BILL KING WRITES AT CHRON.COM, THE HOUSTON CHRONICLE:
When I was a sophomore in college, my sociology professor had our class read Thomas Malthus‘ “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” Malthus argued that human population increases geometrically while food production only increases arithmetically. Therefore, he concluded that the human race was destined to eternal misery as its population would always be bumping up against its ability to produce sustenance.
Malthus wrote his essay around the turn of the 19th century. His belief that the human race was careening headlong into a population-induced apocalypse was redefined in modern terms by Paul Ehrlich‘s best-selling book, “The Population Bomb,” published in 1968, in which he predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s. READ MORE.