We are, of course, at the heart of the problem.  When Malthus wrote his essay, the human population was about a billion.  Over the next century and a half, it tripled to 3 billion and by the turn of the 21st century, it had more than doubled again to 7 billion. Remarkably, even as the human population expanded from 3 to 6 billion, the fraction of people enduring chronic hunger had fallen from half to about a sixth.  But if Malthus thought the game was already over in 1800, how did we manage to grow 7-fold and reduce the fraction of the hungry at the same time?