to Amadeus this is the article # 2 Looking into the Malthusian abyss Original Te

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to Amadeus

this is the article # 2

Looking into the Malthusian abyss

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Maurice King a, Elizabeth Yi Wang a

John Cleland and Steven Sinding (Nov 26, p 1899)1 are to be congratulated on becoming neo-Malthusian, but they don't go far enough.

The conventional wisdom assumes that, as development takes place, birth rates will fall to match death rates, so that populations will eventually stabilise. Unfortunately, the conventional wisdom takes no account of time, and forgets that, while this is supposed to be happening, rapidly growing populations may be exceeding the carrying capacity of their ecosystems, they may have no new land to go to, and they may be failing to develop adequate economic links with the rest of the world. The end result of all this is the direst poverty, starvation, and violence. Malthus did not have a name for this predicament, but Liebenstein did: demographic entrapment.2 This has a definitive stage when starvation, violence, or both have actually broken out, and a warning stage when, because populations are increasing rapidly, these can be confidently predicted.

Cleland and Sinding give some indication of the huge scale of this predicament, particularly in its warning stage, and Alexandratos confirms it.3 Examples of the definitive stage include Rwanda and Ethiopia.

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