Practice question · True or false
Malthus’s prediction failed chiefly because food production grew far faster than he expected while fertility also fell without the famines he anticipated.
Hints
- Ask which of his two assumptions the following two centuries falsified.
- He was wrong about the supply side and about the demand side.
Show the answer
True
Why
True. Agricultural output grew at a pace he had ruled out, through new crops, fertiliser and mechanisation, and fertility declined for reasons — schooling, urban living costs, contraception, women’s employment — that had no place in his model. Being wrong twice is why the theory survives as a name for a worry rather than as a tool.
Practise Population: Structure and Dynamics
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Sociology I is free to start.
More questions on Population: Structure and Dynamics
- Complete the account of the basic demographic measures.
- Crude birth rates are sensitive to age structure, whereas the total fertility rate isolates cohort…
- Spain’s fertility has been below replacement since the early 1980s, and its population is nonetheless larger…
- A country whose fertility has been below replacement for four decades must by now have a shrinking population.
- Arrange the demographic transition in the order the changes actually occur.
- In a low-mortality country, what total fertility rate is taken as replacement level? Give the figure to one…
- Sort each feature by whether it characterises stage 2 of the demographic transition or stage 4.
- Estimate the percentage of Spain’s population aged 65 and over in recent years.
- Arrange these moments in the study and history of population, earliest first.