Population

It is an obvious truth, which has been taken notice of by many writers, that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence; but no writer that the Author recollects has inquired particularly into the means by which this level is effected …

Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.

By that law of our nature which makes food necessary to the life of man, the effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.

This implies a strong and constantly operating check on population from the difficulty of subsistence. This difficulty must fall somewhere and must necessarily be severely felt by a large portion of mankind.
— Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population Growth as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society.

Lemmings go over cliffs, we move to town.

— Lewis Thomas, (1913 – 1993), The Fragile Species, Collier Macmillan, 1992, 100.

Personally I come more and more to believe in decentralization and small-scale ownership of land and means of production. The trouble is that, in an over-populated country like Britain, this is only partially feasible. Mass production, coupled with mass regimentation, for export in exchange for food seems to be the ineluctable destiny of those who have made Malthus’s nightmare come true.

— Aldous Huxley, letter to Harold Raymond (Chatto and Windus) from California, 1945, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 465.

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust … A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.
— Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), A Modest Proposal for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick, 1729.

But far more numerous was the herd.
— John Dryden.

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892), The Vision of Sin, 1842.

Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1 1/16 is born
— Charles Babbage (1792 – 1871)

Until the 1940s, malaria was endemic in Ceylon … despite a high birth rate, for centuries the population has been stabilised and enervated by the mosquito… the population doubled in thirty years, with resultant problems of unemployment, inadequate social services, food shortages.
— Arthur C. Clarke, The View from Serendip, Gollancz, 1978, pp. 127-128.

The primary requirement for a stable human ecosystem is stabilization of human numbers. This is something much more than the conventional aim of family planning, which is that every family should have the children they want, when they want them. It means that at some point it becomes obligatory that each generation replaces itself and no more, that the average number of live births per woman during her lifetime shall be two plus a fraction (probably between 0.3 and 0.9) to allow for couples who are non-fertile, and for childhood deaths.
— Macfarlane Burnet, (1899 – 1984), Dominant Mammal, Heinemann 1970, 129.

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