“Malthus was more comprehensively wrong than almost anyone else in history, and yet he still has his admirers today.”
His timeline may have been off, but his mathematics are impeccable.
We’ll see if, when, and why the global human population levels off.
>>>“Malthus was more comprehensively wrong than almost anyone else in history, and yet he still has his admirers today.”
>>His timeline may have been off, but his mathematics are impeccable.
>>We’ll see if, when, and why the global human population levels off.
You are way off here. His maths were right but he made completely wrong assumptions. He assumed that population would grow geometrically and food production would grow arithmetically. On those assumptions, his maths were indeed correct. But his assumptions have been proven to be comprehensively wrong. Food production has consistently grown faster than population.
So it is not merely that he was wrong about the timeline. For that to be true, we would see increasing food shortages, though without reaching the critical point that he predicted. Then you could legitimately claim that his crisis point has been merely postponed.
What we have actually seen is increasingly plentiful supplies of food.
He was not wrong about the timeline. He was wrong about the trends and wrong about the direction.