Malthus's Population Theory Analysis

For their part, economists base their argument on the notion of “carriage capacity” argument which was advanced by Malthus (25-28). According to Malthus, population growth is geometric growth, and substance is arithmetic growth. Until a positive check happens such as war and famine, the population growth just exceeds the carrying capacity. To prevent this undesired positive checks from happening, Malthus suggested adopting preventive checks, which will include giving fewer resources to the poor.
Indeed, according to Malthus, if enough resources are given to the poor these later will end up exploiting the resources provided to them and multiply their numbers. Although Malthus did not foresee the optimization of output through the wide-spread

Easterlin, for example focuses on three basic proximate determinants of fertility notably, the demand for children, the supply of children, and the costs of fertility regulation (41). they defined the demand for children as the number of surviving children parents would want if fertility regulation were costless; and the supply of children as the number of surviving children a couple would have if they made no attempt to limit family size. Further; they argued that fertility regulation imposes costs on household of two types: psychic cost (i.e. the displeasure associated with the ideas or practice of fertility control), and market cost (i.e. time and money necessary to learn about and use specific techniques). This cost, in turn depends upon the attitude in society towards the general notion of fertility control, the specific technique, and the degree of access of fertility control in terms of both availability of information and the range of specific technique and their prices

a conceptually simple and yet a powerful model that fairly incorporates the key features of other theories of fertility proposed by economists, sociologists and demographers), its basic weakness, notably its incapacity to quantify the determinants of fertility and the degree of implementation of reproductive preference was also criticized by other researchers. According to Bongaarts the debate on fertility decline falls into three basic categories. The first category is that of economists, suggests that fertility decline is brought about by changes in the demand for children. The second category, that of family planning proponents, argues that the large unmet need for contraception and the substantial levels of unwanted fertility could be reduced by providing information about, and access to contraception. The third category, a mid-way position, claims that fertility decline is a complex process that involves key roles for changes in the demand for children, as well as for the diffusion of new attitudes about birth control and for greater accessibility to contraception provided by family planning programs. Easterlins’and crimmins model falls into this mid-way category (30,