In many ways, Thomas Malthus—the namesake of the Malthusian League—was Sanger’s intellectual predecessor. Malthus warned that overpopulation would lead to the dwindling of resources, which would lead to a deadly decline in living standards. The proposed solution to his Malthusian catastrophe was to limit the growth of the population as much as possible. Malthus’s theory, however, was wrong. While the world population has increased by seven billion people since 1800,[11] extreme poverty has decreased from 84 percent to 24 percent.[12] As it turns out, human beings add to and benefit our
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