Ester Boserup

Who was Ester Boserup?

Ester Boserup, born Ester Børgesen in Copenhagen, was a Danish economist. She studied economic and agricultural development, worked at the United Nations as well as other international organizations, and she wrote several books. Her most notable book is The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure. This "classic ... work on agricultural intensification" presents a "dynamic analysis embracing all types of primitive agriculture." The work challenges the assumption dating back to Malthus’s time that agricultural methods determine population. Instead, Boserup argued that population determines agricultural methods. A major point of her book is that "necessity is the mother of invention". It was her great belief that humanity would always find a way and was quoted in saying "The power of ingenuity would always outmatch that of demand" in a letter to Northern Irish philosopher T.S Hueston. She also influenced the debate on the women in workforce and human development, and the possibility of better opportunities of work and education for women.