The Economics of Population

Front Cover
Transaction Publishers - 225 pages

From inside the book

Contents

V
5
VI
19
VIII
31
X
39
XI
40
XII
43
XIII
53
XV
61
XXVII
119
XXVIII
121
XXX
123
XXXI
129
XXXII
145
XXXV
159
XXXVIII
167
XXXIX
185

XVI
67
XVII
71
XVIII
73
XIX
77
XXI
79
XXII
91
XXIV
99
XXV
107
XXVI
111
XL
193
XLI
195
XLII
207
XLV
213
XLVI
219
L
221
LI
225
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Page 102 - I confess I am not charmed with the ideal of life held out by those who think that the normal state of human beings is that of struggling to get on ; that the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life, are the most desirable lot of human kind, or anything but the disagreeable symptoms of one of the phases of industrial progress.
Page xv - One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head ; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations ; to put it on is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another ; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper ; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations...
Page 57 - College spread with one kind only ; as, for instance, with fennel : and were it empty of other inhabitants, it might in a few ages be replenished from one nation only ; as, for instance, with Englishmen.
Page 71 - The friends of humanity cannot but wish that in all countries the labouring classes should have a taste for comforts and enjoyments, and that they should be stimulated by all legal means in their exertions to procure them. There cannot be a better security against a superabundant population.
Page 101 - This impossibility of ultimately avoiding the stationary state — this irresistible necessity that the stream of human industry should finally spread itself out into an apparently stagnant sea — must have been, to the political economists of the last two generations, an unpleasing and discouraging prospect ; for the tone and tendency of their speculations goes completely to identify all that is economically desirable with the progressive state, and with that alone.
Page 49 - ... the human species would increase as the numbers 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. In two centuries the population would be to the means of subsistence as 256 to 9; in three centuries as 4096 to 13, and in two thousand years the difference would be almost incalculable.
Page 49 - ... half that number. And, at the conclusion of the first century, the population would be...
Page 45 - First, that food is necessary to the existence of man. Secondly, that the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state.
Page 51 - That population cannot increase without the means of subsistence is a proposition so evident that it needs no illustration. That population does invariably increase where there are the means of subsistence, the history of every people that have ever existed will abundantly prove. And that the superior power of population cannot be checked without producing misery or vice, the ample portion of these too bitter ingredients in the cup of human life and the continuance of the physical causes that seem...
Page 103 - Hitherto it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day's toil of any human being.

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