Malthus started with two postulates. First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain in its present state. Assuming these postulates to be true, he said that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man (Malthus, 1965). Unchecked population increases in a geometric ratio, but subsistence can increase only in an arithmetical ratio.
In the United States of America , where the means of subsistence have been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and consequently the checks to early marriages fewer than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population has been found to double itself in twenty five years.
Malthus said that the human species would increase in ratio of – 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 … and subsistence only as 1, 2, 3, 4 …, creating a continuously rising imbalance between the size of population and availability of means of subsistence. For Malthus, animals and plants are all impelled by a powerful instinct to reproduce. Man is no exception to this. Afterwards their growth is checked by want of room and nourishment.
Malthus thought that due to the basic conflict between sexuality and subsistence humans can never be happy and population is brought down to lower levels periodically. He divided all the factors leading to a decline in the size of the population into two categories: positive checks and preventive checks. If the population growth is not checked by human reason, it produces misery and vice, i.e., pestilences, famines, deaths, infant deaths, starvation, exposure, and customs such as homosexuality, prostitution, abortion and improper acts. The checks to population growth that have already begun are the positive checks. They manifest in the form of high death rates. Preventive checks appear in the form of vice (sexual practices not leading to childbirth) or moral restraints on sexual activities. |
