The Malthusian Trap - will we have enough to eat?

I hope I have understood this correctly and I am not misleading the general public :S.

In 1798, English economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) published and pointed out in his famous work - An essay on the Principal of Population, the worrying fact that Humans were growing unsustainably at a much faster rate than their sources of food - just like cells overgrowing on a limited size Petri dish, it was a disaster waiting to happen. 

With limited resources, humans were likely to undergo three main challenges: famine, disease and war. People would not have enough to eat, become prone to diseases and are more likely to fight each other for the increasingly scarce resources. It seemed that the human race was unsustainable. Indeed, the same rhetoric can be heard today over other current environmental issues.


So how did we escape the seemingly inevitable doom? Since the publication, the world population has grown from 980 million to 6.9 billion. What was unforeseen back then was the part that technology would eventually come into play in the world that we live in. Technology played a big part in our survival; we got better at growing and producing food. We managed to devise technologies to solve our problems in time.
Also, population does not always grow exponentially. In fact, there is a  natural tendency for it to level off after a period. Once people reach a certain level of affluence, they tend to reproduce less- a growing problem that can be seen in many developed counties these days.

So, the western world broke out of the Malthusian trap by raising agricultural productivity, whilst people have fewer children as they grow wealthier, thanks to the invention of new technologies.

However, let's not forget that many part of the world remain stuck in this trap. There are populations that survives on subsistence farming. When use technologies to boost agricultural output, the population balloon. During times of bad harvest, the ensuing famine keeps the population from growing or becoming richer.

Although Malthus's argument centers around food, the same argument could just as easily be applied to other resources such as energy sources,water..etc. Let's hope we think of the solutions before it's too late. (do science at school, kids!)

With limited resources, having more people to work does not guarantee growth/ prosperity, and can actually be disastrous. The law of diminishing returns applies to our companies and also to the global village that we all live in.

Note:

Malthus taught mathematics at Cambridge back then, when economics was not recognised in its own right by most universities. He later became the world's first ever economics professor at the East India company college. And was made a Fellow of the Royal society in 1818.