Economics Malthus and Mill
Group Take-home Test (THT) 3
DUE August 5 MWF/ August 1 TTh
Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill
Date accomplished: 8/3/13 Class schedule: MWF 9:30-10:30AM
Contributing group members:
*BASIC REFERENCES: lecture files and linked chapter readings from "The Worldly Philosophers” (6th ed., by Robert Heilbroner) in the Links section of the egroup
YOU MAY ALSO DO ADDITIONAL RESEARCH. ALWAYS CITE REFERENCES AT THE END OF YOUR PAPER. Always answer in your own words.
1. List down all the key variables in Thomas Malthus’ Theory of Population discuss how they are related to each other / how they work together.
The key variables in Thomas Malthus’ Theory of Population are human population, food production or food supply, and birth & death rates.
According to Malthus, population will always exceed and grow faster than the food supply, leading to periods of overpopulation and famine. He argued that overpopulation was the cause of many of the social issues in the society such as poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Thus, if left unhampered, human population would continue to grow until they would become too large to be supported by our natural resources and agricultural food supply. He therefore considered that the population increase should be kept down to the level at which it could be supported. This can be done through preventive checks that affect the birth rate and include marrying at a later age (moral restraint), abstaining from procreation, birth control, and homosexuality. Aside from this, positive checks can also be another way and these are the ones which increase the death rate which includes disease, war, disaster, and famine.
2. What are the predictions of the Theory of Population?
• He predicted that the population would continue to increase rapidly than the supply of food, which is the basic need of human. But nature has its own way of decreasing the population in order to meet the supply, through
DUE August 5 MWF/ August 1 TTh
Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill
Date accomplished: 8/3/13 Class schedule: MWF 9:30-10:30AM
Contributing group members:
*BASIC REFERENCES: lecture files and linked chapter readings from "The Worldly Philosophers” (6th ed., by Robert Heilbroner) in the Links section of the egroup
YOU MAY ALSO DO ADDITIONAL RESEARCH. ALWAYS CITE REFERENCES AT THE END OF YOUR PAPER. Always answer in your own words.
1. List down all the key variables in Thomas Malthus’ Theory of Population discuss how they are related to each other / how they work together.
The key variables in Thomas Malthus’ Theory of Population are human population, food production or food supply, and birth & death rates.
According to Malthus, population will always exceed and grow faster than the food supply, leading to periods of overpopulation and famine. He argued that overpopulation was the cause of many of the social issues in the society such as poverty, malnutrition, and disease. Thus, if left unhampered, human population would continue to grow until they would become too large to be supported by our natural resources and agricultural food supply. He therefore considered that the population increase should be kept down to the level at which it could be supported. This can be done through preventive checks that affect the birth rate and include marrying at a later age (moral restraint), abstaining from procreation, birth control, and homosexuality. Aside from this, positive checks can also be another way and these are the ones which increase the death rate which includes disease, war, disaster, and famine.
2. What are the predictions of the Theory of Population?
• He predicted that the population would continue to increase rapidly than the supply of food, which is the basic need of human. But nature has its own way of decreasing the population in order to meet the supply, through