas Malthus' 200-year-old argument that people are poor because they lack self-discipline continues to frame U.S. welfare policy despite substantial evidence to the contrary, say two sociologists ...

Throughout mankind’s history there have been many undesirable occurrences. There have been numerous wars, pestilence, man-made and natural disasters. The current COVID-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and ...

The Malthusian trap or Malthusian check refers to the theory that as the human population grows there is increasing pressure on earth’s resources, which in turn acts as a check on the further rise in ...

In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus, a popular economist, published An Essay on the Principle of Population. In this essay, Malthus argued that population grew geometrically while food production grew ...

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, New York: Viking, 592 pages, $29.95 In 1838 the founding father of modern biology, Charles Darwin, read the 1798 edition of the Rev ...

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