> Malthusian theory had been proven wrong
It was never proven wrong, as much as the world changed in a way that invalidated it.
The entire idea was that population growth was an exponential function, whereas agriculture output was a linear function. There would have been famine if nothing had changed, because there is only a certain amount of physical labor a person is capable of doing, which has to be divided between the farming, logistics, and cooking of the food.
What happened was that a century later we got mechanized farming and synthetic fertilizer, decoupling agricultural output from the population. Now a single person can do the work of thousands, and every year that number grows due to technology advances. It is too expensive to set up fully automated farms on the industrial scale, but it is technologically possible.
But none of that invalidates his idea. If you believe that an exponential function and linear function sharing a point at (0,0) must cross each other (subject to other reasonable conditions like not having crossed yet, the linear having a positive finite slope, etc), then it is not logical to reject Malthus. It just no longer applies because we decoupled our food production capacity from the population size.
It was never proven wrong, as much as the world changed in a way that invalidated it.
The entire idea was that population growth was an exponential function, whereas agriculture output was a linear function. There would have been famine if nothing had changed, because there is only a certain amount of physical labor a person is capable of doing, which has to be divided between the farming, logistics, and cooking of the food.
What happened was that a century later we got mechanized farming and synthetic fertilizer, decoupling agricultural output from the population. Now a single person can do the work of thousands, and every year that number grows due to technology advances. It is too expensive to set up fully automated farms on the industrial scale, but it is technologically possible.
But none of that invalidates his idea. If you believe that an exponential function and linear function sharing a point at (0,0) must cross each other (subject to other reasonable conditions like not having crossed yet, the linear having a positive finite slope, etc), then it is not logical to reject Malthus. It just no longer applies because we decoupled our food production capacity from the population size.