![]() ![]() First, technological increases in food production have increased both the amount and quality of calories we can produce per person. So what happened? Why didn’t we die off? There are three reasons sociologists believe we are continuing to expand the population of our planet. The human population has continued to grow long past Malthus’s predictions. Of course, this has not exactly happened. They would go to war over increasingly scarce resources and reduce the population to a manageable level, and then the cycle would begin anew. Eventually, he thought people would run out of food and begin to starve. Thinking practically, Malthus saw that people could produce only so much food in a given year, yet the population was increasing at an exponential rate. ![]() ![]() They are countered by “preventive checks,” which also control the population but by reducing fertility rates preventive checks include birth control and celibacy. He termed them “positive checks” because they increase mortality rates, thus keeping the population in check. Malthus identified these factors as war, famine, and disease (Malthus 1798). According to Malthusian theory, three factors would control human population that exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity, or how many people can live in a given area considering the amount of available resources. Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was an English clergyman who made dire predictions about earth’s ability to sustain its growing population. Below we will look at four theories about population that inform sociological thought: Malthusian, zero population growth, cornucopian, and demographic transition theories. Sociologists have long looked at population issues as central to understanding human interactions. ![]()
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