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Thomas Malthus on population

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Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) demonstrated perfectly the propensity of each generation to overthrow the fondest schemes of the last when he published An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), in which he painted the gloomiest picture imaginable of the human prospect. He argued that population , tending to grow at a geometric rate, will ever press against the food supply, which at best increases only arithmetically, and thus poverty and misery are forever inescapable. This idea is altogether plausible, if simplistic, and its rapid adoption by theorists of the laissez-faire school is largely responsible for the designation of economics as the “dismal science.” Malthus’s argument had a profounder effect on the science of biology , for it was the reading of his essay that sparked the idea of natural selection by survival of the fittest in the minds of both Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace .

By the time Malthus was asked to write the article “Population” for the 1824 Supplement of the fourth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica , he had somewhat moderated the bleakness of An Essay on the Principle of Population , at least to the extent of adding to the “positive checks” on population—war, starvation, and so on—the idea of more benign “preventive checks,” prudential acts like the purposeful delay of marriage and childbearing. The following short excerpt from Malthus’s article focuses on his ideas about population control.

Consider…the nature of those checks which have been classed under the general heads of Preventive and Positive.

It will be found that they are all resolvable into moral restraint , vice , and misery . And if, from the laws of nature, some check to the increase of population be absolutely inevitable, and human institutions have any influence upon the extent to which each of these checks operates, a heavy responsibility will be incurred, if all that influence, whether direct or indirect, be not exerted to diminish the amount of vice and misery.

Moral restraint, in application to the present subject, may be defined to be, abstinence from marriage, either for a time or permanently, from prudential considerations, with a strictly moral conduct towards the sex in the interval. And this is the only mode of keeping population on a level with the means of subsistence, which is perfectly consistent with virtue and happiness. All other checks, whether of the preventive or the positive kind, though they may greatly vary in degree, resolve themselves into some form of vice or misery.

The remaining checks of the preventive kind, are the sort of intercourse which renders some of the women of large towns unprolific: a general corruption of morals with regard to the sex, which has a similar effect; unnatural passions and improper arts to prevent the consequences of irregular connections. These evidently come under the head of vice.

The positive checks to population include all the causes, which tend in any way prematurely to shorten the duration of human life; such as unwholesome occupations—severe labour and exposure to the seasons—bad and insufficient food and clothing arising from poverty—bad nursing of children—excesses of all kinds—great towns and manufactories—the whole train of common diseases and epidemics —wars, infanticide, plague, and famine. Of these positive checks, those which appear to arise from the laws of nature , may be called exclusively misery; and those which we bring upon ourselves, such as wars, excesses of all kinds, and many others, which it would be in our power to avoid, are of a mixed nature. They are brought upon us by vice, and their consequences are misery.

…Prudence cannot be enforced by laws, without a great violation of natural liberty, and a great risk of producing more evil than good. But still, the very great influence of a just and enlightened government, and the perfect security of property in creating habits of prudence, cannot for a moment be questioned.…

The existence of a tendency in mankind to increase, if unchecked, beyond the possibility of an adequate supply of food in a limited territory, must at once determine the question as to the natural right of the poor to full support in a state of society where the law of property is recognized. The question, therefore, resolves itself chiefly into a question relating to the necessity of those laws which establish and protect private property. It has been usual to consider the right of the strongest as the law of nature among mankind as well as among brutes; yet, in so doing, we at once give up the peculiar and distinctive superiority of man as a reasonable being, and class him with the beasts of the field.…If it be generally considered as so discreditable to receive parochial relief, that great exertions are made to avoid it, and few or none marry with a certain prospect of being obliged to have recourse to it, there is no doubt that those who were really in distress might be adequately assisted, with little danger of a constantly increasing proportion of paupers; and in that case a great good would be attained without any proportionate evil to counterbalance it.

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An Essay on the Principle of Population

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

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Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-9

Chapters 10-15

Chapters 16-19

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Summary and Study Guide

An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus was first published anonymously in 1798. Its core argument, that human population will inevitably outgrow its capacity to produce food, widely influenced the field of early 19th century economics and social science. Immediately after its first printing, Malthus’s essay garnered significant attention from his contemporaries, and he soon felt the need to reveal his identity. Although it was highly controversial, An Essay on the Principle of Population nevertheless left its impression on foundational 19th century theorists, such as naturalist Charles Darwin and economists Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. Modern economists have largely dismissed the Malthusian perspective . Principally, they argue Malthus underappreciated the exponential growth brought about by the advent of the Industrial Revolution; by the discovery of new energy sources, such as coal and electricity; and later by further technological innovations. These modern criticisms are easily defended with historical retrospective.

Malthus’s essay has been revised several times since its publication. This summary focuses on the contents of the first edition. In 1806, Malthus revamped his work into four books to further discuss points of contention in the first edition and address many of the criticisms it received. Three more editions followed (published in 1807, 1817, and 1826 respectively), each modifying or clarifying points made in the second version.

Although Malthus’s basic stance on the unsustainable growth of population to food production remains the same throughout all versions, the most dramatic change in format and content is found between the first and second editions. The first edition is notable for its long and detailed critique of the works of William Godwin, Marquis de Condorcet, and Richard Price on the perfectibility of humankind. Its lack of “hard data” and its unpracticed opinions on sex and reproduction were heavily criticized by his contemporaries. The 1806 publication, written at a later point in Malthus’s life, attempts to address these issues by focusing less on critiquing the works of other theorists and offering better data on the fluctuation of population growth throughout various European countries and colonies (Malthus, Thomas Robert. An Essay on the Principle of Population: the 1803 edition . Yale University Press. 2018).

An Essay on the Principle of Population begins with a preface and is subsequently separated into eleven chapters. The preface reveals that a conversation with a friend on the future improvement of society was what sparked Malthus’s inspiration for this work. Chapter 1 further credits the works of David Hume, Alfred Russel, Adam Smith, and many others for inspiring his own writing. He postulates that population grows exponentially, whereas food production only increases in a linear fashion. This disparity in power will inevitably lead to overpopulation and an inadequate amount of food for subsistence.

Chapter 2 further details the above premise. Malthus imagines a world of abundance. In such a society of ease and leisure, no one would be anxious about providing for their families, which incentivizes them to marry early, causing birth rates to explode. When there are too many people and too little an increase in food to support them, the lower classes will be plunged into a state of misery. Thus, Malthus concludes that population growth only happens when there is an increase in subsistence, and misery and vice keep the world from overpopulation.

In chapters 3, 4, and 5, Malthus applies his theory to different stages of society. He argues that “savage” and shepherding societies never grow as fast as their “civilized” counterparts because various miseries keep their numbers in check. Among “savage” societies, a lack of food and a general disrespect of personal liberties prevent their numbers from increasing rapidly. Shepherding communities, meanwhile, often wage war over territories and suffer a high mortality rate. Civilized societies grew rapidly after adopting the practice of tilling, but due to exhausting most fertile land, their numbers no longer increase at the same rate as before.

The following two chapters are notable because they are the only ones that contain hard data. Malthus cites philosopher Richard Price for his analysis of population in America and references demographer Johann Peter Süssmilch for his work on Prussia. Malthus uses both these examples to prove that population fluctuates in accordance with the quantity of food produced. Chapters 8 and 9 are dedicated to critiquing mathematician Marquis de Condorcet’s work while chapters 10 to 15 do the same for political philosopher William Godwin. Malthus rejects the idea of mankind as infinitely perfectible and dismisses charity as a method to relieve poverty.

Chapters 16 and 17 propose the increase of food production as the only solution to reduce extreme poverty and misery among the lower class. Malthus maintains that donating funds is but a temporary relief to aid the most unfortunate; only a permanent increase in agricultural yield can grow the lower class’s purchasing power. Nevertheless, the final two chapters remind readers that misery and happiness must coexist. The law of nature, the way of living intended by God and demonstrated by Malthus’s population theory, requires both wealth and poverty to function.

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An Essay on the Principle of Population

The book An Essay on the Principle of Population was first published anonymously in 1798 through J. Johnson (London). The author was soon identified as The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. While it was not the first book on population, it has been acknowledged as the most influential work of its era. Its 6th Edition was independently cited as a key influence by both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in developing the theory of natural selection. Warning: template has been deprecated.

PRINCIPLE OF POPULATION ,

AS IT AFFECTS

THE FUTURE IMPROVEMENT OF SOCIETY.

WITH REMARKS

ON THE SPECULATIONS OF MR. GODWIN,

M. CONDORCET,

AND OTHER WRITERS.

PRINTED FOR J. JOHNSON, IN ST. PAUL'S

CHURCHYARD.

The following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr. Godwin's Essay, on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer. The discussion, started the general question of the future improvement of society; and the Author at first sat down with an intention of merely stating his thoughts to his friend, upon paper, in a clearer manner than he thought he could do, in conversation. But as the subject opened upon him, some ideas occurred, which he did not recollect to have met with before; and as he conceived, that every, the least light, on a topic so generally interesting, might be received with candour, he determined to put his thoughts in a form for publication.

​ The essay might, undoubtedly, have been rendered much more complete by a collection of a greater number of facts in elucidation of the general argument. But a long and almost total interruption, from very particular business, joined to a desire (perhaps imprudent) of not delaying the publication much beyond the time that he originally proposed, prevented the Author from giving to the subject an undivided attention. He presumes, however, that the facts which he has adduced, will be found, to form no inconsiderable evidence for the truth of his opinion respecting the future improvement of mankind. As the Author contemplates this opinion at present, little more appears to him to be necessary than a plain statement, in addition to the most cursory view of society, to establish it.

​ 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: and it is a view of these means, which forms, to his mind, the strongest obstacle in the way to any very great future improvement of society. He hopes it will appear, that, in the discussion of this interesting subject, he is actuated solely by a love of truth; and not by any prejudices against any particular set of men, or of opinions. He professes to have read some of the speculations on the future improvement of society, in a temper very different from a wish to find them visionary; but he has not acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what ​ he wishes, without evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might be unpleasing, when accompanied with evidence.

The view which he has given of human life has a melancholy hue; but he feels conscious, that he has drawn these dark tints, from a conviction that they are really in the picture; and not from a jaundiced eye, or an inherent spleen of disposition. The theory of mind which he has sketched in the two last chapters, accounts to his own understanding, in a satisfactory manner, for the existence of most of the evils of life; but whether it will have the same effect upon others must be left to the judgement of his readers.

If he should succeed in drawing the attention of more able men, to what he conceives to be the principal difficulty in ​ the way to the improvement of society, and should, in consequence, see this difficulty removed, even in theory, he will gladly retract his present opinions, and rejoice in a conviction of his error.

June 7, 1798.

CHAP. VIII.

CHAP. XIII.

CHAP. XVII.

CHAP. XVIII.

This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.

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An Essay on the Principle of Population

By thomas robert malthus.

There are two versions of Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population . The first, published anonymously in 1798, was so successful that Malthus soon elaborated on it under his real name. * The rewrite, culminating in the sixth edition of 1826, was a scholarly expansion and generalization of the first.Following his success with his work on population, Malthus published often from his economics position on the faculty at the East India College at Haileybury. He was not only respected in his time by contemporaneous intellectuals for his clarity of thought and willingness to focus on the evidence at hand, but he was also an engaging writer capable of presenting logical and mathematical concepts succinctly and clearly. In addition to writing principles texts and articles on timely topics such as the corn laws, he wrote in many venues summarizing his initial works on population, including a summary essay in the Encyclopædia Britannica on population.The first and sixth editions are presented on Econlib in full. Minor corrections of punctuation, obvious spelling errors, and some footnote clarifications are the only substantive changes. * Malthus’s “real name” may have been Thomas Robert Malthus, but a descendent, Nigel Malthus, reports that his family says he did not use the name Thomas and was known to friends and colleagues as Bob. See The Malthus Homepage, a site maintained by Nigel Malthus, a descendent.For more information on Malthus’s life and works, see New School Profiles: Thomas Robert Malthus and The International Society of Malthus. Lauren Landsburg

Editor, Library of Economics and Liberty

First Pub. Date

London: J. Johnson, in St. Paul's Church-yard

1st edition

The text of this edition is in the public domain. Picture of Malthus courtesy of The Warren J. Samuels Portrait Collection at Duke University.

Table of Contents

• Chapter III
• Chapter VII
• Chapter VIII
• Chapter XII
• Chapter XIII
• Chapter XIV
• Chapter XVI
• Chapter XVII
• Chapter XVIII
• Chapter XIX

The following Essay owes its origin to a conversation with a friend, on the subject of Mr. Godwin’s Essay, on avarice and profusion, in his Enquirer. The discussion, started the general question of the future improvement of society; and the Author at first sat down with an intention of merely stating his thoughts to his friend, upon paper, in a clearer manner than he thought he could do in conversation. But as the subject opened upon him, some ideas occurred, which he did not recollect to have met with before; and as he conceived, that every, the least light, on a topic so generally interesting, might be received with candour, he determined to put his thoughts in a form for publication.

The Essay might, undoubtedly, have been rendered much more complete by a collection of a greater number of facts in elucidation of the general argument. But a long and almost total interruption, from very particular business, joined to a desire (perhaps imprudent) of not delaying the publication much beyond the time that he originally proposed, prevented the Author from giving to the subject an undivided attention. He presumes, however, that the facts which he has adduced, will be found, to form no inconsiderable evidence for the truth of his opinion respecting the future improvement of mankind. As the Author contemplates this opinion at present, little more appears to him to be necessary than a plain statement, in addition to the most cursory view of society, to establish it.

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: and it is a view of these means, which forms, to his mind, the strongest obstacle in the way to any very great future improvement of society. He hopes it will appear that, in the discussion of this interesting subject, he is actuated solely by a love of truth; and not by any prejudices against any particular set of men, or of opinions. He professes to have read some of the speculations on the future improvement of society, in a temper very different from a wish to find them visionary; but he has not acquired that command over his understanding which would enable him to believe what he wishes, without evidence, or to refuse his assent to what might be unpleasing, when accompanied with evidence.

The view which he has given of human life has a melancholy hue; but he feels conscious, that he has drawn these dark tints, from a conviction that they are really in the picture; and not from a jaundiced eye or an inherent spleen of disposition. The theory of mind which he has sketched in the two last chapters, accounts to his own understanding in a satisfactory manner, for the existence of most of the evils of life; but whether it will have the same effect upon others, must be left to the judgement of his readers.

If he should succeed in drawing the attention of more able men, to what he conceives to be the principal difficulty in the way to the improvement of society, and should, in consequence, see this difficulty removed, even in theory, he will gladly retract his present opinions and rejoice in a conviction of his error.

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The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus

Edited by E. A. Wrigley; David Souden

• Published: 2010
• DOI: 10.4324/9781851960019
• Set ISBN: 9781851960019

Set Contents

• Introduction
• Volume 7. Essays on Political Economy
• Volume 8. Definitions in Political Economy: with Index to the Works of Malthus
• Volume 1. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)
• Volume 2. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1826): Part I
• Volume 3. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1826): Part II
• Volume 4. Essays on Population
• Volume 5. Principles of Political Economy: Part I
• Volume 6. Principles of Political Economy: Part II

An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

• E. A. Wrigley
• David Souden

The first, and anonymous, publication in 1798 of a Surrey curate was a book that can fairly be described as having shaken the world. The Reverend Mr Malthus’s views on population and the implications of its growth had considerable and immediate impact: for Malthus and his polemic were very much of the moment.

For the vast majority of Englishmen, any sympathy for the revolution in France had long since evaporated. England and France were at war; the dangers of severe food shortage and high prices were apparent, and were to be fully realized within the next few years; the costs of maintaining the poor, and their visibility, were high. Within intellectual society, there was keen discussion of evidence for and against England having a rising population, and controversy over the views of those who believed that society could be perfected. Malthus was not on the side of those who thought that numbers were rising rapidly, but was on the side of those who argued against William Godwin and others. Within political society, there were difficulties: Malthus was a Whig, and the mid-1790s were hardly an auspicious period for Whig politics. Yet his Essay on the principle of population as it affects the future improvement of society enjoyed immediate and controversial success.

Volume Contents

• content locked Front Matter
• content locked The publications of Thomas Robert Malthus
• content locked Publications about Malthus and his work
• content locked Table of the sources used by Malthus in the successive editions of the Essay on population
• content locked Consolidated bibliography of the sources referred to by Malthus in his published works
• content locked Notes on the printing of variant texts
• content locked Introduction to volume one Edited by David Souden
• content locked Prelims
• content locked I Question stated – Little prospects of a determination of it, from the enmity of the opposing parties – The principal argument against the perfectibility of man and of society has never been fairly answered – Nature of the difficulty arising from population – Outline of the principal argument of the essay
• content locked II The different ratios in which population and food increase – The necessary effects of these different ratios of increase – Oscillation produced by them in the condition of the lower classes of society – Reasons why this oscillation has not been so much observed as might be expected – Three propositions on which the general argument of the essay depends – The different states in which mankind have been known to exist proposed to be examined with reference to these three propositions
• content locked III The savage or hunter state shortly reviewed – The shepherd state, or the tribes of barbarians that overran the Roman Empire – The superiority of the power of population to the means of subsistence – the cause of the great tide of northern emigration
• content locked IV State of civilized nations – Probability that Europe is much more populous now than in the time of Julius Caesar – Best criterion of population – Probable error of Hume in one of the criterions that he proposes as assisting in an estimate of population – Slow increase of population at present in most of the states of Europe – The two principal checks to population – The first or preventive check examined with regard to England
• content locked V The second, or positive check to population examined, in England – The true cause why the immense sum collected in England for the poor does not better their condition – The powerful tendency of the poor laws to defeat their own purpose – Palliative of the distresses of the poor proposed – The absolute impossibility from the fixed laws of our nature, that the pressure of want can ever be completely removed from the lower classes of society – All the checks to population may be resolved into misery or vice
• content locked VI New colonies – Reasons of their rapid increase – North American colonies – Extraordinary instances of increase in the back settlements – Rapidity with which even old states recover the ravages of war, pestilence, famine, or the convulsions of nature
• content locked VII A probable cause of epidemics – Extracts from Mr Süssmilch’s tables – Periodical returns of sickly seasons to be expected in certain cases – Proportion of births to burials for short periods in any country an inadequate criterion of the real average increase of population – Best criterion of a permanent increase of population – Great frugality of living one of the causes of the famines of China and Hindustan – Evil tendency of one of the clauses of Mr Pitt’s Poor Bill – Only one proper way of encouraging population – Causes of the happiness of nations – Famine, the last and most dreadful mode by which nature represses a redundant population – The three propositions considered as established
• content locked VIII Mr Wallace – Error of supposing that the difficulty arising from population is at a great distance – Mr Condorcet’s sketch of the progress of the human mind – Period when the oscillation, mentioned by Mr Condorcet, ought to be applied to the human race
• content locked IX Mr Condorcet’s conjecture concerning the organic perfectibility of man, and the indefinite prolongation of human life – Fallacy of the argument, which infers an unlimited progress from a partial improvement, the limit of which cannot be ascertained, illustrated in the breeding of animals, and the cultivation of plants
• content locked X Mr Godwin’s system of equality – Error of attributing all the vices of mankind to human institutions – Mr Godwin’s first answer to the difficulty arising from population totally insufficient – Mr Godwin’s beautiful system of equality supposed to be realized – Its utter destruction simply from the principle of population in so short a time as thirty years
• content locked XI Mr Godwin’s conjecture concerning the future extinction of the passion between the sexes – Little apparent grounds for such a conjecture – Passion of lave not inconsistent either with reason or virtue.
• content locked XII Mr Godwin’s conjecture concerning the indefinite prolongation of human life – Improper inference drawn from the effects of mental stimulants on the human frame, illustrated in various instances – Conjectures not founded on any indications in the past, not to be considered as philosophical conjectures – Mr Godwin’s and Mr Condorcet’s conjecture respecting the approach of man towards immortality on earth, a curious instance of the inconsistency of scepticism
• content locked XIII Error of Mr Godwin in considering man too much in the light of a being merely rational – In the compound being, man, the passions will always act as disturbing forces in the decisions of the understanding – Reasonings of Mr Godwin on the subject of coercion – Some truths of a nature not to be communicated from one man to another.
• content locked XIV Mr Godwin’s five propositions respecting political truth, on which his whole work hinges, not established – Reasons we have for supposing from the distress occasioned by the principle of population, that the vices, and moral weakness of man can never be wholly eradicated – Perfectibility, in the sense in which Mr Godwin uses the term, not applicable to man – Nature of the real perfectibility of man illustrated
• content locked XV Models too perfect, may sometimes rather impede than promote improvements – Mr Godwin’s essay on avarice and profusion – Impossibility of dividing the necessary labour of a society amicably among all – Invectives against labour may produce present evil, with little or no chance of producing future good–An accession to the mass of agricultural labour must always be an advantage to the labourer
• content locked XVI Probable error of Dr Adam Smith in representing every increase of the revenue or stock of a society as an increase in the funds for the maintenance of labour – Instances where an increase of wealth can have no tendency to better the condition of the labouring poor – England has increased in riches without a proportional increase in the funds for the maintenance of labour – The state of the poor in China would not be improved by an increase of wealth from manufactures
• content locked XVII Question of the proper definition of the wealth of a state – Reason given by the French economists for considering all manufacturers as unproductive labourers, not the true reason – The labour of artificers, and manufacturers sufficiently productive to individuals, though not to the state – A remarkable passage in Dr Price’s two volumes of observations – Error of Dr Price in attributing the happiness and rapid population of America, chiefly, to its peculiar state of civilisation – No advantage can be expected from shutting our eyes to the difficulties in the way to the improvement of society
• content locked XVIII The constant pressure of distress on man, from the principle of population, seems to direct our hopes to the future – State of trial inconsistent with our ideas of the foreknowledge of God – The world, probably, a mighty process for awakening matter into mind - Theory of the formation of mind – Excitements from the wants of the body – Excitements from the operation of general laws – Excitements from the difficulties of life arising from the principle of population.
• content locked XIX The sorrows of life necessary to soften and humanize the heart – The excitements of social sympathy often produce characters of a higher order than the mere possessors of talents – Moral evil probably necessary to the production of moral excellence – Excitements from intellectual wants continually kept up by the infinite variety of nature, and the obscurity that involves metaphysical subjects – The difficulties in revelation to be accounted for upon this principle – The degree of evidence which the scriptures contain, probably, best suited to the improvement of the human faculties, and the moral amelioration of mankind– The idea that mind is created by excitements, seems to account for the existence of natural and moral evil
• content locked Back Matter

Malthus�s Population Principle Explained

By Frank W. Elwell

This essay is a faithful summary of Malthus�s original 1798 �Principle of Population .� While nothing will substitute for reading the original essay with an open mind, I hope this summary will go some way toward rehabilitating this man�s reputation.

Here is the key to that riddle: Malthus made the mistake of illustrating the unequal powers of production and reproduction with a mathematical illustration. He supposes that when unchecked, the earth�s human population would double every twenty-five years (a good estimate consistent with current knowledge). Agricultural production at best, he argues, could not possibly keep pace.

He knows full well that population cannot grow long beyond the means of subsistence (�population must always be kept down to the means of subsistence�), he is simply trying to illustrate to his readers the unequal powers of growth in population and food production and therefore the necessity of checks on population. At one point in the Essay he even states: �I am sufficiently aware that the redundant twenty-eight millions, or seventy-seven millions, that I have mentioned, could never have existed� (63). But for various reasons many critics have taken this mental experiment as the theory of population itself and delight in writing that Malthus was wrong, that overshoot and collapse did not occur. Contrary to popular belief (and the belief of many who should know better), Malthus did not predict a future in which population would outrun food supply and eventually collapse.

Other critics write that Malthus was wrong because he did not take into account the possibility of dramatic increases in the production of food. Many criticize him for not taking into account the revolution in agriculture. But he anticipated this argument as well:

No limits whatever are placed to the productions of the earth; they may increase for ever and be greater than any assignable quantity, yet still the power of population being a power of a superior order, the increase of the human species can only be kept commensurate to the increase of the means of subsistence by the constant operation of the strong law of necessity acting as a check upon the greater power (9-10).

What are these checks that Malthus writes about? They are of two types: �Preventive checks� come into play through the �foresight of the difficulties attending the rearing of a family� (22). They include celibacy, contraception, and various forms of non-procreative sex. �Positive checks,� are the �actual distresses of some of the lower classes, by which they are disabled from giving the proper food and attention to their children� (22). Under this heading Malthus includes extreme poverty, diseases, plague, malnutrition, wars, infanticide, and famine. Positive checks are far more likely to operate within poor populations; preventive checks among the upper classes. In Malthus�s view, both positive and preventive checks�or the ways a people go about controlling their fertility�will greatly impact the rest of the sociocultural system.

Malthus�s principle of population is basically the law of supply and demand applied to the relationships between food production and population growth , which he makes clear time and again throughout the Essay. As the food supply increases, food becomes cheaper, and more children are brought into the world. As there are more mouths to feed, food becomes more expensive, thus causing stress on families, more children dying or steps taken to prevent conception itself. As food prices rise, more land is put under the plow, or greater efforts made in intensifying the production of the land itself.

Because people can reproduce faster than they can increase the production of food, population must always be checked through positive or preventive means. This and nothing more, is Malthus�s �Principle of Population.� Over the course of sociocultural evolution, however, the long-term tendency has been for both productivity and population to intensify. This reciprocal growth, of course, has great effect on other parts of the sociocultural system.

For a more extensive discussion of Malthus�s theories refer to Macro Social Theory by Frank W. Elwell.  Also see Sociocultural Systems: Principles of Structure and Change to learn how his insights contribute to a more complete understanding of modern societies.

Bibliography

Elwell, F. (2009), Macrosociology: The Study of Sociocultural Systems . Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press.

Elwell, F. (2013), Sociocultural Systems: Principles of Structure and Change. Alberta: Athabasca University Press.

Malthus, T. R. (Thomas Robert) (2012-05-12). An Essay on the Principle of Population.   Kindle Edition.

Referencing this Site

To reference Malthus's Population Principle Explained you should use the following format: 

Elwell, Frank W., 2003, "Malthus's Population Principle Explained," Retrieved August 31, 2013, [use actual date] http://www.faculty.rsu.edu/~felwell/Theorists/Essay/Malthus1.htm 

�2013 Frank Elwell, Send comments to felwell at rsu.edu

An Essay on the Principle of Population [1798, 1st ed.]

• Thomas Robert Malthus (author)

This is the first edition of Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population. In this work Malthus argues that there is a disparity between the rate of growth of population (which increases geometrically) and the rate of growth of agriculture (which increases only arithmetically). He then explores how populations have historically been kept in check.

• EBook PDF This text-based PDF or EBook was created from the HTML version of this book and is part of the Portable Library of Liberty.
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• Kindle This is an E-book formatted for Amazon Kindle devices.

An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: J. Johnson 1798). 1st edition.

The text is in the public domain.

• Economic theory. Demography

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• Malthus: For and Against

Related People

Critical Responses

William Godwin

A lengthy and belated reply to Malthus by the radical individualist Godwin. Whereas Malthus took a pessimistic view of the pressures of population growth, Godwin was more optimistic about the capacity of people to limit the growth of their families.

Connected Readings

Econlib Article

Morgan Rose

Thomas Robert Malthus is arguably the most maligned economist in history. For over two hundred years, since the first publication of his book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus’ work has been misunderstood and misrepresented, and severe, alarming predictions have been attached to his…

Malthus had no objection to the idea that wealth derived from manufacturing production could, subject to certain hindrances, be exchanged to increase the amount of food available. He seems only to have misjudged the degree to which those hindrances would be reduced over time. He did not recognize…

What to read next.

Ross Emmett

While many liberty-loving economists are happy to correct the criticisms of Smith, many are equally happy to criticize Malthus for the Malthusian trap, not realizing that the usual portrayal of Malthus is equally false. Malthus shares far more with Smith than most expect. He is, in many ways, as…

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An essay on the principle of population, or, A view of its past and present effects on human happiness : with an inquiry into our prospects respecting the future removal or mitigation of the evils which it occasions

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Essay On Population

Nowadays, population is a major topic of concern for everyone as the population of the world has increased to 8 billion. A population is the total number of people living in a particular area. This count helps the government allocate adequate resources to each area. Here are some sample essays on the topic ' Population' .

100 Words Essay On Population

Population refers to the total number of people living in a specific area or country. The global population has been increasing rapidly in recent decades and is projected to reach around 9 billion by 2050 . The population growth rate varies by country and region, with some areas experiencing higher rates of growth than others. Population growth can have a significant impact on resources, environment and economy of a country. It also poses challenges such as food and water shortages, housing and infrastructure problems and overburdening of healthcare and education systems. It's important for governments to implement policies to address these issues and ensure sustainable development.

200 Words Essay On Population

The global population has been increasing rapidly in recent decades. According to the United Nations, the world population reached 7.9 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach around 9.7 billion by 2050. This population growth rate varies by country and region, with some areas experiencing higher rates of growth than others. Developing countries tend to have higher population growth rates compared to developed countries.

Impact on Resources

The increasing population has a significant impact on resources. As the population grows, the demand for food, water, and energy increases. This can lead to issues such as food and water shortages, as well as strain on energy resources. Additionally, the increasing population also puts pressure on natural resources, such as forests and land, leading to issues such as deforestation and land degradation.

Impact on Environment

The increasing population also has a significant impact on the environment. As the population grows, so does the amount of waste and pollution produced. This can lead to issues such as air and water pollution, as well as strain on natural systems such as oceans and rivers. Additionally, the increasing population also puts pressure on biodiversity, leading to loss of species and ecosystems.

Impact on Economy

The increasing population also has an impact on the economy. As the population grows, so does the demand for housing, infrastructure, and services such as healthcare and education. This can lead to issues such as housing and infrastructure problems, as well as strain on healthcare and education systems. Additionally, the increasing population can also put pressure on employment and job markets.

500 Words Essay On Population

Population growth: a global phenomenon.

Population refers to the total number of people living in a specific area or country. The global population has been increasing rapidly in recent decades and is projected to reach around 9.7 billion by 2050. This population growth rate varies by country and region, with some areas experiencing higher rates of growth than others. Developing countries tend to have higher population growth rates compared to developed countries.

India's Overpopulation

India, with a population of over 1.3 billion , is facing the consequences of overpopulation. The rapid population growth has put a strain on resources, resulting in issues such as food and water shortages, as well as strain on energy resources. The water crisis in India, where over half of the population is facing high to extreme water stress, is a prime example of how overpopulation can affect the availability of resources. Additionally, the increasing population also puts pressure on infrastructure, leading to issues such as housing and transportation.

China's One-Child Policy

China, with a population of over 1.4 billion, has implemented a one-child policy to control its population growth. The policy, which was in effect from 1979 to 2015, aimed to slow down the population growth and improve the standard of living. While the policy did lead to a decrease in population growth, it also had negative consequences such as a gender imbalance and an aging population.

Singapore's Aging Population

Singapore, with a population of around 5.7 million, has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. The low fertility rate, coupled with an increasing life expectancy, has led to an aging population. This has put a strain on the country's healthcare and pension systems, as well as the workforce. The government has implemented various measures, such as incentives for couples to have more children and encouraging immigration, to address the issue of an aging population.

Population growth is a global phenomenon that affects not only the resources and environment, but also the economy and society as a whole. It's important for governments to implement policies to address the challenges posed by population growth and ensure sustainable development. This can include investing in infrastructure, implementing measures to reduce pollution and waste, and encouraging family planning and education programs. Additionally, it's important to find sustainable solutions to the challenges posed by population growth in order to ensure a future where everyone has access to the resources they need to live a healthy and fulfilling life.

What Can We Do

As students, there are several ways to educate society about population:

Raise awareness through class projects and presentations: Students can create class projects and presentations that educate their peers and teachers about the issue of population growth. They can present the information in an interactive and engaging way, using real-life examples, statistics, and videos.

Participate in population-related events: Students can participate in population-related events such as seminars, workshops, and conferences. This will give them the opportunity to learn more about the issue and to share their knowledge with others.

Use social media to spread awareness: Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are powerful tools that students can use to raise awareness about population growth. They can create posts and share infographics that educate their peers and the general public about the issue.

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Essay on Population | Population Essay for Students and Children in English

February 14, 2024 by Prasanna

Essay on Population: Population is the most prominent problem of this century. The population of any country or region is the total number of people living in that country or region. The question of the population persists in almost all the nations of the world. The most populated countries as of now are China, India, and the USA. The problem of population irrespective of any country arises because of resources. In most states, due to scarcity of resources, individuals face a lot of difficulties. There have been various population control measures implemented by countries at different times.

Population control methods that have been devised and implemented included educating people on population and effective ways of birth control. Here we have added two essays on the topic which are for the benefit of students in case of their exams.  Population growth has become a pressing issue in the world, as well as our country today.

You can read more  Essay Writing  about articles, events, people, sports, technology many more.

Long and Short Essays on Population for Students and Kids in English

Here we have written one long Essay on Population of 500 words, one short essay on Population of 100-150 words, and ten important lines covering the whole topic of Essay on Population. Long essay on population is best suited for people in classes 7, 8,9,10 for their exams and assignments. Short essay on population is best suited for students studying in classes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, for their examinations and assignments.

Long Essay on Population 500 Words in English

The population is an important issue these days. This is because almost all countries face problems related to the population. Such problems include difficulty in implementing decisions, providing social security to everyone, and ensuring employment. These are only a handful of topics. The most crucial aspect of the population is population pressure. Population pressure is the pressure exerted by the population in a country. This means that the economy and society have to bear the burden of the population.

An increase in population makes it difficult for a state to provide everyone with the bare minimum necessities. The problem of population pressure is, however, different in countries across the world. In the wealthy countries of the world, population pressure is manageable because of the wealth that it has. In developing nations, a significant increase in the population over time makes it difficult for the country to establish itself. This is because the majority of the increased population consists of people who are poor and have no education or social security. To take care of their interests, the country fails to grow individually.

The population of the country influenced by two factors-migration and education. As far as migration is concerned, people often migrate from one country to another for various reasons. Students often migrate to other countries for education. Young people often migrate to advanced countries through their work.  Such individuals usually tend to settle down in such countries for the rest of their lives. Their main reason for settling is social security and income opportunities. There are also other facilities which people of first world countries get by their economy.

The migrated population often does not wish to leave such facilities.  This leads to population pressure. In countries like India, the population increases every year due to the lack of primary education. The idea of nuclear families has not yet reached most of the people living in villages. In little places, people are not aware of the problems of having excess kids. Such people, however, have their logic behind their exercise. Due to abject poverty, they often think that having many kids would solve their economic problems. This thought on their part stems from the fact that their children would grow up and feed them for the rest of their lives. But often they fail to recognize that this leads to a burden on the whole of the country. Often developing nations undertake programs for educating the masses about the problems of overpopulation and its consequences.

Short Essay on Population 150 Words in English

The population is the total number of people living in a country. India has the second-highest population across the entire world. The population is often a problem for both developing and developed nations. This is because of its increase over the years. Apart from a few nations, the people of almost all countries go on increasing every year. This causes an enormous population pressure on their society and economy. Poverty and the subsequent lack of education among the masses are often a reason for the increase in population. Another reason for the rise in population is the migration of people from different countries due to employment opportunities, education, and marriage. The population can be controlled in various ways. This includes sterilization, awareness campaigns, and birth control measures.

10 Lines on Population Essay 150 Words in English

• Population is the number of people living in a country.
• India and China have the second-highest and highest population, respectively.
• The population is an essential issue in policymaking.
• The large population makes it difficult to implement policies.
• Population pressure is a problem for most countries.
• Population pressure exerts a burden on the economy.
• Lack of education and poverty is the reason for an increase in population.
• Population of a country also increases due to migration.
• The population can be controlled through various programs.
• Awareness campaigns and birth control measures are an effective way to control the population.

FAQ’s on Essay on Population

Question 1. What are the effects of population pressure?

Answer: Population pressure creates a burden on the economy and society, thereby decreasing the availability of resources in a country.

Question 2. What are the varying reasons for migration in a developed country?

Answer: Migration to a developed country happens mainly because of better opportunities in terms of income, employment education, although the situation is changing these days.

Question 3. What are the ways of controlling the population of a country?

Answer: Population can be controlled by population control programs that include birth control programs and effective means of awareness among the masses.

Question 4. What are birth control measures adopted by developing countries?

Answer: The birth control measure that is adopted by various countries includes medical procedures and sterilization campaigns.

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• Population Growth Essay

Essay on Population Growth

One of the major problems the world is facing is the problem of the exponential growth of the population. This problem is the greatest one. Most countries in the world are showing a steep rise in population figures. The world’s resources are limited and so they cannot support a population beyond a certain limit. There has been news about the scarcity of food grains and the paucity of jobs mounting across the world. The number of human beings is multiplying at a steady rate. The world population has already crossed the six billion mark and it is expected to double in the next three or four decades. 

If the population continues to grow at this rate then the economy of the overpopulated countries will be unable to cope up with the growth of the population. Every attempt to bring peace, comfort and welfare to everybody’s door will be thwarted and misery will become prominent if the population is not kept within proper limits. Except for a few countries, all countries are facing a population boom. Currently, the largest populated country in the world is China and India is the second-largest populated country. India represents 17% of the world’s population. Other countries like Bangladesh, Japan, Indonesia and some countries of Europe are threatened to be burst into the seams by population explosion.

Causes of Population Growth

The major cause of population growth is the decrease in death rate and rise in the life span of the average individual. Earlier, there was a balance between the birth and death rate due to limited medical facilities, people dying in wars, and other calamities. The rapid spread of education has made people health conscious. People have become aware of the basic causes of diseases and simple remedies for them.

Illiteracy is another cause of an increase in population. Low literacy rate leads to traditional, superstitious, and ignorant people. Educated people are well aware of birth control methods. 

Family planning, welfare programs, and policies have not fetched the desired result. The increase in population is putting tremendous pressure on the limited infrastructure and negating the progress of any country.

The superstitious people mainly from rural places think that having a male child would give them prosperity and so there is considerable pressure on the parents to produce children till a male child is born. This leads to population growth in underdeveloped countries like India, Bangladesh. 

Poverty is another main reason for this. Poor people believe that the more people in the family, the more will be the number of persons to earn bread. Hence it contributes to the increase in population. 

Continuous illegal migration of people from neighbouring countries leads to a rise in the population density in the countries. 

Religion sentiment is another cause of the population explosion. Some orthodox communities believe that any mandate or statutory method of prohibition is sacrilegious. 

Impact Due to Population 

The growth of the population has a major impact on the living standards of people. Overpopulation across the world may create more demand for freshwater supply and this has become a major issue because Earth has only 3% of freshwater. 

The natural resources of Earth are getting depleted because of the exponential growth of the population. These resources cannot be replenished so easily. If there is no check on the growth of population then there will be a day in the next few years when these natural resources will run out completely. 

There is a huge impact on the climatic conditions because of the growth of the population. Human activities are responsible for changing global temperature. 

Impact of Overpopulation on Earth’s Environment

The Earth's current population is almost 7.6 billion people, and it is expanding. It is expected to surpass 8 billion people by 2025, 9 billion by 2040, and 11 billion by 2100. The population is quickly increasing, far surpassing our planet's ability to maintain it, given existing habits.

Overpopulation is linked to a variety of detrimental environmental and economic consequences, including over-farming, deforestation, and water pollution, as well as eutrophication and global warming. Although many incredible things are being done to increase human sustainability on our planet, the problem of too many people has made long-term solutions more difficult to come across.

Overpopulation is mostly due to trends that began with a rise in birth rates in the mid-twentieth century. Migration can also result in overcrowding in certain areas. Surprisingly, an area's overcrowding may arise without a net increase in population. It can happen when a population with an export-oriented economy outgrows its carrying capacity and migratory patterns remain stable. "Demographic entrapment" has been coined to describe this situation.

Some Major Effects of the High Population are as Follows

The rapid growth of the population has caused major effects on our planet. 

The rapidly growing population in the world has led to the problem of food scarcity and heavy pressure on land resources. 

Generating employment opportunities in vastly populated countries is very difficult. 

The development of infrastructural facilities is not able to cope up with the pace of a growing population. So facilities like transportation, communication, housing, education, and healthcare are becoming inadequate to provide provision to the people. 

The increasing population leads to unequal distribution of income and inequalities among the people widened.

There will be a large proportion of unproductive consumers due to overpopulation. 

Economic development is bound to be slower in developing countries in which the population is growing at a very fast rate. This also leads to low capital formation. Overpopulation makes it difficult to implement policies. 

When there is rapid growth in a country then the government of that country is required to provide the minimum facilities for the people for their comfortable living. Hence, it has to increase housing, education, public health, communication and other facilities that will increase the cost of the social overheads.

Rapid population growth is also an indication of the wastage of natural resources. 

Preventive Measures

To tackle this problem, the government of developing countries needs to take corrective measures. The entire development of the country depends on how effectively the population explosion is stemmed. 

The government and various NGOs should raise awareness about family planning and welfare. Awareness about the use of contraceptive pills and family planning methods should be generated. 

The health care centres in developing and under-developed countries should help the poor people with the free distribution of contraceptives and encourage the control of the number of children. 

The governments of developing countries should come forward to empower women and improve the status of women and girls. People in rural places should be educated and modern amenities should be provided for recreation. 

Education plays a major role in controlling the population. People from developing countries should be educated so that they understand the implications of overpopulation.

Short Summarised Points On Population Growth

Based on the number of deaths and births, population growth might be positive or negative. 

If a country's birth rate outnumbers its death rate, the population grows, whereas more ends result in a drop.

There are 7.7 billion people on the earth, and India, with 1.3 billion people, is the second-most populous country after China.

Mumbai, the Bollywood capital, is India's most populous city, with a population of 12 billion people. Delhi, India's most populous city, comes in second with 11 billion inhabitants.

The advancement of knowledge in science, medicine, and technology has resulted in lower mortality and higher fertility, resulting in population rise.

Factors contributing to India's population expansion, such as mortality and fertility rates, child marriage, a lack of family planning, polygamy marriage, and so on, have wreaked havoc on the ecosystem.

Industrialization, deforestation, urbanisation, and unemployment have all been exacerbated by population expansion. These causes degrade our environment and contribute to societal health issues.

Pollution, global warming, climate change, natural catastrophes, and, most importantly, unemployment are all caused by the population.

To keep population increase under control, individuals must have access to education and be aware of the dangers of overpopulation.

The government must raise public awareness about illiteracy and educate individuals about the need for birth control and family planning.

Overpopulation may lead to many issues like depletion of natural resources, environmental pollution and degradation and loss of surroundings.  All countries must take immediate steps to control and manage human population growth.

FAQs on Population Growth Essay

1. What Do You Mean By Population Growth and How is it a Threat to the World?

Population growth refers to the rapid increase in the number of people in an area. It is a threat to the world because the world’s resources are limited and it cannot support a population beyond a certain limit.

2. What are the factors of Population Exponential Growth?

The factors for the exponential growth of the population are illegal migration from other countries, illiteracy, lack of awareness of contraceptive methods, poverty, lack of basic amenities, religious sentiments and superstitions. 

3. What steps should India take to reign in population growth?

Family planning and welfare must be made more widely known by the Indian government. Women and girls should be given more power. Free contraceptives should be distributed and people should be educated at health care centres. In schools and colleges, sex education should be required. Some more points to ponder are given below:

1. Social Actions

The minimum age for marriage is 18 years old.

Increasing women's status

Adoption of Social Security and the Spread of Education

2. Economic Interventions

Increased job opportunities

Providing financial incentives

3. Additional Measures

Medical Services

Legislative Initiatives

Recreational Resources

Increasing public awareness

4. What Impact Does Overpopulation Have on Our Planet?

Overpopulation is linked to a variety of detrimental environmental and economic consequences, including over-farming, deforestation, and water pollution, as well as eutrophication and global warming. Although many incredible things are being done to increase human sustainability on our planet, the problem of too many people has made long-term solutions more difficult to come across. Because of the exponential rise of the human population, the Earth's natural resources are depleting. Overpopulation has a significant impact on climatic conditions. The fluctuating global temperature is due to human activity.

5. What are the impacts on the population?

The influence of population expansion on people's living conditions is significant. Overpopulation around the world may increase demand for freshwater, which has become a big issue given that the Earth only possesses 3% freshwater. Because of the exponential rise of the human population, the Earth's natural resources are depleting. These materials are not easily replenished. If population growth is not slowed, these natural resources will run out altogether in the next several years. The population explosion has had a significant impact on climatic conditions. The fluctuating global temperature is due to global warming and needs to be regulated immediately as glaciers have already started melting and global temperature is rising at an alarming rate.

Essay on Population Growth for Students and Children

500+ words essay on population growth.

There are currently 7.7 billion people on our planet. India itself has a population of 1.3 billion people. And the population of the world is rising steadily year on year. This increase in the population, i.e. the number of people inhabiting our planet is what we call population growth. In this essay on population growth, we will see the reasons and the effects of this phenomenon on our planet and our societies.

One important feature of population growth is that over the last century it has shown exponential growth. When the pattern of increase is by a fixed quantity, we call this linear growth, for example, 3, 5, 7, 9 and so on. Exponential growth shows an increase by a fixed percentage, for example, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and so on. This exponential growth is the reason our population has seen such an immense increase over the past century and a half.

Causes of Population Growth

To fully understand the phenomenon, in this essay on population growth we will discuss some of its causes. Understanding the reasons for such exponential growth will help us better understand how to plan for the future. So let us begin with one of the main causes, which is the decline in the mortality rate.

Over the last century, we have made some very significant and notable advancements in medicine, science, and technology. We have invented vaccines, found new treatments and even almost completely eradicated some life-threatening diseases. This means that people now have a much higher life expectancy than their ancestors.

Along with the decrease in mortality rate, these advancements in medicine and science have also boosted the birth rates. We now have ways to help those with infertility and reproductive problems. Hence, birth rates around the world have also seen massive improvements. This coupled with slowing mortality rates has caused overpopulation.

Often the lack of proper education is also stated as the culprit of rampant overpopulation. People around the world need to be made aware of the ill-effects of global overpopulation. Values of family planning and sustainable growth needs to be instilled not only in children but adults also. The lack of this awareness and education is one of the reasons for this growth in population.

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Effects of Population Growth

This exponential population growth that our planet has experienced over the last 150 years has had some severe negative effects. The most obvious and common impact is that overpopulation has put a great strain on the natural resources of the earth. As we know, some of the resources available to us come in limited quantities, for example, fossil fuels. When the population explosion happened, these resources are becoming rarer and will one day run out completely.

The increased population had also lead to increased pollution and industrialization . This has adversely affected our natural environment leading to more health problems in the majority of the population. And as the population keeps growing, the poorer countries are running out of food and other resources causing famines and various such disasters.

And as we are currently noticing in India, overpopulation also leads to massive unemployment. Overall the economic and financial condition of densely populated regions deteriorates due to the population explosion.

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Essay on Population

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Population, defined as the total number of individuals or inhabitants in a given area, is a fundamental aspect of human geography and demographic studies. Understanding the dynamics of population helps in comprehending various social, economic, and environmental issues affecting the world today. This essay aims to delve into the concept of population, its growth patterns, impacts, and the challenges it presents.

Understanding Population Growth

Population growth refers to the increase in the number of individuals in a population. Globally, population growth rates have varied historically, influenced by factors such as birth rates, death rates, immigration, and emigration. In the past, high birth rates and high death rates characterized most societies, leading to relatively stable populations. However, advancements in medicine, agriculture, and technology have led to lower death rates and sustained population increases in many parts of the world.

The Impact of Population on the Environment

The relationship between population growth and environmental impact is intricate and significant. A growing population intensifies the demand on natural resources, leading to various environmental challenges:

• Resource Depletion: Increased population leads to heightened demand for resources like water, fossil fuels, and minerals. Over-extraction can result in depletion and long-term scarcity.
• Habitat Loss and Biodiversity Decline: To accommodate more people, natural habitats are often destroyed, leading to loss of biodiversity. Deforestation for agriculture and urbanization is a prime example of this.
• Increased Waste Production: A larger population generates more waste, including plastic, electronic waste, and other pollutants. This waste can contaminate ecosystems and harm wildlife.
• Higher Greenhouse Gas Emissions: More people means more energy consumption, primarily from fossil fuels, contributing to higher greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
• Water and Air Pollution: Increased industrial activities, vehicle emissions, and waste generation lead to significant air and water pollution, affecting both human health and environmental quality.

Population and Economic Development

Population dynamics play a critical role in economic development. A growing population can provide a large workforce, which, if well-utilized, can lead to economic growth. However, if a country has a high population growth rate without adequate resources and infrastructure, it can lead to increased unemployment, poverty, and strain on public services like healthcare and education.

The Concept of Overpopulation

Overpopulation occurs when an area’s population exceeds the capacity of the environment to support it at an acceptable standard of living. This concept is subjective and depends on how resources are managed and distributed. Overpopulation leads to various problems, including environmental degradation, unemployment, the spread of diseases, and inadequate or strained public services.

Population Control Measures

To mitigate the impact of population growth, various control measures have been implemented globally:

• Family Planning Programs: These aim to provide information and access to contraception, helping individuals make informed choices about family size.
• Education and Empowerment of Women: Educating women and providing them with economic opportunities often leads to lower birth rates, as educated women tend to have fewer children and have them later in life.
• Economic Incentives and Disincentives: Some countries use incentives, like tax breaks or direct payments, to encourage smaller families. Conversely, disincentives may include penalties for having more children than a specified limit.
• Public Awareness Campaigns: Raising awareness about the benefits of smaller families and the environmental impact of overpopulation can help change attitudes and behaviors.
• Improving Healthcare: Better overall health care, including maternal and child health services, can lead to reduced infant mortality rates. This often leads to families choosing to have fewer children.

The Role of Education and Awareness in Population Control

Education plays a crucial role in population control. Educated individuals are more likely to understand the implications of high birth rates and make informed decisions about family planning. Awareness campaigns and education can also help dispel myths and cultural norms that contribute to high birth rates.

Challenges in Population Management

• Cultural and Religious Beliefs: In many societies, cultural and religious norms promote large families, which can make population control measures less effective.
• Political and Ethical Issues: Population control policies can raise ethical concerns, especially when they impinge on personal freedoms or are implemented coercively.
• Economic Disparities: In poorer regions, where large families can be an economic necessity, population control measures are harder to implement effectively.
• Lack of Education and Resources: In areas with limited access to education and healthcare, particularly in rural regions, implementing population control measures can be challenging.
• Gender Inequality: In societies where gender inequality is prevalent, women often have limited control over reproductive decisions, making effective population control difficult.
• Aging Populations: In countries with effective population control and low birth rates, aging populations present a different set of challenges, including labor shortages and increased healthcare costs.

The Future of Population Dynamics

As the world advances, population dynamics are expected to undergo significant changes. Factors like aging populations in developed countries, declining birth rates in some regions, and urbanization will shape future population trends. Understanding and planning for these changes is crucial for sustainable development.

Population dynamics have far-reaching implications for our planet. Understanding and managing population growth is essential for ensuring sustainable development, environmental preservation, and economic stability. It requires a coordinated effort involving education, awareness, policy-making, and respect for human rights. The future of our world depends on how effectively we understand and manage this complex yet critical issue of population.

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Essay on world population: top 10 essays | human geography.

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Here is a compilation of essays on ‘World Population’ for class 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short essays on ‘World Population’ especially written for school and college students.

Essay on World Population

Essay Contents:

• Essay on the Views of Malthus on World Overpopulation

Essay # 1. Introduction to World Population:

Human and economic geography are concerned with Man and his use of natural resources. The way in which land, sea, minerals, forests, and water supplies are used varies very much around the world, chiefly because of the wide variation of human numbers, human types and the stage of development of different human groups.

The rapid growth of population is perhaps the most obvious factor affecting present and future na­tional and regional development, but it is by no means the only population problem in the world today. Un­even distribution of population and conflicts stem­ming from racial, cultural, religious, social or political diversity are problems in almost every country in the world.

In 1977 the total world population was estimated at 4,105 million and by the end of the twentieth cen­tury it will have reached about 7,000 million. It is seen that world population is increasing ever more rapidly. This is because it increases in geo­metrical fashion (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, . . .), rather than arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, . . .).

Moreover the rate of growth in the last two centuries has been accelerated by the great advances in medicine, hygiene, and nutrition made all over the world. Death rates and particularly infant mortality rates have been drastically reduced so that more children grow up and themselves have families.

But enormous as the world population is, mere numbers do not present a problem if all the people in an area can be adequately fed, clothed, housed, edu­cated and employed. But this cannot always be done and this is why population growth creates problems.

Some of the main difficulties arise because people are not distributed evenly over the earth and because the age and sex structure of populations varies widely from country to country. Only in terms of these factors can we discuss whether a country is under- or over- populated.

Essay # 2. Distribution of World’s Population:

In terms of continents and countries the world’s popu­lation is very ill-balanced. More than half of the world’s people live in Asia (excluding the U.S.S.R.) which accounts for only one-fifth of the world’s land area, while North, Central and South America together, occupying more than a quarter of the land surface, have only one-seventh of the population.

The African continent also accounts for a quarter of the land sur­face but has just over one-tenth of the world popula­tion. On the other hand Europe, whose area is only one twenty-fifth of the total, has about one-ninth of the world’s people.

The distribution within the continents is also un­even. In Asia, China alone, with ab  out 900 million people, accounts for half the Asian and a quarter of the world population. The Indian subcontinent has a further 710 million people. In Europe too, the popu­lation is unevenly distributed. Far more people live in northern and western European countries than in southern and Eastern Europe.

The U.S.S.R. is the largest country in the world and has 259 million peo­ple but only a quarter of them live in the Asian sec­tion. In Africa and the Americas people are for the most part spread very thinly across the land, leaving large sections such as northern Canada, south-western U.S.A., the Sahara Desert, and the Amazon forests practically uninhabited.

The distribution of population depends to a large extent on the quality of the land itself, which is very uneven. Where the land is well suited to agriculture or there are natural resources for industrial development the population will naturally be larger than in areas where climatic conditions are hostile or where re­sources are few.

Thus population density, that is the number of people living in a unit area, varies widely. In Singapore there are nearly 4,000 people to the square kilometre (ppsk)or 10,300 people to the square mile (ppsm); in Belgium there are 320 (840); in Brazil only 13 (34) and in Mongolia less than 1 ppsk or 2 ppsm, though even within these countries the population is far from evenly spread.

A map of world population densities shows that while the great majority of the land surface is sparsely or moderately populated (between 0 and 50 ppsk or between 0 and 125 ppsm) some limited areas are very densely populated.

These areas are Western Europe, the Indian subcontinent, the plains and river valleys of China, and north-eastern U.S.A. Smaller concen­trations of people are found in the Nile Valley of Egypt, the island of Java in Indonesia and the south­ern part of Japan.

The factors which lead to high population densities are often complex, but those which restrict popu­lation are clear-cut. They are usually climatic factors and, despite modern advances in technology, most ’empty’ areas are never likely to be much more densely peopled than they are today.

Essay # 3. Features of Population Patterns in the World:

The broad features of world population distribution are clearly related to climatic, soil, and other physical factors. This is because such factors regulate the type and amount of crops which can be grown, determining both negative and positive areas for economic develop­ment.

But physical factors are not the only ones which affect population distribution. In most parts of the world the basic pattern of population due to physical factors has detailed variations imposed upon it as a result of social, ethnic, cultural or historical factors.

Some of the most important of such factors are the concentration of racial or linguistic groups in limited areas; the dominance of particular religions in certain areas which may in turn affect birth rates or economic development; the way of life of particular population groups which may mean for instance that a large area of land is required to support a relatively small num­ber of people; the history of settlement, which for instance has led to the dominance of the eastern sea­board in North America; and the history of coloniza­tion, which has led to the development of some tropi­cal areas, especially those nearest the coast.

Moreover modern developments such as rural resettlement, the introduction of new farming techniques, industrialization, the drift to the towns, and changes in the standard of living, are all leading to changes in the population patterns of many countries.

It is not possible in this book to cover the popula­tion pattern of the whole world in detail, but by deal­ing with some countries as examples the comparative roles of basic physical features, economic and social factors can be better understood.

(i) People’s Republic of China:

China has the largest population of any country in the world but its average population density is only about 75 ppsk (200 ppsm). Compared with countries such as the Netherlands (average density 410 ppsk: 1,601 ppsm) or Japan (310 ppsk: 800 ppsm), China does not appear particularly densely peopled.

However, average densities can be misleading where there is a very uneven spread of population, for about three- quarters of China’s population is concentrated in only 15 per cent of the land area. The most densely settled region is in the east, while the western half of the coun­try is still under-populated. Moderately populated dis­tricts are found on the fringes of the densely settled regions.

The physical background to this pattern is fairly clear: the eastern plains and river valleys, including the North China Plain, the Chang Jiang (Yangtze) basin, the Sichuan (Szechwan) basin and the Xi Jiang (Si Kiang) basin, offer ideal conditions for agriculture, with adequate monsoon rainfall, good soils, flat land and water for irrigation from the large rivers.

As a re­sult rural population densities are sometimes as large as 1,000 ppsk (2,500 ppsm). During the long history of settlement in eastern China only the inherent rich­ness of the land has enabled the population to expand to such proportions. The long tradition of dense set­tlement has led to the development of many towns and cities which must originally have served as markets and administrative centres, but have now become in­dustrial centres.

The existence of sixteen or more cities with over a million inhabitants helps to raise population densities in the eastern region; but in terms of the total population urbanization is not very im­portant, for only about one-sixth of the population lives in towns.

In the surrounding uplands and foothills the poorer agricultural opportunities, poorer accessibility and dif­ficulties of irrigating the steep slopes have led to more moderate population densities. Moderate densities are also found in the more favoured areas of the generally negative western provinces.

In the interior provinces of Xinjiang (Sinkiang), Gansu (Kansu), Qinghai (Tsinghai), Tibet and Inner Mongolia, where densities are generally less than 1 ppsk (3 ppsm), physical factors such as a cold continental climate, aridity, high alti­tude and inaccessibility have militated against intensive agriculture. The best form of land use is some form of herding.

This extensive type of agriculture is practiced by the Tibetans, Uighurs, Kazaks, Mongols and Kirghiz who inhabit the area but does not support large num­bers of people. The region is, however, capable of greater development than has hitherto taken place.

The contrasts between China proper and the in­terior are not all due to physical factors however. The sparse population of the interior is partly the result of the traditional way of life of the herders, for in recent years the growing of crops and the exploitation of mineral resources has led to an increase in population density.

In the more densely peopled regions, too, so­cial factors have helped to create overpopulation. Peo­ple could have moved westwards into the empty areas and relieved pressure on the lowlands, but partly be­cause the people of China proper are of true Chinese or Han race while the outer territories are peopled by other ethnic groups, and partly because the unfamiliar conditions would have meant the evolution of new forms of agriculture, this has not taken place on a large scale.

Recently, however, planned colonization of the interior has been encouraged by the communist gov­ernment. Pressure on land in China proper would also have been less, had industrial development taken place earlier, causing many people to migrate to the towns. To some extent this occurred in the 1950s and early 1960s when emphasis was placed on industrial devel­opment.

Despite government attempts to reduce the ‘drift to the towns’ this inevitable movement from the overcrowded countryside continues. The present popu­lation distribution pattern of China is the result of a combination of physical, social, historical and eco­nomic factors.

Present changes are due to the breaking down of traditional attitudes and the rational planning of economic development but it remains to be seen whether this will significantly alter the long-established pattern.

(ii) Canada:

Canada also has marked dis­parities in its population distribution pattern. Over 90 per cent of its 23 million people live in a narrow belt not more than 320 km (200 miles) wide, immediately north of the U.S. border, leaving the vast Northlands practically uninhabited.

Even within the settled belt there are marked differences in population densities for the western coast, the Prairies and the Maritime Provinces are only moderately peopled while the St. Lawrence lowlands are more densely peopled.

The small total population of the country means, however, that nowhere are there the extremely high densities found in China. The main basis of this pattern is the physical background. The cold climate, permafrost, short growing season, rocky terrain and poor soils of the Northlands means that except in certain favoured areas, agriculture is not possible.

The Northlands do have some physical advantages, such as rich mineral resources, coniferous forests and swift-flowing rivers for the generation of H.E.P., but none of these need a large or permanently settled population for their ex­ploitation.

The only permanent inhabitants of the re­gion are Eskimos and certain Indian tribes, who have adapted their way of life to the harsh conditions and have traditionally, depended on hunting and fishing, neither of which supports a dense population.

The Northlands are not the only negative area as far as settlement is concerned; the Rocky Mountain ranges are also sparsely peopled. The climate in the moun­tains is severe, the slopes are steep and rocky and ac­cessibility is limited by the terrain. Only limited coastal areas and valleys are suitable for settlement and these support only a moderate population.

The Prairies have a moderately dense population because the main activity is agriculture. Extensive, highly mechanized farming does not offer employment opportunities to more than a moderate number of people.

The most densely settled parts of the Prairie provinces are those where mineral resources (oil and phosphates) offer some possibilities of industrial de­velopment, or where more intensive agriculture is pos­sible as in the Red River Valley.

The cool, foggy, damp climate of the Maritime Provinces, the hilly terrain and the limited agricultural lands are only suited to a moderate population den­sity, but the better conditions of the St. Lawrence lowlands lead to a denser settlement. The possibilities of more intensive agricultural development, good water communications, and land of moderate relief are the main physical advantages of the region.

Physical factors are not all-important, however, in determining Canada’s population distribution. Re­moteness from central services, and fear of loneliness play some part in keeping the Northlands empty. Similarly the distance of the Prairies from contacts with the rest of the world, limits the willingness of people to live there as well as hampering industrial growth for lack of markets. The eastern seaboard was the first area settled by European immigrants.

As the longest-settled part of the country it has the best social and cultural amenities. Its nearness to Europe allows traditional links with Britain and France to be main­tained as well as promoting trade and industry. Anoth­er reason for the concentration of settlement in the south-east of the country is the proximity of the U.S.A.’s industrial belt.

This has encouraged invest­ment and therefore industrial development and has led to a greater density of population, especially in and around the industrial centres of Toronto, Kingston, Montreal and Quebec. The Maritimes have not had the same advantage for they adjoin the northern New England states which themselves suffer from inaccessi­bility. Social factors also play an important role.

The population of Canada is descended mainly from immi­grants; about half from British and a third from French stock. Descendants of immigrants of other nationali­ties are far fewer in number. While the English-speaking Canadians are found throughout the country, the French are concentrated in Quebec and eastern On­tario.

This is mainly because they feel most at home in a French environment, where French is spoken, French language papers and French food are available. Because of this concentration, and the fact that most of the French Canadians are Catholics, the birth rate is high and this leads to a denser population. For these various reasons, therefore, the provinces of Quebec and Ontario have about two-thirds of the Canadian population.

(iii) Peninsular Malaysia:

It is not only large countries with a wide range of physical and climatic regions which have a marked disparity in population distribution. Peninsular Malaysia has far greater den­sities of population on its western coastlands than in other parts of the country. This is partly due to the far greater possibilities for agriculture on the west where the lowlands are broader than on the east.

In the north are the wide padi-lands of Kedah and Perlis, while far­ther south are undulating lowlands which were found ideal for the growing of export crops, especially rub­ber and oil palm. On the East Coast, however, the swampy coastal plain is narrower and gives way more rapidly to mountainous terrain, except in the north in a region around Kota Bharu and Kuala Trengganu where the lowlands are wider and support a high rural population growing rice, rubber and other crops.

The western lowlands proved ideal for colonial plantation development not only from a physical standpoint but also because of their proximity to the Strait of Malacca which has always been a major sea- route. Ports such as Malacca, Port Kelang and George Town provided outlets for the produce of the western coastlands.

Ports on the east coast did not have the advantage of facing such a major seaway. Population was expanded in the west by an influx of immigrant labourers for the plantations. Nowadays the West Coast is still favoured for agricultural development both in plantations and smallholdings because of the existing infrastructure of roads, market towns and ports.

The other important factor has been the exploita­tion of vast reserves of tin which occur largely in the western coastal plains. Here again immigrants came in to work the mines or came as traders to support and serve the mining communities.

Tin and rubber trading led to the establishment of far more market towns in western districts and these in turn have grown into ex­panding industrial and commercial centres. George Town, Ipoh and Kuala Lumpur alone house 15 per cent of the Peninsular Malaysian population.

Agriculture and fishing have led to a moderate popu­lation on the East Coast but the centre of the country, which is mountainous, forested and ill-provided with transport routes has few people and is far more diffi­cult and expensive to develop. Government policy is to help open up the land for settlement through settle­ment schemes such as that at Jengka Triangle but this will make little impact on overall population distribution.

(iv) Nigeria:

Nigeria has a very compli­cated pattern of population distribution, with three separate centres of dense population divided by regions of moderate or sparse settlement. This pattern is part­ly governed by physical factors, since the area of least dense population, known as the Middle Belt, coincides with a region of poor soils, low rainfall and inadequate groundwater supplies. The tsetse fly is also a great problem in this region.

The regions of dense popula­tion are those where climate, soils and terrain are more favourable, and where a wide variety of food and cash crops can be grown. In the south-east the main cash crop is oil palm, in the south-west cocoa and some oil palm, and in the north the main crops are cotton and groundnuts.

Areas of moderate population density tend to be found on the more marginal land on the fringes of the densely settled zones and in those parts of the sparsely settled zones which are better served by roads, railways or river transport and are thus more accessible.

Many other factors than those of climate and soil have contributed to the present pattern. Perhaps the most important is that each of the main centres of population is the chief area of settlement of one of the three main ethnic groups in Nigeria. The Ibos are con­centrated in the south-east, the Yorubas in the south­west, and the Muslim Hausa peoples in the north.

These are the three most successful and powerful groups and their numbers have increased more rapidly than those of smaller groups which were more subject to wars, slave raiding and general unrest. As a result of these ethnic differences and the separate development of the three groups, the detailed population distribu­tion differs from one densely settled region to another.

In the north the main centres of population are large, isolated towns such as Kano and Sokoto which have traditionally served as termini on the caravan routes of the Sahara. In the south-west, the towns are more con­centrated, forming an area of dense population includ­ing Ibadan, Oshogbo and Oyo; the rural population is also fairly dense. Lagos, the capital city, has grown rapidly by in-migration and is the centre of another densely settled region.

The south-eastern concentra­tion of population is characterized, however, by few large urban centres but by very high rural densities, reaching about 700 ppsk (1,500 ppsm) in some dis­tricts, and is thus more similar to densely settled rural areas in some Asian countries than to conditions in most parts of Africa. The south-east is also the region where major oil exploitation has taken place with as­sociated industrial development.

The Middle Belt, which represents a negative area for settlement has also been affected by factors other than those of terrain. Though poor, this region is in fact capable of greater economic development than has hitherto taken place. It could support more peo­ple, but its population was greatly reduced in the past by slave raiding by the more powerful tribes of the north and south. Some regions such as the Jos Plateau and the Niger Valley, which have mineral and agricul­tural potential are now being developed and are gain­ing population.

Many of the moderately settled areas on the fringes of densely settled regions could also support far more people. In some cases natural conditions in such areas are highly suitable to agriculture. However, people from the overcrowded regions have not moved into them because of traditional social attitudes and their wish to stay near friends, homes and existing cultural centres.

Recent government policy has encouraged a wider spread of settlement by developing transport, mineral resources, power supplies and agriculture in the regions still capable of supporting a larger popula­tion.

Essay # 4. Population Structure of the World:

Population structure is analysed in terms of age and sex groupings and is represented by population pyra­mids. By studying such diagrams it is possible to gain a clearer idea of the population characteristics of any given country.

In working-class families all the children could contribute to the family income. However, death rates were also very high be­cause epidemic diseases such as bubonic plague, chol­era and typhoid had not been brought under control and tuberculosis was also very common. Moreover low standards of hygiene and nutrition meant that infant mortality rates were also high. It was therefore neces­sary to have a large family so that at least some of the children would live.

During the nineteenth century great advances were made in medicine and the death rate began to fall, but the birth rate remained high so that the population expanded rapidly. During the twentieth century a different pattern has emerged.

The First World War and the Depression of the 1920s impressed upon people the difficulty of feeding, clothing and educating a large family of chil­dren. Children were no longer an economic asset, con­tributing their labour or wages to the family as they had done in the past. At the same time people wished to give their children a better education and better homes than they had had themselves. This led to a de­cline in the birth rate.

This trend was assisted by the fact that, with far better living conditions and health facilities, children had a much better chance of sur­vival. At first this trend was more apparent in the towns than in the country districts and in middle-class rather than in working-class families but it eventually affected the whole population. Birth rates dropped even further during the Second World War and though there was a post war ‘baby boom’ when the number of babies born was very large, the size of families re­mained small.

People live longer on an average and Britain therefore has an ageing population. The proportion of the population living to ages of 65 or more has doubled since the late nineteenth century. Britain’s death rate is slightly higher than that of Aus­tralia or the U.S.A. because of the large proportion of older people in the population.

The nicks in the pyra­mid at age groups 60—64 and 35—49 reflect the very low birth rates of the Depression and war years (1920s and 1939-45) while the bulge in the 10-20 year age groups indicates higher birth rates in the more hopeful economic conditions of the 1960s which has petered out with renewed economic difficulties in the late 1970s.

Britain’s population is now decreasing. People are unwilling to have many children who have to be supported through many years of education, and who thus restrict the money available for material comforts in the home or for leisure pursuits.

Other European countries have a similar population structure though there are minor differences. In West Germany for instance the birth rate is so low that the population is decreasing markedly and may drop from 57 million today to 52 million by the year 2000.

Some countries in Europe and elsewhere attempt to encour­age population growth by giving child allowances or tax relief to lessen the financial burden of larger fami­lies, e.g. in France. But in Spain and Ireland, where the Catholic Church forbids birth-control, birth rates are still high and the population still has a high pro­portion of young people and is growing.

Population structure in most Asian, African and Latin American countries is very different from that of Europe. Death rates have declined markedly in the twentieth century, though they are still a little higher than in Europe or North America because standards of hygiene, nutrition and disease control are lower.

The proportion of old people in the population is very small. The moderate decline in the death rate however has not been matched by a change in the birth rate which remains very high, so that the popu­lation contains many young people. The pyramids for most underdeveloped countries are even more broadly based than that of Britain in the nineteenth century.

In many of these countries it will take a long time to overcome the traditional attitudes and lack of know­ledge of family planning techniques though some countries such as India give great publicity and promi­nence to family planning. Few of the underdeveloped countries show any sign of a voluntary change to small­er families. Only in some of the most rapidly develop­ing countries, such as Singapore have birth rates de­clined rapidly.

Singapore is small and changes in birth rates affect the population quite quickly. Singapore has a policy of encouraging two children per family by imposing financial penalties on families with more than two children. Japan with 114,000,000 people and among the lowest death and infant-mortality rates in the world today has an interesting population history.

Until the early 1950s except for a nick in the male 30—45 age groups, caused by deaths during the Second World War, the pyramid resembled that of any other traditionally agricultural country. However the impact of industrialization, urbanism and a rising standard of living led to a decline in the birth rate and the pyramid is now ‘top-heavy’, though it still does not show the concentration in the middle and older age groups found in European countries.

The case of Japan illustrates the time-lag in changes in population structure, for though industrial develop­ment began in the late nineteenth century, it took fifty years for the effect to be felt in the population structure. Population structure in Japan now follows the European pattern.

Migration can have profound effects on population structure. This relates to Australia but in the 1950s and 1960s the U.S.A., Canada and New Zealand had a similar pattern. Immi­gration into these countries is much more restricted today. Immigrants are usually young people who have their families in their new country, encouraged by the better standards of living they find there.

The immi­grants themselves swell the population in the 30—45 age groups while their children help to increase the proportion of people under 20. When the rate of im­migration slows down the population becomes more stable. The U.S.A., for example, now has a declining birth rate. Immigration of large numbers of people of a different racial group often produces a temporary imbalance both in age and sex structure, because the bulk of immigrants are men, and also in racial com­position.

An age, sex pyramid divided by race for Peninsular Malaysia in 1931 illustrates this. Men out­number women in the middle age groups while a time lag between the bulk of Chinese and the bulk of Indian immigration is also seen.

Indian women came into the country mainly after the men. At this stage immigrants were not settling down to have families so the percen­tage of young Chinese and Indians in the population was smaller than that of Malays.

Migration not only affects the population structure of the receiving countries, but also that of the home countries of emigrants. Thus between 1850 and 1900 Ireland’s population was reduced from 8 to 4 million people by migration, about 90 per cent of which was to the U.S.A. Many young people left and the birth rate was drastically reduced. This migration has now slowed down and the population is beginning to as­sume a more normal pattern.

The sex structure of population is also important. The proportion of men to women affects the rate of population growth through the net reproduction ratio, which measures the rate at which the present genera­tion of women is being replaced by daughters who will in turn have children.

The calculation of this ratio allows forecasts of future population trends to be made. The numbers of men and women are usually fairly even but are sometimes out of balance after such events as wars, when more men than women are killed. The numbers are usually uneven in the higher age groups because women tend to live longer than men.

Essay # 5. Population Problems of Advanced Countries:

Underdeveloped countries do not have a monopoly of population problems, though in general their prob­lems are more widespread and more difficult to solve. It is, however, worthwhile to note the problems of in­dustrial and urbanized societies, some of which are becoming increasingly serious.

1. Ageing Population:

As the birth rate is low the proportion of younger people in the population is relatively small and the low death rate and high life expectancy mean that there is an ever-increasing pro­portion of older people in the population. Many retire from active work in their sixties and then become dependent on the working population. Provision of pensions and other facilities, e.g. extra health services, for elderly people pose financial problems.

2. Small Work Force:

As educational standards improve children remain longer at school and join the work force later. This, combined with the low birth rate, means that the labour force expands only slowly while industrial and other employment opportunities continue to multiply. Despite a high degree of mecha­nization in most industries many countries are short of workers.

In Europe for instance workers migrate from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey which are some­what overpopulated, to Germany and Switzerland where there are insufficient workers. Another problem is that the work force is generally well-educated and skilled and there is a shortage of unskilled workers. Because the majority of workers are skilled and the work force is relatively small wages are high.

3. Rural Depopulation:

Towns provide ameni­ties such as shops, entertainment and better social services, which cannot be matched in country districts, and employment is usually easier to find in urban areas. For this reason there is a steady movement of people from the country to the towns so that in some areas farms are even abandoned.

The fewer people live in the country the less economic it is to provide serv­ices and the greater becomes the disparity between town and country. Where rural depopulation is accom­panied by mechanization and rationalization of farm­ing and thus a rise in income, an improvement may result, but often the country districts suffer a decline in living standards.

4. Urbanization:

As towns expand, the pressure on transport, water supplies, sewage and refuse disposal grows and creates problems. Smoke and chemical ef­fluents from factories produce air and water pollution. Traffic congestion and noise are other problems.

Ten­sions created by urban life lead to a far higher incidence of mental illness than in underdeveloped countries, and pollution, particularly fumes from motor vehicles, also has physical health hazards. Urban sprawl is anoth­er problem; the expanding towns engulf land which would otherwise be suitable for agriculture and thus reduce self-sufficiency in many countries.

Underdeveloped and advanced countries have some problems in common, for most countries are unevenly developed. Most advanced countries have areas where agriculture or industry could be improved or where the population is too large. Similarly the underdeveloped countries all have large towns where the problems are similar to those of urbanized societies everywhere.

It is also important to bear in mind the differences be­tween underdeveloped countries. Some have a much better resource base or a smaller population, and these, such as Argentina, Mexico and Malaysia, are much more likely to be able to overcome their problems than countries with few resources and a large popula­tion with fixed traditional ideas.

Essay # 6 . Moderately Populated Areas of the World:

Around the margins of sparsely-populated areas the density of population gradually increases; only occa­sionally are low and high densities found side by side with no transition zone. The sharpest changes occur between the irrigated and non-irrigated areas in the deserts, the most notable example being the con­trast between the Nile Valley and the surrounding desert.

The moderately peopled regions of the world are usually those where agriculture is the dominant occu­pation. The climate, relief and soil are thus the main factors affecting population density; the more favour­able these conditions are, the more people the land can support. But human and economic factors such as communications and accessibility to markets also af­fect population patterns.

The moderately-peopled parts of the world are of four main types:

(i) Tropical Savannas:

The savanna areas have a very seasonal climate with summer rainfall and a natural vegetation of grass and scattered trees which are adapted to withstand the drought of the winter. Various types of extensive farming are practised. Ranching is important in the sertao of Brazil, in north­ern Australia and in many parts of Africa.

Shifting cultivation provides food crops for the scattered popu­lations in Brazil and Africa though some areas have been developed for the cultivation of cash crops, such as groundnuts, tobacco, sisal or pyrethrum, either on large estates or smallholdings. None of these occupa­tions supports a dense population.

(ii) Temperate Grasslands:

In temperate con­tinental areas there are broad stretches of grassland where the climate is relatively dry and most of the rain falls in summer. Temperatures are high in summer and very low in winter. The growing season is long enough for cereal cultivation but where there is insuf­ficient moisture ranching is the dominant occupation.

The largest grassland areas are in North America (the Prairies), U.S.S.R. (the Steppes), and Argentina (the Pampas), but parts of interior Australia and South Africa have similar conditions. The grasslands coincide with vast plains or with regions of undulating terrain and are thus ideal for large-scale, mechanized cereal cultivation, but neither this nor ranching supports a large population.

Both savannas and temperate grasslands are con­tinental in location and lack of communications and remoteness have helped to keep the population rela­tively small. The best developed areas are those with good lines of transport, e.g. Argentina. Settlement has often followed the building of railways, such as the Trans-Siberian or the Canadian Pacific.

(iii) Tropical Coastlands:

While the interiors of tropical countries are often not well developed, the more accessible tropical regions have been cleared of forest and are devoted to agriculture. Both food crops such as rice and maize and cash crops such as rubber, oil palm, cocoa and sugar-cane are important in the lowlands, while tea and coffee are grown in the high­lands.

Coastal areas are preferred since accessibility to the sea is an advantage to growers of these dominantly export crops. Many areas were cleared only in the nineteenth century and thus populations are not as large as those found in tropical countries with a long agricultural tradition.

(iv) Temperate Coastlands:

Temperate coast- lands have a moderate climate, with an adequate rain- fall and no great extremes of temperature, so that a very wide range of crops can be grown. Livestock also form an important part of the agricultural economy. Farming is well established and although farms are usually small in size, yields per hectare are high.

As a result the land can support fairly large numbers of people, and such areas as central and eastern Europe, central, southern and north-western U.S.A., south­eastern Australia, central Chile and along the Plate estuary in Argentina, therefore have a moderate to dense population.

Both tropical and temperate coastlands are more densely peopled than the continental interiors, partly because the climate is more favourable and partly be­cause communications and markets are better. The larger the population the faster it will grow and the greater will be the market for agricultural and other goods.

This in turn helps to promote improvements in farming practices and the production of larger crops. The more productive the land the more peo­ple it can support. Areas of moderate population grad­ually merge into more densely settled areas where intensive farming and the development of industry allow far more people to get a living from the land.

Essay # 7 . Densely Populated Areas of the World :

Only limited areas of the world have high densities of population and these have all the advantages of good climatic, soil and relief conditions, as well as re­sources of fuel and industrial raw materials. The largest populations also grow most rapidly so that, unless there is rapid out-migration, people tend to concen­trate in relatively restricted areas.

The development of urban areas with many people, markets, shops, en­tertainment and other facilities tend to attract people from the surrounding areas.

Densely populated regions fall into two main categories, those dependent mostly on agriculture and those dependent mostly on indus­try:

(i) Agriculture:

Some of the most densely peo­pled parts of the world rely basically on agriculture. Industry has been developed in these areas and there are many large towns but a large proportion of the population still lives and works on the land. These areas include the Nile Valley of Egypt, the river valleys and plains of mainland China, the Indo-Gangetic plain and western coastal plain of the Indian subcontinent, and the island of Java in Indonesia.

In these areas as many as 1,000-2,000 people may live on a square kilometre (3,000-4,000 per square mile) of land. This is only possible because climate, relief, soil and water supply in the regions are favourable. Egypt has a Medi­terranean type of climate which is suitable for many crops and the Nile waters have been harnessed to irri­gate the fields.

In India, too, the fertile alluvial soils of the plains, the availability of water for irrigation in the dry season, the regular rhythm of the monsoons and high temperatures all the year round, allow several crops to be grown each year.

In China warm summers, monsoon rainfall, irrigation, constant manuring of the soil, and the careful management of the land, all con­tribute to support a huge rural population. Java has a warm climate, heavy rainfall and rich volcanic soils.

These areas were always advantageous for settle­ment. The Nile, Indus and Huang He (Hwang Ho) val­leys were the centres of ancient civilizations and as agriculture developed large settled populations were built up. Numbers have continued to grow ever since but farming techniques have not been modernized at the same rate.

As the capacity of the land to provide food has been outstripped the people have become poorer. Farms are very small—often not more than half a hectare and although a wide variety of cash crops is grown the cultivation of food crops is more important. Rice is the main food crop and is supple­mented by vegetables; poultry are kept, and buffaloes, sheep and goats are important in Egypt, Indonesia and India, and pigs in China.

The pressure on land is continually increasing as more and more people must be fed from the same plot, and such large populations can only live off the land because the people are willing to subsist on a relatively meagre diet of little nutri­tional value. Overcrowding thus leads to poverty and a low standard of living which in turn makes moderni­zation difficult because people cannot afford to buy machinery or fertilizers.

Moreover the farms are often too small to use modern techniques efficiently. Farm­ing could be done much more effectively by fewer people working larger plots of land but there is as yet no alternative source of employment in the towns of these countries. Large-scale industry has only recently been established and may never be able to compensate for population problems which have existed for so long.

(ii) Industry:

The densely populated areas depen­dent on industry and urban development are Western Europe, north-eastern U.S.A., and Japan. These areas are less extensive than densely peopled agricultural areas and are radically different, for most of the peo­ple live in large towns and few in the country.

The food for these large centres of population is not pro­duced locally but drawn from all over the world, so they are much more dependent on industry, trade and commerce. Unlike densely peopled agricultural areas they have a generally high standard of living and rather than getting poorer they are becoming richer as new techniques and ideas create greater employment op­portunities.

However problems of traffic, noise, pollu­tion, disposal of waste and provision of water supplies become greater as towns expand, and as the standard of living improves, health, education, recreation and other amenities must be provided at greater and great­er cost. Large urban centres attract ever larger popu­lations by in-migration, for while improved agricultural methods mean that fewer people are needed in the country, employment opportunities are much greater in the cities.

The three areas of high urban population differ from one another for historical reasons. The Industrial Revolution first took place in Britain where industrial­ization coincided with a phase of rural depopulation, caused by changes in land tenure, which provided workers for the factories in the towns.

At this time too, medical advances brought down the death rate and thus the population began to expand rapidly so that a large urban labour force was available through­out the nineteenth century. Mineral resources such as coal and iron were also available and trading relation­ships with other countries were already well-established so that raw materials could be obtained and goods marketed all over the world.

Industrialization spread to Belgium, northern France and later to Ger­many, but in these countries agricultural reform did not take place as early as in England and there is still a relatively large agricultural population.

The industrial district of the U.S.A. is an offshoot of the European region. Immigrants from Europe brought their knowledge and skill in industry to the new country, where the huge resources of coal, oil, iron, copper and many other raw materials allowed industry to develop rapidly. Large industrial towns and cities were already established before the whole country was settled.

Japan was traditionally an agricultural nation with a large rural population similar to that of China, and had little contact with other countries. In the late nineteenth century, however, this isolation was broken down and the advantages of industry were realized. Many circumstances aided the growth of Japanese in­dustry and its already large population was transformed from an agricultural to an urban one.

In this Japan differs from other industrial regions where the growth of population occurred at the same time as the growth of industry. As a result the popu­lation pattern in Japan is different; 13 per cent of the people still depend on agriculture as compared with only 2 per cent in Britain for example.

Essay # 8 . Problems of Overpopulation across the World :

There are underdeveloped countries where the level of technological development inhibits agricultural effi­ciency and the establishment of industry even though the resources exist in the country. Such countries have additional problems if they are overpopulated like China or India. In these countries the modern indus­trial economy has been grafted on to a traditional agricultural one and the two have not yet been proper­ly balanced.

Another group of countries which are underdeveloped are those which lack population, al­though they sometimes have advanced societies and command modern technological methods. These coun­tries, such as Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Zaire, or Asiatic U.S.S.R., have tremendous resources which cannot be fully developed because of lack of population.

Their problems are often accentuated by adverse climatic conditions. Population problems are thus among the basic difficulties of underdeveloped countries but those of overpopulation are of course different from those of under-population.

(i) Rapid Population Growth:

Large popula­tions increase rapidly and in most underdeveloped countries the birth rate is high and family planning is not practiced on a large scale. This means that there is a large proportion of young people in the population who are dependent on the relatively small working section of the population. At the same time the large number of young people puts extra strain on social services, especially education.

(ii) Unemployment:

In many underdeveloped countries industry is not well-established and there are few employment opportunities for unskilled work­ers. Unemployment is therefore high. On the other hand there is often a shortage of skilled workers be­cause there are few facilities for training.

In overpopulated rural areas unemployment or under-employment is also a major problem; people migrate to the towns where it is often even more difficult to find work. Moreover the towns become overcrowded, making living conditions poorer.

(iii) Housing and Health:

The standard of living in overpopulated countries is low and housing condi­tions are often poor and overcrowded. Standards of hygiene and nutrition are also low which leads to health problems such as malnutrition, and the spread of dis­eases. Prevention and cure of disease is hampered by insanitary conditions, by the ignorance of the people, by the lack of financial resources and often by the sheer numbers of people involved.

(iv) Under-Utilization of Agricultural Re­sources:

Traditional methods of agriculture, out­dated or inadequate equipment, lack of financial re­sources for improving farms, the non-use of fertilizer and the non-use or misuse of marginal agricultural land, such as highlands, may all help to keep agricultural production much lower than its potential. Difficulties of rationalizing farming techniques and reforming land tenure to give larger, more economic farms are aggra­vated by lack of capital and by traditional atti­tudes of the farmers who are often slow to accept new ideas.

(v) Slow Growth of Industry:

In most under­developed countries industry is only slowly becoming established. Apart from lack of local capital which makes the actual exploitation of resources or setting- up of factories difficult, the population factors are important. The labour force, though large in number is generally unskilled and has no background of indus­trial employment.

Similarly, although the large popu­lation should provide a good market for the finished goods, the majority of the people are poor and cannot afford to buy the products. To produce goods cheaply for a small market mechanized manufacture is most economical but this employs very few workers and does not help the employment situation.

(vi) Traditional Attitudes:

Traditional or reli­gious attitudes may militate against change or may make conditions worse. Birth-control is forbidden by the Catholic Church, for instance, and caste restric­tions on occupations in India also help to slow down development. Less important is the conservatism of rural people regarding farming methods and the intro­duction of new crops. This kind of attitude can be removed by education in a way that religious beliefs cannot.

Essay # 9 . Problems of Under-Population across the World :

(i) uneven distribution of population :.

Average population densities for under-populated coun­tries are low, and in many areas there are practically no people at all. Small populations increase slowly, even though birth rates are often high. Immigration is an important source of people but it is usually to the towns rather than to the country that new immigrants go.

At the same time the towns with their better con­ditions attract people from the already sparsely settled countryside. Imbalance between town and country is a major problem of under-populated countries.

(ii) Remoteness:

It is difficult to increase settle­ment in sparsely populated areas because people are unwilling to forego the amenities of the town. Where there are few people it is uneconomic to provide elab­orate communications, health, education or other facilities. This in turn increases the unwillingness of people to settle in such areas.

(iii) Under-Utilization of Resources:

Lack of population makes it difficult for a country to de­velop its resources to the full. Minerals will usually be extracted, especially precious metals and petroleum, because the desire for wealth will overcome other con­siderations. Agricultural resources are more difficult to develop because they require more and harder work over a long period of years before they show a good return.

In the nineteenth century when the U.S.A. was settled people were prepared to develop the land be­cause many of them were landless peasants, but immigrants to under-populated countries today generally prefer town life.

(iv) Slow Growth of Industry:

The growth of industry is often slow in under-populated countries because there is a shortage of labour, especially skilled labour, e.g. in the South American and African coun­tries. Where skilled labour has to be brought in this raises the cost of industrial development. Moreover the small population does not always provide an adequate market even where the standard of living is high.

(v) Climatic Problems:

Many under-populated countries have hostile climatic or relief conditions which make settlement difficult or dangerous for im­migrants. Such conditions obstruct development and are likely never to be fully overcome.

Are there any solutions to the problems of under­developed countries? In terms of economics the major need is for an infusion of capital, probably in the form of foreign aid, to finance development. In terms of population the need is for a decline in birth rates in overpopulated countries, but progress towards this end is extremely slow so that the improvement of agricul­ture, establishment of industry and extension of edu­cational, health and other facilities will in the long run be more important in solving overpopulation by mak­ing better use of available resources.

In under-populated countries immigration might be increased but this could only work if immigrants possessed the right skills and were prepared to live in the sparsely populated areas. To open up under-populated areas is both diffi­cult and expensive and thus economic factors are again paramount.

Essay # 10 . Views of Malthus on World Overpopulation:

Thomas Malthus was an English clergyman who, in 1798, published an Essay on the Principle of Popu­lation in which he put forward the view that, ‘the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man’. He thought that a balance could only be maintained if famine, disease or war periodically increased the death rate and reduced population growth.

His pessimistic ideas were accepted by several other nineteenth-century scholars in England and France and many people still hold similar views today. Is this pessimistic view really justified?

In the first place it is important to realize the context of Malthus’ work. He was not considering the world as a whole but only England. Moreover he wrote almost 200 years ago when conditions certainly justified some of his conclusions.

At the end of the eighteenth century the popu­lation of England was only about 10 million, but much of their food supply had to be produced from the limited agricultural land of the country. The Agricultural Revolution of the late eighteenth cen­tury had brought about many improvements, but farming methods and crop yields were still much lower than they are today.

Changes in land tenure, brought about by enclosure of the old common fields and the formation of large farms in the place of small scattered plots, led to rural depopulation. The towns, especially those where the new factory industries had been established, grew very rapidly and were overcrowded, dirty and unhealthy. The people who lived in them were poor, under-fed, overworked and had little resistance to disease.

Thus, had food supplies been reduced or popula­tion expanded too rapidly, these people would have suffered and starvation and epidemics would have reduced the population. This had already hap­pened twice during England’s history; the Black Death of the fourteenth century and the Great Plague of the seventeenth century coincided with periods when harvests were bad and there were food shortages. Hunger reduced resistance to dis­eases and bubonic plague caused the death of many thousands of people.

Malthus was afraid that something similar would happen again. In his time great advances were being made in the treatment and control of diseases such as cholera, typhoid and smallpox which were still rife in England and Europe. This meant that death rates, and particularly infant mortality rates, were falling.

Malthus calculated that population could double every 25 years, but no similar increases in food supplies could be expected. Given the social conditions of the time it was not therefore surpris­ing that his predictions should be pessimistic. He could not have foreseen the tremendous changes which were to take place in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

These changes completely altered the economic and social conditions in Britain and Europe:

1. Great improvements have taken place in agri­cultural production as a result of better farm man­agement, increased use of fertilizers and pesticides, use of better seeds and livestock breeds, application of soil-conservation methods and so on. These im­provements led to considerable increases in the yields of most agricultural products and also allow­ed hitherto unusable land to be brought into profit­able use.

2. During the nineteenth century vast new agri­cultural regions in America, Africa and Australasia were opened up and large-scale plantation agricul­ture was established in tropical countries. Improve­ments in transportation not only allowed migrants to reach new areas and bring them into production, but also meant that their crops could be easily transported to Britain and Europe to supplement local food supplies.

3. The population did not expand anything like as fast as Malthus predicted. The rate of increase declined largely as a result of a decreasing birth rate although death rates continued to fall. Improved standards of living, the costs of maintaining a large family and especially the difficulties of the depres­sion and the two World Wars in the first half of the twentieth century all contributed to the trend to­wards smaller families and a slower rate of popula­tion growth.

Thus, in Europe at least, Malthus’ predictions were proved wrong by events. But many people still apply his ideas to underdeveloped countries, where advances in agriculture are slower and population growth much more rapid. Death rates in many un­derdeveloped countries have been reduced but can still be lowered considerably.

In some ways this gives these countries a breathing space for if current high birth rates were combined with the low death rates of advanced countries, populations would ex­pand so rapidly that it would indeed be impossible to feed them. On this basis, for instance, India’s population could be trebled in less than 50 years.

Death rates are linked with levels of hygiene, nutri­tion and housing and will fall as Living standards improve. Fortunately these improvements are grad­ually taking place. The question remains-when death rates reach their lowest level, will a propor­tional reduction have occurred in birth rates?

There are several reasons to hope that the future of underdeveloped countries is not as bleak as it seems:

1. Rapid and efficient means of transportation have benefited not only Europe but the rest of the world. Thus if there is famine in one area food sup­plies can usually be brought in from elsewhere.

2. On a world scale there is no real food short­age and in many fields, such as livestock and dairy products, output could be greatly expanded in a very short time. But financial considerations pre­vent poor countries from purchasing as much food as they need or could absorb. Thus huge surpluses of wheat, for example, cannot be sold to the coun­tries which need them most.

Other food crops such as coffee, tea and sugar, of which surpluses are often produced, cannot be sold in underdeveloped countries because incomes are low and therefore demand is low. The lack of an effective market is also the chief obstacle to the production and sale of highly nutritious meat and dairy produce.

Thus the problem is not one of food shortage but of economic inequality. This inequality is, how­ever, gradually being reduced by the development of natural resources, agriculture and industries in underdeveloped countries, which in turn earns for­eign exchange and provides them with the financial resources for further development.

Such improve­ments in agriculture and industry should eventually improve incomes and standards of living and allow people in underdeveloped countries to obtain more and better foods.

3. Tremendous advances have been made in agriculture in underdeveloped countries which, with foreign aid and technical advice, are growing more staple crops and are introducing more nutritious crops not previously grown. Research into plant varieties has produced improved hybrids which have greater resistance to disease, greater tolerance to unfavourable climatic conditions and give much higher yields.

The most important achievements have been in producing ‘miracle’ rice strains. IR8 and IR15 grown in the Philippines, turned that country from a rice importer to a rice exporter in the course of a few years. Moreover the nutritional value of rice has been improved in certain recently developed strains.

4. Education in underdeveloped countries is being steadily improved and is gradually reaching a larger and larger proportion of the population. In the long term education has a tremendously impor­tant role to play in the fields of agriculture, techni­cal training to equip people for industrial employ­ment and in spreading the idea of family planning.

All these changes in underdeveloped countries are gradual and the real test of Malthusian views of population and food supplies will depend upon the speed with which these countries can be modernized and the rate at which improvements in living stand­ards affect birth rates.

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How the Diploma Divide Is Remaking American Politics

Education is at the heart of this country’s many divisions..

Blue America is an increasingly wealthy and well-educated place.

Throughout the second half of the 20th century, Americans without college degrees were more likely than university graduates to vote Democratic. But that gap began narrowing in the late 1960s before finally flipping in 2004 .

John F. Kennedy lost college-educated voters by a two-to-one margin yet won the presidency thanks to overwhelming support among white voters without a degree. Sixty years later, our second Catholic president charted a much different path to the White House, losing non-college-educated whites by a two-to-one margin while securing 60 percent of the college-educated vote. The latest New York Times /Siena poll of the 2022 midterms showed this pattern holding firm, with Democrats winning 55 percent of voters with bachelor’s degrees but only 39 percent of those without.

A more educated Democratic coalition is, naturally, a more affluent one. In every presidential election from 1948 to 2012, white voters in the top 5 percent of America’s income distribution were more Republican than those in the bottom 95 percent. Now, the opposite is true: Among America’s white majority, the rich voted to the left of the middle class and the poor in 2016 and 2020, while the poor voted to the right of the middle class and the rich.

In political-science parlance, the collapse of the New Deal–era alignment — in which voters’ income levels strongly predicted their partisan preference — is often referred to as “class dealignment.” The increasing tendency for politics to divide voters along educational lines, meanwhile, is known as “education polarization.”

There are worse things for a political coalition to be than affluent or educated. Professionals vote and donate at higher rates than blue-collar workers. But college graduates also comprise a minority of the electorate — and an underrepresented minority at that. America’s electoral institutions all give disproportionate influence to parts of the country with low levels of educational attainment. And this is especially true of the Senate . Therefore, if the coalitional trends of the past half-century continue unabated — and Democrats keep gaining college-educated votes at the expense of working-class ones — the party will find itself locked out of federal power. Put differently, such a development would put an increasingly authoritarian GOP on the glide path to political dominance.

And unless education polarization is substantially reversed , progressives are likely to continue seeing their reform ambitions pared back sharply by Congress’s upper chamber, even when Democrats manage to control it.

These realities have generated a lively intra-Democratic debate over the causes and implications of class dealignment. To some pundits , consultants, and data journalists , the phenomenon’s fundamental cause is the cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class. In their telling, college graduates in general — and Democratic college graduates in particular — tend to have different social values, cultural sensibilities, and issue priorities than the median non-college-educated voter. As the New York Times ’s Nate Cohn puts the point, college graduates tend to be more cosmopolitan and culturally liberal, report higher levels of social trust, and are more likely to “attribute racial inequality, crime, and poverty to complex structural and systemic problems” rather than “individualist and parochial explanations.”

What’s more, since blue America’s journalists, politicians, and activists are overwhelmingly college graduates, highly educated liberals exert disproportionate influence over their party’s actions and identity. Therefore, as the Democrats’ well-credentialed wing has swelled, the party’s image and ideological positioning have grown more reflective of the professional class’s distinct tastes — and thus less appealing to the electorate’s working-class majority.

This theory does not sit well with all Democratic journalists, politicians, and activists. Some deny the existence of a diploma divide on cultural values, while others insist on its limited political salience. Many progressives attribute class dealignment to America’s pathological racial politics and/or the Democrats’ failures of economic governance . In this account, the New Deal coalition was unmade by a combination of a backlash to Black Americans’ growing prominence in Democratic politics and the Democratic Party’s failures to prevent its former working-class base from suffering decades of stagnant living standards and declining life expectancy .

An appreciation of these developments is surely indispensable for understanding class dealignment in the United States. But they don’t tell the whole story. Education polarization is not merely an American phenomenon; it is a defining feature of contemporary politics in nearly every western democracy . It is therefore unlikely that our nation’s white-supremacist history can fully explain the development. And though center-left parties throughout the West have shared some common failings, these inadequacies cannot tell us why many working-class voters have not merely dropped out of politics but rather begun voting for parties even more indifferent to their material interests.

In my view, education polarization cannot be understood without a recognition of the values divide between educated professionals and working people in the aggregate. That divide is rooted in each class’s disparate ways of life, economic imperatives, socialization experiences, and levels of material security. By itself, the emergence of this gap might not have been sufficient to trigger class dealignment, but its adverse political implications have been greatly exacerbated by the past half-century of inequitable growth, civic decline, and media fragmentation.

The college-educated population has distinct ideological tendencies and psychological sensibilities.

Educated professionals tend to be more socially liberal than the general public. In fact, the correlation between high levels of educational attainment and social liberalism is among the most robust in political science. As early as the 1950s, researchers documented the tendency of college graduates to espouse more progressive views than the general public on civil liberties and gender roles. In the decades since, as the political scientist Elizabeth Simon writes , this correlation has held up with “remarkable geographical and temporal consistency.” Across national boundaries and generations, voters with college degrees have been more likely than those without to support legal abortion, LGBTQ+ causes, the rights of racial minorities, and expansive immigration. They are also more likely to hold “post-material” policy priorities — which is to say, to prioritize issues concerning individual autonomy, cultural values, and big-picture social goals above those concerning one’s immediate material and physical security. This penchant is perhaps best illustrated by the highly educated’s distinctively strong support for environmental causes, even in cases when ecological preservation comes at a cost to economic growth.

Underlying these disparate policy preferences are distinct psychological profiles. The college educated are more likely to espouse moral values and attitudes associated with the personality trait “ openness to experience .” High “openness” individuals are attracted to novelty, skeptical of traditional authority, and prize personal freedom and cultural diversity. “Closed” individuals, by contrast, have an aversion to the unfamiliar and are therefore attracted to moral principles that promote certainty, order, and security. Virtually all human beings fall somewhere between these two ideal types. But the college educated as a whole are closer to the “open” end of the continuum than the general public is.

All of these distinctions between more- and less-educated voters are probabilistic, not absolute. There are Catholic theocrats with Harvard Ph.D.’s and anarchists who dropped out of high school. A nation the size of the U.S. is surely home to many millions of working-class social liberals and well-educated reactionaries. Political attitudes do not proceed automatically from any demographic characteristic, class position, or psychological trait. At the individual level, ideology is shaped by myriad historical inheritances and social experiences.

And yet, if people can come by socially liberal, “high openness” politics from any walk of life, they are much more likely to do so if that walk cuts across a college campus. (And, of course, they are even more likely to harbor this distinct psychological and ideological profile if they graduate from college and then choose to become professionally involved in Democratic politics.)

The path to the professional class veers left.

There are a few theoretical explanations for this. One holds that spending your late adolescence on a college campus tends to socialize you into cultural liberalism: Through some combination of increased exposure to people from a variety of geographic backgrounds, or the iconoclastic ethos of a liberal-arts education, or the predominantly left-of-center university faculty , or the substantive content of curricula, people tend to leave college with a more cosmopolitan and “open” worldview than they had upon entering.

Proving this theory is difficult since doing so requires controlling for selection effects. Who goes to college is not determined by random chance. The subset of young people who have the interests, aptitudes, and opportunities necessary for pursuing higher education have distinct characteristics long before they show up on campus. Some social scientists contend that such “selection effects” entirely explain the distinct political tendencies of college graduates. After all, the “high openness” personality trait is associated with higher IQs and more interest in academics. So perhaps attending college doesn’t lead people to develop culturally liberal sensibilities so much as developing culturally liberal sensibilities leads people to go to college.

Some research has tried to account for this possibility. Political scientists in the United Kingdom have managed to control for the preadult views and backgrounds of college graduates by exploiting surveys that tracked the same respondents through adolescence and into adulthood. Two recent analyses of such data have found that the college experience does seem to directly increase a person’s likelihood of becoming more socially liberal in their 20s than they were in their teens.

A separate study from the U.S. sought to control for the effects of familial background and childhood experiences by examining the disparate “sociopolitical” attitudes of sibling pairs in which one went to college while the other did not. It found that attending college was associated with greater “support for civil liberties and egalitarian gender-role beliefs.”

Other recent research , however, suggests that even these study designs may fail to control for all of the background factors that bias college attendees toward liberal views before they arrive on campus. So we have some good evidence that attending college directly makes people more culturally liberal, but that evidence is not entirely conclusive.

Yet if one posits that higher education does not produce social liberals but merely attracts them, a big theoretical problem remains: Why has the population of social liberals increased in tandem with that of college graduates?

The proportion of millennials who endorse left-wing views on issues of race, gender, immigration , and the environment is higher than the proportion of boomers who do so. And such views are more prevalent within the baby-boom generation than they were among the Silent Generation. This cannot be explained merely as a consequence of America’s burgeoning racial diversity, since similar generational patterns have been observed in European nations with lower rates of ethnic change. But the trend is consistent with another component of demographic drift: Each successive generation has had a higher proportion of college graduates than its predecessor. Between 1950 and 2019, the percentage of U.S. adults with bachelor’s degrees increased from 4 percent to 33 percent.  

Perhaps rising college attendance did not directly cause the “high-openness,” post-material, culturally progressive proportion of the population to swell. But then, what did?

One possibility is that, even if mass college attendance does not directly promote the development of “high openness” values, the mass white-collar economy does. If socially liberal values are well suited to the demands and lifeways inherent to professional employment in a globally integrated economy, then, as such employment expands, we would expect a larger share of the population to adopt socially liberal values. And there is indeed reason to think the professional vocation lends itself to social liberalism.

Entering the professional class often requires not only a four-year degree, but also, a stint in graduate school or a protracted period of overwork and undercompensation at the lowest ranks of one’s field. This gives the class’s aspirants a greater incentive to postpone procreation until later in life than the median worker. That in turn may give them a heightened incentive to favor abortion rights and liberal sexual mores.

The demands of the professional career may influence value formation in other ways. As a team of political scientists from Harvard and the University of Bonn argued in a 2020 paper , underlying the ideological divide between social liberals and conservatives may be a divergence in degrees of “moral universalism,” i.e., “the extent to which people’s altruism and trust remain constant as social distance increases.” Conservatives tend to feel stronger obligations than liberals to their own kin and neighbors and their religious, ethnic, and racial groups. Liberals, by contrast, tend to spread their altruism and trust thinner across a wider sphere of humanity; they are less compelled by the particularist obligations of inherited group loyalties and more apt to espouse a universalist ethos in which all individuals are of equal moral concern, irrespective of their group attachments.

Given that pursuing a professional career often requires leaving one’s native community and entering meritocratic institutions that are ideologically and legally committed to the principle that group identities matter less than individual aptitudes, the professional vocation may favor the development of a morally universalistic outlook — and thus more progressive views on questions of anti-discrimination and weaker identification with inherited group identities.

Further, in a globalized era, white-collar workers will often need to work with colleagues on other continents and contemplate social and economic developments in far-flung places. This may encourage both existing and aspiring professionals to develop more cosmopolitan outlooks.

Critically, parents who are themselves professionals — or who aspire for their children to secure a place in the educated, white-collar labor force — may seek to inculcate these values in their kids from a young age. For example, my own parents sent me to a magnet elementary school where students were taught Japanese starting in kindergarten. This curriculum was designed to appeal to parents concerned with their children’s capacity to thrive in the increasingly interconnected (and, in the early 1990s American imagination, increasingly Japanese-dominated) economy of tomorrow.

In this way, the expansion of the white-collar sector may increase the prevalence of “high-openness” cosmopolitan traits and values among rising generations long before they arrive on campus.

More material security, more social liberalism.

Ronald Inglehart’s theory of “ cultural evolution ” provides a third, complementary explanation for both the growing prevalence of social liberalism over the past half-century and for that ideology’s disproportionate popularity among the college educated.

In Inglehart’s account, people who experience material security in youth tend to develop distinctive values and preferences from those who do not: If childhood teaches you to take your basic material needs for granted, you’re more likely to develop culturally progressive values and post-material policy priorities.

Inglehart first formulated this theory in 1971 to explain the emerging cultural gap between the baby boomers and their parents. He noted that among western generations born before World War II, very large percentages had known hunger at some point in their formative years. The Silent Generation, for its part, had come of age in an era of economic depression and world wars. Inglehart argued that such pervasive material and physical insecurity was unfavorable soil for social liberalism: Under conditions of scarcity, human beings have a strong inclination to defer to established authority and tradition, to distrust out-groups, and to prize order and material security above self-expression and individual autonomy.

But westerners born into the postwar boom encountered a very different world from the Depression-wracked, war-torn one of their parents, let alone the cruel and unforgiving one encountered by common agriculturalists since time immemorial. Their world was one of rapid and widespread income growth. And these unprecedentedly prosperous conditions engendered a shift in the postwar generation’s values: When the boomers reached maturity, an exceptionally large share of the cohort evinced post-material priorities and espoused tolerance for out-groups, support for gender equality, concern for the environment, and antipathy for social hierarchies.

Since this transformation in values wasn’t rooted merely in the passage of time — but rather in the experience of abundance — it did not impact all social classes equally. Educated professionals are disproportionately likely to have had stable, middle-class childhoods. Thus, across the West, the post-material minority was disproportionately composed of college graduates in general and elite ones in particular. As Inglehart reported in 1981 , “among those less than 35 years old with jobs that lead to top management and top civil-service posts, Post-Materialists outnumber Materialists decisively: their numerical preponderance here is even greater than it is among students.”  

As with most big-picture models of political development, Inglehart’s theory is reductive and vulnerable to myriad objections. But his core premise — that, all else being equal, material abundance favors social liberalism while scarcity favors the opposite — has much to recommend it. As the World Values Survey has demonstrated, a nation’s degree of social liberalism (a.k.a. “self-expression values”) tightly correlates with its per-capita income. Meanwhile, as nations become wealthier, each successive generation tends to become more socially liberal than the previous one.

Critically, the World Values Survey data does not show an ineluctable movement toward ever-greater levels of social liberalism. Rather, when nations backslide economically, their populations’ progressivism declines. In the West, recessions have tended to reduce the prevalence of post-material values and increase support for xenophobic parties. But the relationship between material security and cultural liberalism is demonstrated most starkly by the experience of ex-communist states, many of which suffered a devastating collapse in living standards following the Soviet Union’s fall. In Russia and much of Eastern Europe, popular support for culturally progressive values plummeted around 1990 and has remained depressed ever since.

Inglehart’s theory offers real insights. As an account of education polarization, however, it presents a bit of a puzzle: If material security is the key driver of social liberalism, why have culture wars bifurcated electorates along lines of education instead of income? Put differently: Despite the material security provided by a high salary, when one controls for educational attainment, having a high income remains strongly associated with voting for conservatives.

One way to resolve this tension is to stipulate that the first two theories of education polarization we examined are also right: While material security is conducive to social liberalism, the college experience and demands of professional-class vocations are perhaps even more so. Thus, high-income voters who did not go to college will tend to be less socially liberal than those who did.

Separately, earning a high income is strongly associated with holding conservative views on fiscal policy. Therefore, even if the experience of material security biases high-income voters toward left-of-center views on cultural issues, their interest in low taxes may nevertheless compel them to vote for right-wing parties.

Voters with high levels of education but low incomes, meanwhile, are very often children of the middle class who made dumb career choices like, say, going into journalism. Such voters’ class backgrounds would theoretically bias them toward a socially liberal orientation, while their meager earnings would give them little reason to value conservative fiscal policy. Perhaps for this reason, “ high-education low-income voters ” are among the most reliably left-wing throughout the western world.

In any case, whatever qualifications and revisions we would wish to make to Inglehart’s theory, one can’t deny its prescience. In 1971, Inglehart forecast that intergenerational value change would redraw the lines of political conflict throughout the West. In his telling, the emergence of a novel value orientation that was disproportionately popular with influential elites would naturally shift the terrain of political conflict. And it would do so in a manner that undermined materialist, class-based voting: If conventional debates over income distribution pulled at the affluent right and the working-class left, the emerging cultural disputes pulled each in the opposite direction.

This proved to be, in the words of Gabriel Almond, “one of the few examples of successful prediction in political science.”

When the culture wars moved to the center of politics, the college educated moved left.

Whether we attribute the social liberalism of college graduates to their experiences on campus, their class’s incentive structures, their relative material security, or a combination of all three, a common set of predictions about western political development follows.

First, we would expect to see the political salience of cultural conflicts start to increase in the 1960s and ’70s as educated professionals became a mass force in western politics. Second, relatedly, we would expect that the historic correlation between having a college degree and voting for the right would start gradually eroding around the same time, owing to the heightened prominence of social issues.

Finally, we would expect education polarization to be most pronounced in countries where (1) economic development is most advanced (and thus the professional sector is most expansive) and (2) left-wing and right-wing parties are most sharply divided on cultural questions.

In their paper “Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,” Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty confirm all of these expectations.

The paper analyzes nearly every manifesto (a.k.a. “platform”) put forward by left-wing and right-wing parties in the past 300 elections. As anticipated by Inglehart, the researchers found that right-wing and left-wing parties began to develop distinct positions on “sociocultural” issues in the 1970s and that these distinctions grew steadily more profound over the ensuing 50 years. Thus, the salience of cultural issues did indeed increase just as college graduates became an electorally significant demographic.

As cultural conflict became more prominent, educated professionals became more left-wing. Controlling for other variables, in the mid-20th century, having a college diploma made one more likely to vote for parties of the right. By 2020, in virtually all of the western democracies, this relationship had inverted.

Some popular narratives attribute this realignment to discrete historical events, such as the Cold War’s end, China’s entry into the WTO, or the 2008 crash. But the data show no sudden reversal in education’s political significance. Instead, the authors write, the West saw “a very progressive, continuous reversal of educational divides, which unfolded decades before any of these events took place and has carried on uninterruptedly until today.” This finding is consistent with the notion that class dealignment is driven by gradual changes in western societies’ demographic and economic characteristics, such as the steady expansion of the professional class.

The paper provides further support for the notion that education polarization is a by-product of economic development: The three democracies where college-educated voters have not moved sharply to the left in recent decades — Ireland, Portugal, and Spain — are all relative latecomers to industrialization.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the authors established a strong correlation between “sociocultural polarization” — the degree to which right-wing and left-wing parties emphasize sharply divergent cultural positions — and education polarization. In other words: Countries where parties are highly polarized on social issues tend to have electorates that are highly polarized along educational lines.

It seems reasonable then to conclude (1) that there really is a cultural divide between educated professionals and the working class in the aggregate and (2) that this gap has been a key driver of class dealignment. Indeed, if we accept the reality of the diploma divide, then an increase of education-based voting over the past 50 years would seem almost inevitable: If you have two social groups with distinct cultural values and one group goes from being 4 percent of the electorate to 35 percent of it, debates about those values will probably become more politically prominent.

And of course, mass higher education wasn’t the only force increasing the salience of social conflict in the West over the past half-century. If economic development increased the popularity of “post-material” values, it also made it easier for marginalized groups to contest traditional hierarchies. As job opportunities for women expanded, they became less dependent on the patriarchal family for material security and thus were more liable to challenge it. As racial minorities secured a foothold in the middle class, they had more resources with which to fight discrimination.

And yet, if an increase in sociocultural polarization — and thus in education polarization — is a foregone conclusion, the magnitude of these shifts can’t be attributed to the existence of cultural divides alone.

Rather, transformations in the economic, civic, and media landscapes of western society since the 1970s have increased the salience and severity of the diploma divide.

When the postwar bargain collapsed, the center-left failed to secure workers a new deal.

To polarize an electorate around cultural conflicts rooted in education, you don’t just need to increase the salience of social issues. You also need to reduce the salience of material disputes rooted in class. Alas, the economic developments of the past 50 years managed to do both.

The class-based alignment that defined western politics in the mid-20th century emerged from a particular set of economic conditions. In the early stages of industrialization, various factors had heightened the class consciousness of wage laborers. Such workers frequently lived in densely settled, class-segregated neighborhoods in the immediate vicinity of large labor-intensive plants. This close proximity cultivated solidarity, as divisions between the laborer’s working and social worlds were few. And the vast scale of industrial enterprises abetted organizing drives, as trade unions could rapidly gain scale by winning over a single shop.

By encouraging their members to view politics through the lens of class and forcing political elites to reckon with workers’ demands, strong trade unions helped to keep questions of income distribution and workers’ rights at the center of political debate and the forefront of voters’ minds. In so doing, they also helped to win western workers in general — and white male ones in particular — unprecedented shares of national income.

But this bargain between business and labor had always been contingent on robust growth. In the postwar era of rising productivity, it was possible for profits and wages to increase in tandem. But in the 1970s, western economies came under stress. Rising energy costs and global competition thinned profit margins, rendering business owners more hostile to labor’s demands both within the shop and in politics. Stagflation — the simultaneous appearance of high unemployment and high inflation — gave an opening to right-wing critics of the postwar order, who argued that the welfare state and pro-labor macroeconomic policies had sapped productivity.

Meanwhile, various long-term economic trends began undermining industrial unionism. Automation inevitably reduced the labor intensity of factories in the West. The advent of the shipping container eased the logistical burdens of globalizing production, while the industrialization of low-wage developing countries increased the incentives for doing so. Separately, as western consumers grew more affluent, they began spending less of their income on durable goods and more on services like health care (one needs only so many toasters, but the human desire for greater longevity and physical well-being is nigh-insatiable). These developments reduced both the economic leverage and the political weight of industrial workers. And since western service sectors had lower rates of unionization, deindustrialization weakened organized labor.

All this presented center-left parties with a difficult challenge. In the face of deindustrialization, an increasingly anti-labor corporate sector, an increasingly conservative economic discourse, an embattled union movement, and a globalizing economy, such parties needed to formulate new models for achieving shared prosperity. And they had to do so while managing rising cultural tensions within their coalitions.

They largely failed.

Countering the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality would have required radical reforms. Absent policies promoting the unionization of the service sector, deindustrialization inevitably weakened labor. Absent drastic changes in the allocation of posttax income, automation and globalization redistributed economic gains away from “low skill” workers and toward the most productive — or well-situated — professionals, executives, and entrepreneurs.

The United States had more power than any western nation to standardize such reforms and establish a relatively egalitarian postindustrial model. Yet the Democratic Party could muster neither the political will nor the imagination to do so. Instead, under Jimmy Carter, it acquiesced to various policies that reinforced the postindustrial economy’s tendencies toward inequality, while outsourcing key questions of economic management to financial markets and the Federal Reserve. The Reagan administration took this inegalitarian and depoliticized model of economic governance to new extremes. And to highly varying degrees, its inequitable and market-fundamentalist creed influenced the policies of future U.S. administrations and other western governments.

As a result, the past five decades witnessed a great divergence in the economic fortunes of workers with and without college diplomas, while the western working class (a.k.a. the “lower middle class”) became the primary “losers” of globalization .

The center-left parties’ failures to avert a decline in the economic security and status of ordinary workers discredited them with much of their traditional base. And their failure to reinvigorate organized labor undermined the primary institutions that politicize workers into a progressive worldview. These shortcomings, combined with the market’s increasingly dominant role in economic management, reduced the political salience of left-right divides on economic policy. This in turn gave socially conservative working-class voters fewer reasons to vote for center-left parties and gave affluent social liberals fewer reasons to oppose them. In western nations where organized labor remains relatively strong (such as Norway, Sweden, and Finland), education polarization has been relatively mild, while in those countries where it is exceptionally weak (such as the United States), the phenomenon has been especially pronounced.

Finally, the divergent economic fortunes of workers and professionals might have abetted education polarization in one other way: Given that experiencing abundance encourages social liberalism — while experiencing scarcity discourages it — the past half-century of inequitable growth might have deepened cultural divisions between workers with degrees and those without.

The professionalization of civil society estranged the left from its working-class base.

While the evolution of western economies increased the class distance between college graduates and other workers, the evolution of western civil societies increased the social distance between each group.

Back in the mid-20th century, the college educated still constituted a tiny minority of western populations, while mass-membership institutions — from trade unions to fraternal organizations to political parties — still dominated civic life. In that context, an educated professional who wished to exercise political influence often needed to join a local chapter of a cross-class civic association or political party and win election to a leadership position within that organization by securing the confidence of its membership.

That changed once educated professionals became a mass constituency in their own right. As the college-educated population ballooned and concentrated itself within urban centers, it became easier for interest groups to swing elections and pressure lawmakers without securing working-class support. At the same time, the proliferation of “knowledge workers” set off an arms race between interest and advocacy groups looking to influence national legislation and election outcomes. Job opportunities for civic-minded professionals in think tanks, nonprofits, and foundations proliferated. And thanks to growing pools of philanthropic money and the advent of direct-mail fundraising, these organizations could sustain themselves without recruiting an active mass membership.

Thus, the professional’s path to political influence dramatically changed. Instead of working one’s way up through close-knit local groups — and bending them toward one’s political goals through persuasion — professionals could join (or donate to) nationally oriented advocacy groups already aligned with their preferences, which could then advance their policy aims by providing legislators with expert guidance and influencing public opinion through media debates.

As the political scientist Theda Skocpol demonstrates in her book Diminished Democracy , college graduates began defecting from mass-membership civic organizations in the 1970s, in an exodus that helped precipitate their broader decline.

Combined with the descent of organized labor, the collapse of mass participation in civic groups and political parties untethered the broad left from working-class constituencies. As foundation-funded NGOs displaced trade unions in the progressive firmament, left-wing parties became less directly accountable to their less-educated supporters. This made such parties more liable to embrace the preferences and priorities of educated professionals over those of the median working-class voter.

Meanwhile, in the absence of a thriving civic culture, voters became increasingly reliant on the mass media for their political information.

Today’s media landscape is fertile terrain for right-wing populism.

The dominant media technology of the mid-20th century — broadcast television — favored oligopoly. Given the exorbitant costs of mounting a national television network in that era, the medium was dominated by a small number of networks, each with an incentive to appeal to a broad audience. This discouraged news networks from cultivating cultural controversy while empowering them to establish a broadly shared information environment.

Cable and the internet have molded a radically different media landscape. Today, news outlets compete in a hypersaturated attentional market that encourages both audience specialization and sensationalism. In a world where consumers have abundant infotainment options, voters who read at a graduate-school level and those who read at an eighth-grade level are unlikely to favor the same content. And the same is true of voters with liberal and conservative sensibilities — especially since the collapse of a common media ecosystem leads ideologues to occupy disparate factual universes. The extraordinary nature of today’s media ecology is well illustrated by this chart from Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of the Public :

This information explosion abets education polarization for straightforward reasons: Since the college educated and non-college educated have distinct tastes in media, in a highly competitive attentional market, they will patronize different outlets and accept divergent facts.

Further, in the specific economic and social context we’ve been examining, the modern media environment is fertile terrain for reactionary entrepreneurs who wish to cultivate grievance against the professional elite. After all, as we’ve seen, that elite (1) subscribes to some values that most working-class people reject, (2) commandeers a wildly disproportionate share of national income and economic status, and (3) dominates the leadership of major political parties and civic groups to an unprecedented degree.

The political efficacy of such right-wing “populist” programming has been repeatedly demonstrated. Studies have found that exposure to Fox News increases Republican vote share and that the expansion of broadband internet into rural areas leads to higher levels of partisan hostility and lower levels of ticket splitting (i.e., more ideologically consistent voting) as culturally conservative voters gain access to more ideologically oriented national news reporting, commentary, and forums.

What is to be done?

The idea that education polarization arises from deep structural tendencies in western society may inspire a sense of powerlessness. And the notion that it emerges in part from a cultural divide between professionals and working people may invite ideological discomfort, at least among well-educated liberals.

But the fact that some center-left parties have managed to retain more working-class support than others suggests that the Democrats have the capacity to broaden (or narrow) their coalition. Separately, the fact that college-educated liberals have distinct social values does not require us to forfeit them.

The commentators most keen to acknowledge the class dimensions of the culture wars typically aim to discredit the left by doing so. Right-wing polemicists often suggest that progressives’ supposedly compassionate social preferences are mere alibis for advancing the professional class’s material interests. But such arguments are almost invariably weak. Progressive social views may be consonant with professional-class interests, but they typically represent attempts to universalize widely held ideals of freedom and equality. The college educated’s cosmopolitan inclinations are also adaptive for a world that is unprecedentedly interconnected and interdependent and in which population asymmetries between the rich and developing worlds create opportunities for mutual gain through migration , if only xenophobia can be overcome. And of course, in an era of climate change, the professional class’s strong concern for the environment is more than justified.

Nevertheless, professional-class progressives must recognize that our social values are not entirely unrelated to our class position. They are not an automatic by-product of affluence and erudition, nor the exclusive property of the privileged. But humans living in rich, industrialized nations are considerably more likely to harbor these values than those in poor, agrarian ones. And Americans who had the privilege of spending their late adolescence at institutions of higher learning are more likely to embrace social liberalism than those who did not.

The practical implications of this insight are debatable. It is plausible that Democrats may be able to gain working-class vote share by moderating on some social issues. But the precise electoral payoff of any single concession to popular opinion is deeply uncertain. Voters’ conceptions of each party’s ideological positioning are often informed less by policy details than by partisan stereotypes. And the substantive costs of moderation — both for the welfare of vulnerable constituencies and the long-term health of the progressive project — can be profound. At various points in the past half-century, it might have been tactically wise for Democrats to distance themselves from the demands of organized labor. But strategically, sacrificing the health of a key partisan institution to the exigencies of a single election cycle is deeply unwise. Meanwhile, in the U.S. context, the “mainstream” right has staked out some cultural positions that are profoundly unpopular with all social classes . In 2022, it is very much in the Democratic Party’s interest to increase the political salience of abortion rights.

In any case, exactly how Democrats should balance the necessity of keeping the GOP out of power with the imperative to advocate for progressive issue positions is something on which earnest liberals can disagree.

The case for progressives to be more cognizant of the diploma divide when formulating our messaging and policy priorities, however, seems clearer.

Education polarization can be self-reinforcing. As left-wing civic life has drifted away from mass-membership institutions and toward the ideologically self-selecting circles of academia, nonprofits, and the media, the left’s sensitivity to the imperatives of majoritarian politics has dulled. In some respects, the incentives for gaining status and esteem within left-wing subcultures are diametrically opposed to the requirements of coalition building. In the realm of social media, it can be advantageous to make one’s policy ideas sound more radical and/or threatening to popular values than they actually are. Thus, proposals for drastically reforming flawed yet popular institutions are marketed as plans for their “abolition,” while some advocates for reproductive rights insist that they are not merely “pro-choice” but “ pro-abortion ” (as though their objective were not to maximize bodily autonomy but rather the incidence of abortion itself, a cause that would seemingly require limiting access to contraception).

Meanwhile, the rhetoric necessary for cogently theorizing social problems within academia — and that fit for effectively selling policy reforms to a mass audience — is quite different. Political-science research indicates that theoretical abstractions tend to leave most voters cold. Even an abstraction as accessible as “inequality” resonates less with ordinary people than simply saying that the rich have too much money . Yet Democratic politicians have nevertheless taken to peppering their speeches with abstract academic terms such as structural racism .

Relatedly, in the world of nonprofits, policy wonks are often encouraged to foreground the racial implications of race-neutral redistributive policies that disproportionately benefit nonwhite constituencies. Although it is important for policy design to account for any latent racial biases in universal programs, there is reason to believe that, in a democracy with a 70 percent white electorate and widespread racial resentment, it is unwise for Democratic politicians to suggest that broadly beneficial programs primarily aid minority groups.

On the level of priority setting, it seems important for college-educated liberals to be conscious of the fact that “post-material” concerns resonate more with us than with the general public. This is especially relevant for climate strategy. Poll results and election outcomes both indicate that working-class voters are far more sensitive to the threat of rising energy prices than to that of climate change. Given that reality, the most politically viable approach to reducing emissions is likely to expedite the development and deployment of clean-energy technologies rather than deterring energy consumption through higher prices. In practice, this means prioritizing the build-out of green infrastructure over the obstruction of fossil-fuel extraction.

Of course, narrowing the social distance between college-educated liberals and working people would be even better than merely finessing it. The burgeoning unionization of white-collar professions and the growing prominence of downwardly mobile college graduates in working-class labor struggles are both encouraging developments on this front. Whatever Democrats can do to facilitate labor organizing and increase access to higher education will simultaneously advance social justice and improve the party’s long-term electoral prospects.

Finally, the correlation between material security and social liberalism underscores the urgency of progressive economic reform. Shared prosperity can be restored only by increasing the social wage of ordinary workers through some combination of unionization, sectoral bargaining, wage subsidies, and social-welfare expansion. To some extent, this represents a chicken-and-egg problem: Radical economic reforms may be a necessary precondition for the emergence of a broad progressive majority, yet a broad progressive majority is itself a precondition for radical reform.

Nevertheless, in wealthy, deep-blue states such as New York and California, Democrats have the majorities necessary for establishing a progressive economic model. At the moment, artificial constraints on the housing supply , clean-energy production, and other forms of development are sapping blue states’ economic potential . If such constraints could be overcome, the resulting economic gains would simultaneously increase working people’s living standards and render state-level social-welfare programs easier to finance. Perhaps the starting point for such a political revolution is for more-affluent social liberals to recognize that their affinity for exclusionary housing policies and aversion to taxation undermines their cultural values.

Our understanding of education polarization remains provisional. And all proposals for addressing it remain open to debate. The laws of political science are more conjectural than those of physics, and even perfect insight into political reality cannot settle disputes rooted in ideology.

But effective political engagement requires unblinkered vision. The Democratic Party’s declining support among working-class voters is a serious problem. If Democrats consider only ideologically convenient explanations for that problem, our intellectual comfort may come at the price of political power.

• political science
• higher education
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