The Problem with Malthus

The human population explosion of the past two and a half centuries (which has begun a dramatic wind-down) has given many people a stick to shake or at least plenty of food for thought. And beginning at about in the same timeframe as the population explosion, people have warned that we're not going to have enough food to feed us all. The father of this school of thought, Thomas Malthus, basically said that the way populations are growing, it won't take long for population to outpace food production - because there is only so much land that can be put under the plow.

Now, I've heard arguments today that sound quite similar to Malthus's from over 200 years ago, and I've heard critiques of these and of Malthus himself – and it seems to me that both sides seem to be missing something essential. Besides, most of what both sides say is just putting words into Malthus’s mouth as a straw man for the other side’s argument.

The first thing to deal with is: How could Malthus been so wrong in the first place? For his argument seemed so logical.

Let me start my comments about today's cornucopians, on the one side, and the over-population fanatics, on the other, by looking at what went wrong with Malthus. For he saw around him a development which he considered unsustainable: For every funeral he had (he was an Anglican cleric), he had 6 baptisms. (If I went by these statistics today in Germany, the relationship wouldn't exactly be turned around, but there are starting to be more deaths than births in a great number of populous countries.)

Now, what strikes me most, is that Malthus was not interested in explaining the phenomenon that he observed around him but rather to discover a general pattern behind it and to find out where it would usually end. Now, he makes an assumption that might be the reason why he has so many critics today: He assumes that it is normal to have more births than deaths; and that famine, plague and war reduce these population surpluses in due time – meaning, if people were left to themselves. With this assumption, he goes on to explain the mechanics to how an uncontrolled (exponential) population progression works: There can be an (incrementally increasing) economic/nutritional surplus for a good while, but sooner or later, the population will be checked back to the carrying capacity of the land.

Now, instead of accepting the checks that would naturally occur once the situation got out of hand, Malthus made a plea that birthrates should be controlled. It is exactly this plea that most of the developed world has fulfilled this plea and has adopted it as its own.

But why did he make the plea at all? Because he saw that the people who were having most of the babies were quite poor, infesting the city with more poverty.

In that sense, the goal of his essays was to help get rid of much of the poor and of the situation that promotes poverty. For if fewer people were born, more of them would be able to be absorbed into the workforce, escaping poverty. At the same time, if there is a smaller pool of poor people outside the workforce, wages will rise, making the workers more valuable while decreasing poverty dramatically. Of course, some poor are always there, he said. But the reason so many of them were around was a result of the great surplus in the food supply that existed at the time.

So we see that Malthus was more interested in physio-economic processes than in any “collapse” or impending famine that would necessarily (eventually) result from such a continued development.

At the same time, he (like most of the economists at the time who were looking for generally applicable models) failed to see the deeper reality of what was going on around him. Now, what I am proposing would have helped him (at least for his historical inheritance) is for most of us quite risky anyway. For basically he should have looked to see if the observed phenomenon of his environment fit the pattern that he saw repeating itself throughout history, or if the situation was a new one, saying "This time it's different".

Well, anyone who has considered economic movements, especially bubbles on the stock market, for instance, knows that claiming that it’s different this time around is almost a sure sign for being wrong. Prices/valuations only grow to the heavens when they are in a bubble which sooner or later will burst. And Malthus, of course, assumed that this time around was not really different than the other times in history – although it was mostly because that was not his primary question or concern.

Well, it was different that time. It was not only the early years of the Industrial Revolution – which is common knowledge nowadays – but there were a number of other elements which made that era in history different than any other:

1. Agricultural production per acre had been rising for a good century, especially in Great Britain, so that many more people could be fed and a much smaller portion of the population needed to work in the fields (by that time less than 50%!)
2. Transportation (later becoming part of the industrial revolution with the railroads) infrastructure was being greatly extended, so that food, and of course other production surpluses, could be more easily brought to food-hungry regions and urban populations
3. General hygiene and medicine practices were improving, so that especially infant mortality was beginning to fall dramatically
4. War had become the sole domain of the state – piracy and hoarding bands (especially from the Russian Steppe) were removed, allowing for greater prosperity

In short, what Malthus was seeing was the beginnings of a brand new trend. The old rules were not completely being replaced but rather being placed in a new framework and – until the limits of the new system were found – out of effect for a while. It's as if an isolated island country were to discover a new, empty continent and then try to say that things would return to the old limits quite soon – once the extra deer there were hunted off, for instance. But a continent has much more than just deer, and that continent will not just disappear. In the case under study here, industrialization was adopting new methods while fossil fuels, the real source of our new wealth, were just beginning to be exploited at all. Since then, the per capita amount of energy being used has grown about 100 times. Back then, one man rode a horse, e.g. which is exactly one horsepower. Nowadays one would drive a car – which usually has at least 100 horsepower.

In short, we can say that humanity, starting with Great Britain/ Northwestern Europe, was certainly moving into uncharted waters. For this was not the periodic (and in the long run, gradual) growth which Malthus assumed to be taking place. We were not simply populating a few new empty territories, as the Portuguese had done, for instance, four centuries earlier when they discovered the mid-Atlantic islands, increasing population capacity incrementally. No, with the new industrial methods and the new energy resources, we were able to multiply the amount of energy put to our personal use in comparison to before the Industrial Revolution.

So what does that mean for us today? Calling on Malthus’s ghost in and of itself usually doesn’t help for either side. For, was he generally right but only 2 centuries early in calling on natural population checks? World population has grown almost ten times since he began writing and will probable increase another 50% until we’re done. And are we in the process of finding the new limits to the world system which Malthus couldn’t even guess existed? Or, as his model would suggest, are we in a severe overshoot which is only waiting for the 4 horsemen of the apocalypse to rear their ugly heads?

Of course there is the opposite view, that it is futile to try to find limits in a world that doesn’t actually know any. This view works against most of history – in the long run! – where two steps forward are usually followed by one step backwards and sometimes is followed by two or more backwards, but not usually. At the same time, we can generally agree that homo sapiens is the one species that has continued to push all “natural” limits into some distant future: The energy of sunlight was replaced (supplemented) by fire, natural selection by breeding, scavenging by agriculture, bodily abilities by tools, direct communication by speech, by writing, by recording, by databanks etc., etc..

Water is not a barrier, heights and depths are reachable, hot and cold can be breached, and we’ve been experimenting with airless environments for the past 50 years. The five continents are becoming “boring”, so that we’ve even invented a brand new continent: cyberspace. At the same time, the limits we seem to be reaching right now are of elementary/chemical nature: Phosphorus, potassium, helium, rare earths, oil and fresh water.

Malthus himself was not worried about any definite limits. His opinion was that there are limits but that we cannot really know where they are. Rather, we should control population without worrying about the limits – and by doing so controlling poverty. It sounds like the path that China took fifty years ago and that most of the West and Japan have been on since at least the 1970s with the adoption of the use of the pill, while some have been on it (e.g. France and then Germany) for over a century as their populations have stabilized and are even beginning to drop.

Well, some days I think we’re in a Malthusian “trap” as the peak-oilists, the environmentalists and the population fanatics believe. And sometimes I’m sure we’re moving onto another brand new continent, into a new paradigm as the cornucopians, the singularists and most economists assume. There is most certainly evidence for both: On the one side limits in the amount of primary energy being produced (and with esp. oil production beginning a long fall in production) and on the other side methods which have the promise of transforming our intensely energy- and transportation-based paradigm into something new. Digitalization has made some transport simply redundant.

These are the two elements that have and will continue to be discussed ad naseum by their respective proponents, both calling on Malthus’s ghost.