The 72 year-old, financial analyst Jeremy Grantham, has been noticed for what some call economic doomsday predictions, typically in open letters to investors. He argues that the late-18th-century doomsayer Thomas Malthus was pretty much right but just had bad timing with his predictions about unsustainable population growth on the eve of the hydrocarbon-fueled Industrial Revolution. Grantham is saying the same thing that both economists and scientists have been saying for decades and basically reaching the same conclusions, with updated numbers.
Grantham asserts that this already overpopulated world will vie increasingly for scarce resources over the next century. Further, capitalism, he says, is ill-equipped to deal with its impact on the earth. The contest over the world’s commodities is just beginning, Grantham says, and a Malthusian, run-out-of-resources economics could eventually take hold.