Suddenly, I remembered my long forgotten high school economics lesson amidst this great global virus scare.
18th century thinker Thomas Robert Malthus had already been relegated to the Jurassic Victorian age of covering up by the time I was transiting from shorts to trousers.
Yet, what he said reads so relevant today:
‘This is incontrovertibly true. Through the animal and vegetable kingdoms nature has scattered the seeds of life abroad with the most profuse and liberal hand, but has been comparatively sparing in the room and nourishment needed for these germs of existence contained in this earth, (that) if they could freely develop themselves, would fill millions of worlds in the course of a few thousand years.
Necessity, that imperious all-pervading law of nature, restrains them within prescribed bounds. The race of plants and animals shrinks under this great restrictive law; and man cannot by any effort of reason escape from it.
The positive checks to population are extremely various, and include every cause, whether arising from vice or misery, which in any degree contributes to shorten the duration of human life. Under this head, therefore, may be enumerated all the unwholesome occupations, severe labour and exposure to the seasons, extreme poverty (and now, if I may add extreme wealth, since Covid-19 is a rich man’s disease), bad nursing of children, great towns, excesses of all kinds, the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, plagues and famines.’
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