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Faculty of Economics

The New Malthusianism : A Symposium – 12th,13th December


Thomas MalthusMalthus Basic Theory

Recent studies project populations reaching levels of 12-14 billion individuals by the end of the century. This raises a set of questions regarding food security, pandemic threats, and environmental crisis. These issues relate back to Thomas Malthus and the concerns he raised relating to resource scarcity and human population levels, and the interaction between these.

On the occasion of the 220th anniversary of Malthus’ Essay on Population, a symposium was convened at his Cambridge College – Jesus College – to consider more recent explorations of Malthus and Malthusianism. Economic historians, population/land use modellers, growth theorists, and resource economists presented new or current insights to be derived from more recent studies related to Malthusianism.

Professor Partha Dasgupta presented a stimulating keynote to kick off the symposium which you can see here.

The twenty participants presented a raft of stimulating papers arising out of Malthusian thought and motivated by current studies, new projections or historical data. The papers ranged from new theories of unified economic growth via sophisticated democratic projection models to new and striking evidence on the evolution of real wages in England over the past 300 years.

The New Malthusianism Symposium was sponsored by the MAVA Foundation and the Cambridge Institute for New Economic Thinking in celebration of the 220th Anniversary of the publication of Malthus’ Essay on Population and organised by Professor Tim Swansson, Dr Toke Aidt and Ms Andhina Kusumawidjaja.


 



You can also view this video on the University SMS site


Tags:

Malthus

Malthusian

Population Overshoot

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