4 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. This increasing energy extraction could then, contra Malthus, support an exponentially growing population.
      • for: Malthus - energy extraction, overshoot,
      • paraphrase
        • increasing energy extraction via cultural evolution of new energy saving and extraction technologies allows a population to continue growing exponentially instead of crashing due to limits of energy extraction growth.
  2. Jan 2021
    1. Godwin wasn’t convinced. Hiscounterargument, neatly summarised by Porter, was that “such a threat would be averted by the simultaneous withering away of sexual desires—a proposal which notoriously reduced Malthus to guffaws.”

      I'd have laughed too, but for the present moment this seems to in fact be the case.

  3. Dec 2019
    1. a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth

      Victor's frightening imagination of a "race of devils" that would be "propagated upon the earth" may owe something to fears of vast population increase in the wake of debates over Thomas Malthus's predictions in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which were being fiercely debated (by Godwin and William Hazlitt among others) around the time of the novel's composition. See Clara Tuite, "Frankenstein's Monster and Malthus's 'Jaundiced Eye': Population, Body Politics, and the Monstrous Sublime," Eighteenth-Century Life 22.1 (1998).

  4. Oct 2019
    1. Malthusian narrative

      Malthusian narrative is a population + resource theory proposed by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. In sum, when unchecked or uncontrolled, population will grow exponentially, while our resources, like food, will not grow as fast. Thus, unchecked population growth will be met with famine and other sufferings. You might have guessed, this idea later developed into the whole idea of advocating for population control. Overall, not a happy thought.

      Whether it is empirically supported or not, it holds a great power over how people think about sustainability.