SOC101Y1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 2: Thomas Robert Malthus, Georg Simmel, Dennis Meadows
Document Summary
Urban life is different than rural life, and population size matters. Rural towns become big cities with larger populations and the built environment of a city conflicts with the natural environment. Issue of population size causing problems to humanity was first brought up by thomas malthus one of the founders of demography (he was the first to seriously consider the possibility that earth would eventually overpopulate) Demography: the study of human populations, their growth and decline through births, deaths and migration. Malthus argued that earth"s available resources increase additively (arithmetically) while the population grew exponentially (geometrically) in the end geometric series will always over take arithmetic series and hence we will run out of resources and die off. Malthus proposed having checks" (limits) in order to keep population growth in line with food supply. Positive checks: prevent overpopulation by increasing death rate, include war, feminine, pestilence, and disease.
