Nineteenth-century British economist Thomas Malthus reasoned that because the amount of land is fixed, as population grows and more labor is applied to land, the productivity of labor in food production would decline, leading to widespread famine. This prediction is what led economics to be called the “dismal science.” Malthus’s prediction failed to come to pass as advances in technology, such as the Green Revolution, greatly increased labor productivity in food production. Do such technological advances contradict the law of diminishing marginal returns?