The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born.
The Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) is best known for An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Here this classical economist argues that human beings are caught between two drives, lust and hunger – or, being the polite reverend that he was, population and subsistence.
By Roland Boer