Bons pontos sobre Malthus em um artigo onde Paul Krugman comenta uma matéria do NYT criticando as “Cassandras”:

“Statements like this are deeply unfair to Parson Malthus. The fact is that Malthus was right about the whole of human history up until his own era.

Sumerian peasants in the 30th century BC lived on the edge of subsistence; so did French peasants in the 18th century AD. Throughout history population growth had always managed to cancel out any sustained gains in the standard of living, just as Malthus said.

It was only with the industrial revolution that we finally escaped from the trap (if we did — for all we know, 35th-century historians will view the period 1800-2020 or so as a temporary aberration).

Was Malthus just unlucky? No. The same forces that made the industrial revolution possible — above all, the spirit of inquiry and rationality — also led to the birth of analytical economics. There probably couldn’t have been a Malthus until the world was on the verge of becoming non-Malthusian.“