Malthus believed that population growth is always faster than the growth in agricultural production as well as the production of other resources. So, the population growth overtakes the growth in other resources. Therefore, the only way to increase for prosperity is controlling population growth.

The human beings have limited ability to voluntarily reduce the population growth, so he believed that the positive checks to population growth in form of famines and diseases are the nature's way to deal with the imbalance between food supply and increasing population.