The Malthusian trap

The Malthusian trap is a condition in which population growth absorbs increases in food production or income, keeping living standards near subsistence.

Thomas Robert Malthus: An English cleric and political economist whose 1798 essay argued that population tends to grow faster than food supply. His account gives the trap its name and proposes population pressure as its engine.
An Essay on the Principle of Population: Thomas Robert Malthus's 1798 work arguing that population growth tends to outstrip the growth of subsistence. This essay first set out the argument later called the Malthusian trap.
Preindustrial economy: An economy organized chiefly around agriculture and craft production before industrialization. Agricultural dependence and limited productivity growth made these economies especially exposed to population pressure.
Demographic transition: The shift from high birth and death rates to low birth and death rates as societies develop. Falling fertility can let income growth persist instead of being absorbed by population growth.
Malthusianism: A family of views emphasizing limits imposed by population growth and finite resources. The trap is the central mechanism behind many Malthusian arguments about scarcity.
Diminishing returns: A pattern in which adding more of one input to fixed inputs yields progressively smaller increases in output. With land fixed, additional workers can produce less extra food per person.
David Ricardo: An English political economist who developed theories of rent, wages, and distribution in a land-constrained economy. Ricardo's account of wages and land rent helped extend classical population-pressure economics.
Black Death: The fourteenth-century pandemic that killed a large share of Europe's population. The population collapse raised labor scarcity and wages, illustrating the reverse of population-driven wage pressure.
Solow growth model: A model of long-run economic growth driven by capital accumulation, labor, and technological progress. It explains growth through capital and technology rather than a return to subsistence alone.
Population policy: Government measures intended to influence population size, growth, distribution, or composition. Malthusian concerns have repeatedly informed debates over fertility and public intervention.

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