Malthusian catastrophe (also known as Malthusian check)

is a prediction of a forced return to subsistence-level conditions

once population growth has outpaced agricultural production.
Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of
population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that
premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind
are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of
destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this
war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in
terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still
incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels
the population with the food of the world.
Thomas Malthus, 1798. An Essay on the Principle of Population. Chapter VII, p. 61
In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus famously predicted that short-term gains
in living standards would inevitably be undermined as human population
growth outstripped food production, and thereby drive living standards
back toward subsistence.
We were, he argued, condemned by the tendency of population to grow
geometrically while food production would increase only arithmetically.
 For 200 years, economists have contended that Malthus overlooked
technological advancement, which would allow human beings to keep
ahead of the population curve.

The argument is that food production can indeed grow geometrically

because production depends not only on land but also on know-how.

With advances in seed breeding, soil nutrient replenishment (such as

chemical fertilizers), irrigation, mechanization and more, the food
supply can stay well ahead of the population curve.
 More generally, advances in technology in all its aspects
agriculture, energy, water use, manufacturing, disease control,
information management, transport, communicationscan keep
production rising ahead of population.
 Another factor undermining Malthuss argument, it would seem,
is the demographic transition, according to which societies move
from conditions of high fertility rates roughly offset by high
mortality rates to conditions of low fertility rates together with low
mortality rates.

Malthus did not reckon with the advance of public health, family
planning, and modern contraception, which together with
urbanization and other trends, would result in a dramatic decline in
fertility rates to low levels, even below the replacement rate of
2.1 children per household.
 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels argued that Malthus failed to recognize a
crucial difference between humans and other species. In capitalist societies,
as Engels put it, scientific and technological "progress is as unlimited and at
least as rapid as that of population".

Henry George criticized Malthus's view that population growth was a

cause of poverty, arguing that poverty was caused by the concentration of
ownership of land and natural resources.
 Julian Simon was another economist who argued that there could be no global
Malthusian catastrophe, because of two factors:

(1) the existence of new knowledge, and educated people to take

advantage of it, and;
(2) "economic freedom", that is, the ability of the world to increase
production when there is a profitable opportunity to do so.