Malthus on population:

Although the poor lack the self-restraint of the rich to reproduce beyond the population that the food supply can support, the population must be must be governed in order to supply the demands of the rest of the population through both preventative and positive population checks. The human population must be kept in balance with the supply of food in order to keep people from going hungry. However, the increasing population is surpassing the food supply. Therefore, positive checks and preventative checks must occur in order to shrink the size of the population. Positive checks are natural events that happen and keep the population low. Examples of these population checks are poverty, disease, famine, and wars. Events such as those keep the population from surpassing the food supply of the human race. Preventative checks are population checks done by someone limiting the size of their family to the amount of people they can afford to support. Living beyond ones means is a reason for over population and must be stopped through a simple thought process of calculating the amount of children one can support. Through these checks, mankind will be able to balance out the population that the poor cannot keep down.