Criticism
Carlyle's view was attacked by John Stuart Mill as making a virtue of toil itself, stunting the development of the weak, and committing the "vulgar error of imputing every difference which he finds among human beings to an original difference of nature."
The teachings of Malthus eventually became known under the umbrella phrase "Malthus' Dismal Theorem". While some argue that his predictions were forestalled by dramatic improvements in the efficiency of food production in the 20th century during the Green Revolution, classical liberal economists argue that the law of supply and demand would mean that if the supply of food were to decline, the price of food would then rise, thereby allowing for a gradual adjustment in consumption and preventing an all out famine.
Read more about this topic: The Dismal Science
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“In criticism I will be bold, and as sternly, absolutely just with friend and foe. From this purpose nothing shall turn me.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1845)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)