Malthus’s children

Two hundred years ago, the creepy Revd Thomas Malthus would take to his pulpit to rail against the copulating lower orders. Author of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), Malthus was one of the first promoters of the overpopulation thesis. If people — especially poor people — didn’t stop having so many babies, ‘premature death would visit mankind’. The demand for food would outstrip mankind’s ability to produce it, giving rise to famines, to ‘epidemics, pestilence and plagues’ that would ‘sweep off tens of thousands’. His scabrous sermons provided a satisfying shudder down the backs of his pious, prole-fearing followers.

Today, Malthusian sermons are not delivered in church but in the theatre — the Royal Court Theatre in London, to be precise, where for the past few weeks a modern-day Malthus, Professor Stephen Emmott of Oxford University, has been thrilling the chattering classes with his predictions of population-related global disaster.