These questions were also asked by the man who is possibly history’s most persistently influential theorist on the subject of population growth, Thomas Robert Malthus. His 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population describes how unchecked population growth is exponential while the growth of the food supply is expected to be arithmetical, thereby inevitably resulting—he reasoned—in a not-too-distant global famine (which in fact has never materialized).
Mathusian modeling
