ECONOMIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL
SCIENCE 2
Question 1
Thomas Malthus postulated that population growth occurred in geometric progression
whereas food production increased in arithmetic progression. He presented these ideas in his
1798 work, An Essay on the Principle of Population. The Law of Diminishing results informed
the latter inference (Ayesha, 2018).
The above disparity implies that population growth will be higher than food supply,
resulting in food shortage. The result would be death. He then posited that natural checks such as
natural disasters and human catastrophes such as wars, and preventive checks such as family
planning and celibacy would regulate the population to a manageable level. This is what is
known as the Malthusian catastrophe (Schneider, 2016).
According to David Ricardo, three factors of production exist: labor,
land, and capital goods. Alongside these are three categories of people; landlords, workers,
and capitalists earning rent, wages, and profits respectively. Ricardo’s burden was how a
society’s total output is distributed among wages, rent, and profits (Stigler, 1952).
Question 2
Ricardo’s model works on the assumption that there is a fixed quantity of capital goods
per laborer. It also demands that the population and the economy’s capital stock grow at the
same rate in a growing economy, which would rarely happen, except coincidentally. The model
asserts that growth is determined by capital accumulation which in turn depends on ploughed
back profits. Profits are determined by increase in agricultural production, specifically food. The
law of diminishing results then comes into play as more labor is used in agriculture, tapering
profit to the point where production is no longer profitable ("Ricardian Theory of Development –
