Population, Sustainability, and Malthus: Crash Course World History 215

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In which John Green teaches you about population. So, how many people can reasonably live on the Earth? Thomas Malthus got it totally wrong in the 19th century, but for some reason, he keeps coming up when we talk about population. In 1800, the human population of the Earth passed 1 billion, and Thomas Malthus posited that growth had hit its ceiling, and the population would level off and stop growing. He was totally right. Just kidding, he was totally wrong! There are like 7 billion people on the planet now! John will teach a little about how Malthus made his calculations, and explain how Malthus came up with the wrong answer. As is often the case, it has to do with making projections based on faulty assumptions. Man, people do that a lot.

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28 Comments

  1. Jeez poor Malthus. The most misunderstood thinker in history… Imagine if other thinkers got the Malthus treatment:
    He wasn't making a prediction. He was noticing a paradox. If food grows linearly, but population grows exponentially, then humanity is always a few generations away from mass starvation…. and yet somehow, we're still here.

    He wasn't making some crazy prediction for a dismal future; he was just stating an observable factual phenomenon.

  2. He was right, and you cannot simply accept it. More population means more poor and middle class people. Also what technology has achieved is written off by our foolish mistakes

  3. I think that what he was trying to say is that with whatever innovation may arise that it can only have a scaling effect on the amount of food available for consumption while population can increase as a function of its size. The social and ethical issues is a whole other bag of worms.

  4. Malthus is more like a mathematical theory. Given 1. Population grows exp 2. Resources grow linear, Then People must die. Therefore Malthus is totally correct. It's just that the prerequisites of his theory are not satisfied yet.

  5. the problem is: our ability to grow food only improves linearly, while the population is growing exponentialy, if you know maths you'll see that a big starving is inevitable

  6. Mr. Malthus was wrong underestimating tech and everything, but he also didn't know that Bill Gates & friends come into the equation to mitigate the gap of his mistakes.

  7. Are you able to share a bibliography with sources for the information presented in this video? Please, I would very much like to read. Thank you.

  8. the future holds a quarter of the human population declining due to a virus out-break
    i sence violence hunger and pain(not actully hunger i just said that to make it seem frightning)

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