Related Research Articles
Thomas Robert Malthus was an English economist, cleric, and scholar influential in the fields of political economy and demography.
The Population Bomb is a 1968 book co-authored by former Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich and former Stanford senior researcher in conservation biology Anne H. Ehrlich. From the opening page, it predicted worldwide famines due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth. Fears of a "population explosion" existed in the mid-20th century baby boom years, but the book and its authors brought the idea to an even wider audience.
The Limits to Growth (LTG) is a 1972 report that discussed the possibility of exponential economic and population growth with finite supply of resources, studied by computer simulation. The study used the World3 computer model to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth and human systems. The model was based on the work of Jay Forrester of MIT, as described in his book World Dynamics.
Economic growth can be defined as the increase or improvement in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy in a financial year. Statisticians conventionally measure such growth as the percent rate of increase in the real and nominal gross domestic product (GDP).
Ibn Khaldun was an Arab sociologist, philosopher, and historian widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages, and considered by many to be the father of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography studies.
Julian Lincoln Simon was an American economist. He was a professor of economics and business administration at the University of Illinois from 1963 to 1983 before later moving to the University of Maryland, where he taught for the remainder of his academic career.
Environmental sociology is the study of interactions between societies and their natural environment. The field emphasizes the social factors that influence environmental resource management and cause environmental issues, the processes by which these environmental problems are socially constructed and define as social issues, and societal responses to these problems.
Malthusianism is a theory that population growth is potentially exponential, according to the Malthusian growth model, while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population decline. This event, called a Malthusian catastrophe has been predicted to occur if population growth outpaces agricultural production, thereby causing famine or war. According to this theory, poverty and inequality will increase as the price of assets and scarce commodities goes up due to fierce competition for these dwindling resources. This increased level of poverty eventually causes depopulation by decreasing birth rates. If asset prices keep increasing, social unrest would occur, which would likely cause a major war, revolution, or a famine. Societal collapse is an extreme but possible outcome from this process. The theory posits that such a catastrophe would force the population to "correct" back to a lower, more easily sustainable level. Malthusianism has been linked to a variety of political and social movements, but almost always refers to advocates of population control.
A steady-state economy is an economy made up of a constant stock of physical wealth (capital) and a constant population size. In effect, such an economy does not grow in the course of time. The term usually refers to the national economy of a particular country, but it is also applicable to the economic system of a city, a region, or the entire world. Early in the history of economic thought, classical economist Adam Smith of the 18th century developed the concept of a stationary state of an economy: Smith believed that any national economy in the world would sooner or later settle in a final state of stationarity.
The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798, but the author was soon identified as Thomas Robert Malthus. The book warned of future difficulties, on an interpretation of the population increasing in geometric progression while food production increased in an arithmetic progression, which would leave a difference resulting in the want of food and famine, unless birth rates decreased.
Albert Allen Bartlett was an American professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. As of July 2001, Professor Bartlett had lectured over 1,742 times since September 1969 on Arithmetic, Population, and Energy. Bartlett regarded the word combination "sustainable growth" as an oxymoron, and argued that modest annual percentage population increases could lead to exponential growth. He therefore regarded human overpopulation as "The Greatest Challenge" facing humanity.
'Asabiyyah is a concept of social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and a sense of shared purpose and social cohesion, originally used in the context of tribalism and clanism.
The Coal Question; An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines is a book that economist William Stanley Jevons wrote in 1865 to explore the implications of Britain's reliance on coal. Given that coal was a finite, non-renewable energy resource, Jevons raised the question of sustainability. "Are we wise," he asked rhetorically, "in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?" His central thesis was that the supremacy of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland over global affairs was transitory, given the finite nature of its primary energy resource. In propounding this thesis, Jevons covered a range of issues central to sustainability, including limits to growth, overpopulation, overshoot, energy return on energy input (EROEI), taxation of energy resources, renewable energy alternatives, and resource peaking—a subject widely discussed today under the rubric of peak oil.
Social development theory attempts to explain qualitative changes in the structure and framework of society, that help the society to better realize aims and objectives. Development can be defined in a manner applicable to all societies at all historical periods as an upward ascending movement featuring greater levels of energy, efficiency, quality, productivity, complexity, comprehension, creativity, mastery, enjoyment and accomplishment. Development is a process of social change, not merely a set of policies and programs instituted for some specific results. During the last five centuries this process has picked up in speed and intensity, and during the last five decades has witnessed a marked surge in acceleration.
The Muqaddimah, also known as the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun or Ibn Khaldun's Prolegomena, is a book written by the historian Ibn Khaldun in 1377 which presents a view of universal history. Some modern thinkers view it as the first work dealing with the social sciences of sociology, demography, and cultural history. The Muqaddimah also deals with Islamic theology, historiography, the philosophy of history, economics, political theory, and ecology. It has also been described as a precursor or an early representative of social Darwinism, and Darwinism.
In the history of economic thought, ancient economic thought refers to the ideas from people before the Middle Ages.
In economics, scarcity "refers to the basic fact of life that there exists only a finite amount of human and nonhuman resources which the best technical knowledge is capable of using to produce only limited maximum amounts of each economic good." If the conditions of scarcity did not exist and an "infinite amount of every good could be produced or human wants fully satisfied ... there would be no economic goods, i.e. goods that are relatively scarce..." Scarcity is the limited availability of a commodity, which may be in demand in the market or by the commons. Scarcity also includes an individual's lack of resources to buy commodities. The opposite of scarcity is abundance. Scarcity plays a key role in economic theory, and it is essential for a "proper definition of economics itself".
"The best example is perhaps Walras' definition of social wealth, i.e., economic goods. 'By social wealth', says Walras, 'I mean all things, material or immaterial, that are scarce, that is to say, on the one hand, useful to us and, on the other hand, only available to us in limited quantity'."
In environmental science, a population "overshoots" its local carrying capacity — the capacity of the biome to feed and sustain that population — when that population has not only begun to outstrip its food supply in excess of regeneration, but actually shot past that point, setting up a potentially catastrophic crash of that feeder population once its food populations have been consumed completely. Overshoot can apply to human overpopulation as well as other animal populations: any life-form that consumes others to sustain itself.
Kitāb al-ʿIbar is a 14th-century historical encyclopedia in seven volumes written by the Arab sociologist and historian Ibn Khaldun. Its prolegomenon, or introduction, is al-Muqaddima. Kitāb al-ʿIbar was also printed in Arabic under the title Tarīkh Ibn Khaldūn.
Gale L. Pooley is an American economist, professor, and author, recognized for his work in economics and real estate valuation. Dr. Gale Pooley is currently a professor of economic history at Utah Tech University. He previously held a position as Associate Professor at Brigham Young University–Hawaii (BYU-Hawaii), where he taught in the Department of Business and Government as the lead for the economics program. His academic career also includes teaching positions at Alfaisal University in Riyadh, Brigham Young University–Idaho, Boise State University, and the College of Idaho, in the fields of business, statistics, and economics. Pooley holds professional designations from the Appraisal Institute, the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, and the CCIM Institute. Pooley is renowned for his contributions to the field of economics, particularly through his work on the concept of abundance and population growth.
References
- ↑ Tierney, John (December 2, 1990). "Betting on the Planet". The New York Times.
- ↑ Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah , 2:272-73, quoted in Weiss, Dieter (1995). "Ibn Khaldun on Economic Transformation". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 27 (1): 29–37. doi:10.1017/S0020743800061560. JSTOR 176185. [30].
- ↑ George, Henry (1898). Progress and Poverty, Volumes I and IIAn Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth.[ page needed ]
- ↑ Moseley, William (2014). An Introduction to Human-Environment Geography: local dynamics and global process. Blackwell Publishing. pp. 240–241. ISBN 978-1-4051-8931-6.
- ↑ "Population Growth over Human History". University of Michigan. Archived from the original on July 24, 2011.
- ↑ "International Data Base (IDB): Total Midyear Population for the World: 1950–2050". U.S. Census Bureau. Archived from the original on October 17, 2007.
- ↑ World population to 2300 United Nations; Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 2004
- ↑ Gerland, Patrick; Raftery, Adrian E.; Ševčíková, Hana; Li, Nan; Gu, Danan; Spoorenberg, Thomas; Alkema, Leontine; Fosdick, Bailey K.; Chunn, Jennifer; Lalic, Nevena; Bay, Guiomar; Buettner, Thomas; Heilig, Gerhard K.; Wilmoth, John (October 10, 2014). "World population stabilization unlikely this century". Science. 346 (6206): 234–237. Bibcode:2014Sci...346..234G. doi:10.1126/science.1257469. PMC 4230924 . PMID 25301627.
- ↑ The Cornucopian Fallacies. TEF Reports. by Lindsey Grant
- ↑ Oreskes, Naomi (March 1, 2023). "Eight Billion People in the World Is a Crisis, Not an Achievement". Scientific American. Springer Nature. Retrieved April 3, 2023.
This argument is a retread of a theoretical framework that was named cornucopianism in the 1980s. Cornucopians, led by economist Julian Simon and military strategist Herman Kahn, argued that anxiety over limited natural resources is misguided because human ingenuity can overcome any limits. Let populations grow alongside markets operating under minimal government constraints, and people will invent solutions to whatever problems they face. It's true that technological innovations in the 19th and 20th centuries created more agricultural productivity—enough to feed much of a growing population. But the cornucopian perspective ignores other important facts. For instance, an enormous number of these inventions came into being through government actions. From the canals and railroads of the 19th century to the interstate highways and Internet of the 20th, most large-scale technological achievements have relied, at least in part, on government initiatives and support. Big gains in health and life expectancy stemmed from state investments in scientific research and public health. In the early 21st century the price of renewable solar energy fell dramatically, largely because of state-funded research and policies to help ensure demand. And although much of our population grew healthily in the 20th century, hundreds of millions died in famines, pandemics and wars. Scientists have been warning us about the risks of anthropogenic climate disruption since the 1950s, but technological progress has not stopped the unfolding climate crisis.