Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The prospect of a growing mismatch between people and resources deeply troubled a learned and inquisitive English country curate named Thomas Robert Malthus, who in 1798 committed his thoughts to paper in a work which has made him world-famous. In his Essay on Population,* Malthus focused upon what appeared to him the greatest problem facing the human species: 'that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.' This was so, he argued, because the populations of Britain, France, and America were doubling every twenty-five years whereas—although fresh land was also being opened up—there was no certainty that food supplies could increase at the same rate repeatedly. . . . Thus, “the power of population” was answered, not so much by “the power in the earth” itself, but by the power of technology—the capacity of the human mind to find new ways of doing things, to invent new devices, to organize production in improved forms, to quicken the pace of moving goods and ideas from one place to another, to stimulate fresh approaches to old problems."