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The article is an endeavour to comparatively review classic and modern
theories and/or theoretical concepts regarding relationship between
population development and the overall sustainable development. On the
second centennial anniversary of the first essay that initiated numerous
discussions regarding this relationship, it cannot be said that the
scientific elite is any nearer the consensus. Not only that the hypothesis
of Malthus, Neo-Malthusians and Marxist thinkers are being built upon, but
completely new ideas regarding this relationship are springing up.
Disregarding the ideological differences but placing emphasis on the
technological discrepancies prevailing to this day, the article also
indicates that these apparently irreconcilable theories can permeate and
complement each other. The Malthusian theory could be valid in a peasant
society, but the socialists pointed to its flows in the industrial society.
The Neo-Malthusians modernized the teachings of Malthus and in the "Limits
to Growth" we find a more exact support to the fears of Neo-Malthusians. The
theo1y of E. Boserup provides not only a consistent explanation of the
relationship between population growth so far and sustainable development
but also points to the essence of theoretical differences. On the short run,
at a certain technological level (that is, manner of production) everybody
is in the right: constant growth in population ultimately results in
declining yields (excess population). On the long run, critical mass of
population creates a new technological level which, in the beginning,
requires higher population density (new "laws" of the population).

The present study analyzes computer performance over the last century and a half. Three results stand out. First, there has been a phenomenal increase in computer power over the twentieth century. Depending upon the standard used, computer performance has improved since manual computing by a factor between 1.7 trillion and 76 trillion. Second, there was a major break in the trend around World War II. Third, this study develops estimates of the growth in computer power relying on performance rather than components; the price declines using performance-based measures are markedly larger than those reported in the official statistics.

In recent essays, Thomas Weiss and Rorden Wilkinson argue that analysis of systems of global governance going back to the beginnings of the earliest state systems could provide fundamental insight into the problems that trouble the scholarly field of international relations today. While no social scientist or historian is yet able to give a credible account of global governance over those many millennia, it is possible to begin to recount the history of global governance far back beyond the events with which scholars of international relations begin, 1945, the end of World War II and the founding of the postwar UN system - as Thomas Weiss and Dan Plesch do in their essay in this issue of Global Governance - to provide valuable insights for contemporary global governance. An even more reasonable date for the beginning of the contemporary system of global governance would be 1815. The associated events were the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna and the beginning of a system of governance of Europe and its empires that eventually led to the global system that we now have. The conservative governments that held the congress created many of the institutions that still characterize global governance and gave new life to older institutions and practices whose sources and consequences were central to the nineteenth-century interimperial organizations out of which the United Nations grew. Many of the goals of the interimperial system - the economic goals as well as the goal of universalizing and perfecting the state system - also are still with us. Moreover, the constitutional dynamics of the nineteenth-century system - the forces that led to change within international governance - remain the same. Attention to those dynamics can, as Weiss and Wilkinson would suggest, help us understand the prospects for ameliorating current global problems, including problems that could not have been anticipated two centuries ago. Adapted from the source document.