July 29th, 2004
Make Mine Malthus!
Ronald Bailey, writing at Reason Online, reminds us that Malthusianism (views based on the ill-founded pessimism of Thomas Malthus regarding population growth and the use and availability of resources) never seems to go away, no matter how often it is comprehensively debunked. This is important to the healthy life extension movement, as overpopulation and Malthusian arguments are often used to justify allowing aging and death to continue to claim tens of millions of lives each year. Malthusian ideas are simply wrong - resources are never limited. Human ingenuity constantly leads us to new resources and new and better ways of using old ones.