Malthus Was Right

It has gotten to be dogma that "Malthus was proven wrong" on all sides of the mainstream's political spectrum. I always found that odd, because he didn't make any predictions. All of his work was based on historical data and known cases; he was very much a British empiricist. The only prediction in his essay, to the extent he made any, was that the principles wouldn't change in the future because of some nebulous "progress".

And they didn't. What happened instead, as the article rightly notes, is that we temporarily increased carrying capacity. And in so doing we built a trap for ourselves from which we won't be extricated in the coming decades. No one knows exactly how the trajectory of energy and resource descent will play out, but that it will happen, is happening now, is not in doubt.