2025-03-29
48 分钟The Economist Maybe you've heard of the Malthusian trap or Malthusian catastrophe.
In the late 18th century,
Thomas Malthus and others were thinking about whether the world could feed a population that was growing faster than the food supply was.
For a really long time, people were really worried about poverty,
fighting over food, death by starvation.
In the same year Malthus published the essay that made him famous,
a sociologist named Auguste Comte was born.
He is credited with a weighty phrase that's still invoked today.
Demography is destiny.
No spoiler here, between them and now, the species didn't die hungry.
Because the world Malthus and Comte lived in changed.
The Industrial Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution, the Contraceptive.
But the world and societies kept changing,
and now they're confronted with another trap, another looming catastrophe.
What happens when the problem isn't a shortage of food, but a shortage of people?
I'm Jason Palmer, and this is The Weeknd Intelligence.
Today is the first in a series of episodes we're doing on fertility,
on demography, ultimately on destiny.
It's no less troubling from today's vantage than Malthus' view was from his.
You'll hear about demographic doom loops and population vortices,