Law of Population

"Law of Population" was a massive treatise written by Michael Thomas Sadler as a response to Thomas Robert Malthus's works on population growth.

In this work Sadler refutes the extreme conclusions Malthus came to regarding the geometric growth of populations, such as that populations could "double in as little as ten years," and instead proposes that the growth of populations is a far less worrisome menace than thought at the time. It is worth noting that at this period in history population growth had become a "political bugbear" throughout England, much in a way comparable to modern day fears of terrorism or Cold War Era fears of thermonuclear war.

In this work Sadler proposed many factors in models of population growth that are now wideley accepted as fact, such as that "Birth rates tend to decline with increasing levels of prosperity."