““Thomas Malthus, was one of the first to analyze the relations between population growth and available resources. At the end of the eighteenth century, he argued that any species, regarded purely mathematically, can multiply at a geometric rate, on the upward-curving trend familiar from compound interest. Yet the resources available to feed each species normally increase only at an arithmetic rate, on a straight-line trend. This means, as we have seen in the final section of chapter 5, that available resources set the real limits to population growth.””
