Thursday, May 15, 2008

Still wrong after all these years...

The father of "finite resource" or "fixed pie" economics:

Malthus got his demographic as well as his economic predictions wrong. His assumption that populations would carry on growing in times of plenty turned out to be false. Starting in Europe, one country after another underwent a “demographic transformation” as economic development brought greater prosperity. Both birth and death rates dropped and population growth eventually started to slow. ... If the world's population growth was a false concern four decades ago, when it peaked at 2% a year, it is even less so now that it has slowed to 1.2%.

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