Quote:
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Are we, or are we not, over-populated? Do we, or do we not, have a crisis on our hands?
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I have read that today's conventional wisdom about the danger to the planet from population growth has its roots in Malthus's
Essay on The Principle of Population, the first edition of which was published in 1798.
There is a
document on the web dated in 2005 associated with the University of Copenhagen, Denmark that gives the history of Malthus's
Essay.
The document states that
Essay says that population growth is "geometrical," what we call "exponential" today, whereas agricultural output has an arithmetric or linear progression. So population grows in a progression of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, etc. But agricultural output grows in a progression of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc.
Here's my question: What about technology? Why do we assume that agricultural output has a linear progression?
Anyone want to take a stab at that?