Answer to Question #198678 in Economics for PRETTY

Question

Briefly discussion whether the Malthusian Theory of Population is applicable to a country like South Africa. Support your answer with findings from a reliable source.

Answer 1

There are two ways out of the large-scale Malthusian trap: either wait for the balance of population and resources to be restored through the death of hundreds of millions of people due to environmental crises, growing poverty, mass hunger, deadly pandemics, and wars or try to slow down population growth much more active than this is now being done.

The consequences of the population explosion in the global South are being developed in the "framework" neo-Malthusian and anti-Malthusian paradigms. The subject of these diametrically opposed approaches is, as a rule, the underdeveloped South, so that possible inconsistencies with the concepts of economic and demographic interactions in the developed North are deliberately excluded. For more than half a century, neo-Malthusianism has been the mainstream of academic discourse. Neo-Malthusianism borrowed from its predecessor, classical Malthusianism the central thesis about the (Malthusian) trap in which countries systematically fall, where population growth is outstripping growth in food production. However, the neo-Malthusian paradigm is broader than Malthusianism in conceptualizing the consequences of rapid population growth: we are talking not only about food and not only about other parameters of the "habitat capacity", but in general about all the problems that rapid demographic growth exacerbates. In this perspective, the population turns out to be the denominator of processes, in the numerator which is worth everything good and valuable: irreplaceable natural resources, fertile land, clean water, food, schools and hospitals, government spending on social needs, gross product, physical capital, national wealth ... From this perspective, it turns out that the population explosion has few positive and many negative consequences, including the growth of agrarian overpopulation, the persistence of poverty and the spread of extreme poverty, pressure on the physical and social infrastructure, the slowdown in economic growth. Demographic

explosion fuels social tensions, ethnic conflicts, and international competition for resources (including water resources), which multiplies the man-made impact on the environment. The famous book of the biologist P. Ehrlich at one time summarized, presented in a concentrated form, and provided vivid illustrations of neo-Malthusian arguments in the food and environmental fields.