Thomas Robert Malthus podcast

This is from Economics in Ten podcast, season three, episode five. Malthus is famous for his population theory: the idea that population tends to grow faster than food supply, leading to recurring cycles of famine and poverty. But the episode also covers his broader contributions, including his early theorising about demand deficiency, which anticipates Keynesian thinking in interesting ways. There’s good discussion of where Malthus was right, where he was wrong, and how his ideas influenced both Darwin and Victorian social policy. Goes slightly beyond the standard spec, but the population-resources tension and development economics framing is accessible and perennially relevant, particularly in the context of sustainability and limits to growth.  Listen here