“So we tend to freak ourselves out on a regular basis. I’ll give you a few examples. In 1798, Thomas Malthus published an essay describing how population growth is exponential, but the growth of the food supply is linear. If the population kept growing, he insisted, mass starvation was inevitable. But as I told you at my house, poverty and starvation are at lower levels than ever before, and the population is more than seven-fold higher than it was in Malthus’s time. Turns out he couldn’t have been more wrong.
