Don't Fear Exploding Population

Ever since Parson Thomas Robert Malthus wrote his 1798 essay on population, it has been trotted out by millenarians and self-styled Cassandras as the basis for predicting famine and global woe. Malthus's arguments were resurrected as a best-seller for the modern era in the 1968 overpopulation-panic classicThe Population Bomb. More recently, Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs has cited Malthus to explain the dire state of Africa, and Harvard University historian Niall Ferguson to predict a coming 20 years of global misery. The recent food crisis -- which pushed 100 million-plus people worldwide into absolute poverty -- has elevated Malthus's reputation as a prognosticator to the Delphic levels of a Nostradamus or an Al Roker.

But despite his centuries-long global celebrity and recent revival, the parson's predictions have been wrong from the start. He was wrong about the future of his native Britain. And he was wrong about the future of everywhere else.