The seed
Read this article with dedicated curiosity, a little insensitivity and skepticism, and it won’t sound like a history rant.
Ancient Greeks
The concept of ‘population’ had become frequented in Greek philosophical writings of the fourth century BCE. Ancient Greek philosophers, including Aristotle and Plato, discussed about the optimal population size for the Greek states. In his work Politics, Aristotle made an unprecedented departure from the concept of a closed population and emphasized that the population must be treated as an open system. The territory and the population size of the states were variables, and the variation in population could not be accurately explained solely taking into account the reproductive patterns and mortality rates of the existing citizenry. Simply put, factors like immigration, emigration and expansion, among many others, had to be unified on the slate to explain the exact trend.
Consequently, the Aristotelian population thinking was born; only a small part of which, fortunately, is pertinent to the topic in question. Plato and Aristotle reached the conclusion that the states should be small enough for effective governance and direct public participation in decision-making, yet large enough in resources and territory to support a healthy population and ample military strength. Quite interestingly, Aristotle based his theory differently from many of his contemporaries and precedents, by not using the demand and supply of labour for economic growth as a founding pillar for his philosophy.
According to him, in order to increase the population size, immigration/procreation had to be encouraged; whereas for reducing it, the state should encourage emigration to colonies. If that didn’t work, the Jews in the state were to be slaughtered. Just kidding, on that last one. (And no, the second World War is not one of the recent innovations in population reduction.)
Reproductive Prudence and Mortality were not well-recognized concepts in Aristotle’s era, yet Aristotle was aware and promoted, in and through his theory, abortion and infanticide as a means of controlling the population. There were similar, and sometimes vastly dissimilar developments in other parts of the world.
At this point, having been assured and reassured that the unassuming reader’s mind, spontaneously bombarded with a gazillion truckloads of factual data, would be begging for some abstraction, we answer the pitiable subject’s prayers with a well-deserved respite: more factual data.
Modern Times
Much of the debate and discussion on population control stemmed from the rapid development of European cities.
Richard Hakluyt, an English writer, commented that:
“Throughe our longe peace and seldome sickness… wee are growen more populous than ever heretofore;… many thousandes of idle persons are within this realme, which, havinge no way to be sett on worke, be either mutinous and seeke alteration in the state, or at leaste very burdensome to the commonwealthe.”
Uhm, Richard … U maid A lote of ‘typographical’ erruhs.
The Malthusian Growth Model
A notable development in this respect came from Thomas Robert Malthus, a British clergyman and economist, with the publication of his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principle of Population(A complete book disguised as an essay; Social science examinees have a profound experience in this field). Malthus, in his book, notes that an increase in food production of a country transiently adds to its prosperity, until a consequent population rise undoes it.
A very intelligent inference could be that mankind has a propensity to squander exuberance on improving the dining table strength instead of the banquet. Thus, according to Malthus, a country would prosper only to be catapulted back into misery and despair, what came to be widely known as the Malthusian Trap.
He correctly identified social upliftment through education of the lower social strata as a way out of the Malthusian Trap. He introduced the concept of checks on population, them being of two types: ‘Positive’ checks and ‘Preventative’ checks. The ‘Preventative’ checks, aimed at lowering birth rates, included moral restraint, abstinence and birth control. The ‘Positive’ checks, so coined in a moment of pure, sinister sadism, were factors like famines, disease, and genocide which increased the death rates.
Malthus put forward the Simple Exponential Growth model, which described the relation of the variation in the population with the population itself. For those who have taken courses in elementary calculus, this model is not breaking news. For the rest, it is morse code.
While the Simple Exponential Growth model deserves special mention as being the first in the domain of population modelling, it suffers from ignoring a few real intricacies, as is evident from the graph below. Over time, more descriptive and accurate models have been developed.
Reader’s Takeaway
The theory of population put forward by Malthus aided Darwin in formulating his idea of evolution through natural selection in the wild, where reproductive prudence was unknown.
“If evolution was the machine, and natural selection was the engine, then Malthus’ perpetual struggle for resources was the fuel.” — allaboutscience.org
Originally published at populationcontrolweb.wordpress.com on November 4, 2017.
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