Was Thomas Malthus right?

[Swamp Rat]

"In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long- continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then I had at last got a theory by which to work".

Charles Darwin, from his autobiography. (1876)

This often quoted passage reflects the significance Darwin affords Malthus in formulating his theory of Natural Selection. What "struck" Darwin in Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) was Malthus's observation that in nature plants and animals produce far more offspring than can survive, and that Man too is capable of overproducing if left unchecked. Malthus concluded that unless family size was regulated, man's misery of famine would become globally epidemic and eventually consume Man. Malthus' view that poverty and famine were natural outcomes of population growth and food supply was not popular among social reformers who believed that with proper social structures, all ills of man could be eradicated.

(snip)

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/malthus.html

*****

Another interesting website:

For the last two hundred years, Malthus' An Essay on the Principles of Population has served to define the terms of debate on human population growth and the Earth's capacity to provide subsistence. And, if human civilization lasts that long, William Catton's 1980 book, Overshoot may well turn out to be the definitive statement on this issue for the next two centuries. In this Forum, Dr. Catton elucidates the contemporary relevance of Malthus, by examining the concept of overshoot —the ability of humans to temporarily expand their numbers at the expense of the natural world's long-term sustainability— in the context of Charles Darwin's understanding of population competition.
 
Malthus, Darwin, and population competition

In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus tried to inform people that a human population, like a population of any other species, had the potential to increase exponentially were it not limited by finite support from its resource base. He warned us that growth of the number of human consumers and their demands will always threaten to outrun the growth of sustenance. When Charles Darwin read Malthus, he recognized more fully than most other readers that the Malthusian principle applied to all species. And Darwin saw how reproduction beyond replacement can foster a universal competitive relationship among a population's members, as well as how expansion by a population of one species may be at the expense of populations of other species.

Others were not so perceptive. When I was in high school, the textbook used in my biology class listed "Over-production of individuals" first among "the chief factors assigned by Darwin to account for the development of new species from common ancestry through natural selection" (Moon and Man, 1933:457), but it did not cite Malthus nor discuss his concerns about population pressure. That neglect was typical because, for a while, "it was argued widely that developments had disproved Malthus, that the problem was no longer man's propensity to reproduce more rapidly than his sustenance, but his unwillingness to reproduce adequately in an industrial and urban setting" (Taeuber, 1964:120).

(snip)

http://members.optusnet.com.au/bnbg6billion/6billion_Ma...

[bemildred]

1. Yep. He was.

This mistates him a bit, he was explaining the status quo, not
predicting some future calamity.

[Blue Wally]

2. It has been a few years.......

Forty-five years ago (1959) that I read Malthus for Econ 102. Malthus major point, which has been glossed over by those using his name for a zero-growth program, was that the desperately poor should be allowed to starve and die because any attempt to help them through welfare served only to degrade the survivable poor class just above them. Malthus' findings are hardly progressive.

[bemildred]

4. Not meaning to pick a fight, but,

his central point:

Malthus concluded that unless family size was regulated, man's misery of famine would become globally epidemic and eventually consume Man.

is indisputably correct. How one chooses to deal with that is another
matter, and to be sure is has been used for social darwinist arguments.
But it also leads to Stewart Brand's observation that if we are to be
like Gods, we might as well be good at it. If we fail to learn to
manage ourselves, nature will continue to do the job for us in one way
or another.

[gottaB]

8. Are you familiar with the Epic of Atrahasis?

Nintu ultimately solves the problem of famine and disease by ordaining that one third of the women shall be egisitu women--they shall not be permitted to give birth. The original cause of the problem however was not lack of abundance but lazy gods. It's as clear a case of class conflict as one finds in the ancient world.

If we can extrapolate based upon what is known about recent gathering-hunting societies, then we can say that the idea of regulating human fertility (or fecundity) is nothing new. What changed with the Neolithic Revolution was the introduction of class or caste as a basis for organizing the regulation of fertility.

In order for the Malthusian hyposthesis to be interesting, more interesting than say the Epic of Atrahasis, one would need to show a clear trend towards population growth outsripping productive capacity--completely forgetting I guess the 100,000 odd years Homo sapiens roamed the planet without any real explosion in population growth. I don't see that. I'm not sure at all that the incidence of hunger in Mesopotamia today is higher, as a proportion of the total population, than it was 10,000 years ago. I am sure that much of the malnutrition observed in Iraq has nothing to do with the inability of Iraqis to exercize moral restraint, or a lack of resources in the country, and that thousands are dying unnecessarily from the effects of malnutrition and dirty water. It could be otherwise, and that's something to keep in mind whenever a concerned memeber of the literate classes puts forward the notion that some group of people further down the totem pole are breeding out of control.

[bemildred]

9. I'm not really interested in defending Mr. Malthus as such.

I'm more familiar with Gilgamesh, Enki, all that, but I don't see that
it matters much.

I don't particularly disagree with anything you say, but I also don't
see that it invalidates the point made: that unrestrained growth will
outstrip environmental carrying capacity. That Mr. Malthus and Mr.
Darwin did their work in a racist and class-riddled social systen, which
is true, has nothing to do with the validity of the points they made.
That humans have successfully regulated their numbers in various ways
throughout most of their history does not somehow imply that things will
be ducky if they don't, and there seems little question that our numbers
have increased alarmingly in the last few centuries.

[aneerkoinos]

26. Jesus the Malthusian Profet?

Here's interesting quote from the Gospel of Thomas (quite different from the 'procreate and fullfill the Earth for which Jesus is blamed by Pope and other Power/Satan worshippers ;))

(79)
(1) A woman in the crowd said to him: "Hail to the womb that carried you and to the breasts that fed you."
(2) He said to : "Hail to those who have heard the word of the Father (and) have truly kept it.
(3) For there will be days when you will say: ‘Hail to the womb that has not conceived and to the breasts that have not given milk.’"

[bemildred]

28. That is interesting.

It is my impression that one generally finds in pre-agrarian cultures
that there are social mechanisms in place to control population. And
that seems obvious in a way, when the food supply is limited and not
under your control, you have to control the number of mouths or you
all risk starvation. Usually these mechanisms take the form of
restrictions on who may breed with whom and infanticide/abortion in
one form or another. Sometimes one also sees cannibalism, a practice
that has it's own drawbacks, but which is very effective in keeping
numbers down. One generally sees the more repellent of these practices
where the population problem is more acute. Peoples that live
sparsely on the environment are also generally pretty mellow with
each other. That which is rare (people) has more value.

It seems obvious to me that for a long time the primary selective pressure
on human groups has been from other human groups, so I suppose one
can consider inter-group warfare one of the means of controlling
population too.

When agrarian cultures came into being, they brought with them insulated
elites, who didn't care all that much if a few peasants starved, and
"civilization" also brought in the instruments of state power, so you
start to see the sorts of disfunctional and delusional situations we
have now and the corresponding disfunctional and delusional arguments
we have today.

Mr. Malthus was very much a part of that sort of disfunction, and his
conclusion that the poor should be allowed to starve was wrong, not merely
in the classist sense, but in the sense that it was the wrong way to
reduce the birth rate, but he was the first in the Western intellectual
line to point out that humans are subject to the same laws as other
species, and for that he should get credit.

[yellowcanine]

21. Generation time is more important than family size in determining

rate of population increase. Industrialized countries generally have longer generation times as a result of delaying marriage and reproduction. This has a huge effect on rate of increase. China would have been better off just encouraging people to wait until they were 30 to reproduce - it would have been more effective and more socially acceptable than the "1 child" policy.

[bemildred]

23. To be sure.

One of the most effective ways to control population is to
reduce or eliminate poverty and illiteracy, and to empower
women. The evidence is quite clear at this point.

[cornfedyank]

27. that is a very good idea

also lets them get to know each other.

[fedsron2us]

10. You are correct. Malthus was a political economist

not an evolutionary biologist. His work was essentially an attack on any attempt to provide relief to the poor in England. He thought attempts to relieve want and misery were doomed to failure and that therefore the correct moral choice was not to intervene at all. I can see why these views might appeal to certain to certain Republican theorists but I find it deeply depressing to see him touted as some sort of seer by so many people on the DU.

http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Biographies/Philosophy/Malthus.htm

edit for link

[bemildred]

11. I've been here since 2001.

I don't believe I've seen Malthus mentioned here before this.
It might have happened and I missed it, but it doesn't come up a lot.

I don't see anyone here saying he was a seer, we are just saying he
had a point. That point would not even be questioned if one was
taking about lemmings or caribou, but for some reason when it is
applied to humans people go bonkers. One can admit that population
is an issue without advocating social darwinism or letting the poor
die or culling the "unfit" or whatever. I don't really appreciate
being conflated with social-darwinist dickheads just because I think
population issues are not all twaddle.

[fedsron2us]

12. Population and resource depletion are a legitimate issues

but Malthus had no interest in ecology or the environment. He was a utilitarian political philosopher of the laissez faire school. As a conservative church man it is highly unlikely that he would have accepted Darwin's views on evolution.

I accept that Malthus is not mentioned by name that often in DU. Nonetheless, his views are definitely out there if you care to look for them, particularly when people start discussing the carrying capacity of the planet or the likelihood of a global dieoff. There are a couple of current threads on the subject of a global flu pandemic which trot out the argument that what the world needs to fix its problems is some sort of population cull. Similar ideas are occasionally raised from time to time on various peak oil discussions

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=1029056&mesg_id=1029056
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=2754047#2755309

The gist of the theory is that the carrying capacity of the planet is no more than 2 billion people, and the implication, whether explicitly stated or not, is that 4 billion people are going to die. Given that the population of the USA is no more than 300,000,000 it looks as though the bulk of the mortality will be afflicting the rest of the world with particular emphasis on Africa and Asia. As these continents are far more directly effected by any population crisis it might not be unreasonable to expect them to be leading any discussion on the subject. Yet apart from the practical steps of launching family planning drives in India and China they do not seem to be particularly agitated. The main proponents of Malthusian theory appear to reside in the G7 countries where population growth is slowing or, in the case of Europe, about to go sharply into reverse. Many of these ideas can be traced back to the 'Limits of Growth' published by the Club of Rome in the 1960's. What is interesting is that these views tend to find favour whenever the West is confronted by crisis and uncertainty. Both in the 1970s and today oil, the Middle East and the potential threat from external rivals such as Russia and China are fueling the angst. There seems to be huge amounts of worry about the subject of population growth and resource depletion in North America and Europe just at the same time as it looks as if they are going to be supplanted as the worlds dominant powers by Asia. I suppose for inhabitants of the USA who consume 25% of all the world energy resources the prospect of having to compete with the growing might of China for raw materials is very unsettling. In some ways contemplating armageddon, be it in the form of the Christian rapture or some type of enviromental holocaust, is more comforting for people than accepting the fact that they might not be calling the shots in the world for much longer.

[bemildred]

14. Blah, blah, blah.

See post #4 and post #9.

Newton invented the Calculus (pace Liebnitz) but was quite a loon
on religious issues. One does not therefore infer that Newton was
wrong about the Calculus. Neither does one infer that Newton was
wrong because of the nefarious uses made of the calculus since his
time. One must keep separate things separate. History is full of
guys like Kepler that discovered important "laws" in the context of
general medieval credulity. One does not therefore say Kepler was
wrong, one gives him due credit for his discovery.

[blindpig]

15. so, because the concept of carrying capacity might be used by 1st World

racist then it must be denied or condemned? Newsflash: carrying capacity is a biological concept that has been demonstrated time and again. Now if you wish separate our species from the rest of life on Earth then you are in deep denial of the past 150 years of science.

Do you believe that our species can continue to reproduce unchecked, to be bailed out by some deus ex machina, rapture or Science? Wishful thinking. Is it ok to exterminate 90% of living species? I find the idea abominable.

Undoubtedly there are some who adhere to a social darwinist take on population and Malthus, but they are not here at DU. I have been accused of being a "malthusian", which I greatly resent. To care for all of life on Earth and the quality of human lives is not morally reprehensible.

To invoke the need for population control, indeed reduction, is not necessarily nazi, though of course those types can use those arguments to attempt to legitimize their evil. It is rather accepting biological reality.

Population reduction, through one child families and promotion of non-breeding should be for everybody on this planet with the exception of peoples in danger of extinction. Anything else would be unjust.

[gottaB]

24. This just in: Homo sapiens regulates its own reproduction

The "concept" of unchecked reproduction does not fit the empirical data. Fertility is culturally regulated in every known human group. Humans are organic lifeforms and part of an ecological system, and should be studied accordingly. That's a scientific proposition. However, it is not scientific to ignore data that would tend to contradict your beliefs. Homo sapien's capacities for managing its own reproduction and its environment are remarkably greater than those of other species. If that empirical fact doesn't figure into your models, your models will be of limited use.

You don't seem to get why racism matters in this discussion, so I will attempt to explain it to you. The essential intellectual mistake of the racist is to equate cultural and social differences with biological differences. In fact human groups display no biological differences of any significance in these regards. Everybody has the equipment, more or less, and everybody's use of their equipment is more or less mediated by their social milieux. This fact is lost on racists, Malthus for instance, who speculate that some groups have an inherently diminished capacity for exercizing, in Malthus' words, "moral restraint." We could get into discussion of how Malthus encoded anti-Irish bigotry into his writings, and whether his clear disdain for the masses speaks more to the phenonemon of class than to race. That would be beside the point, which is that the subhuman does not exist as a product of evolutionary biology, but is a human invention.

[aneerkoinos]

31. Population decline

I'm afraid you can't exclude North America from a painfull one. The way things are going, USA, without socialist health care and lots of guns and trigger happy people, is after the collapse of its petrodollar empire US is the likeliest candidate for die-off scenario much worse that what Russia has been going through since the fall of Soviet empire.

Gladly, the theory about carrying capacity of only 2 billion is not credible. Even in post carbon energy economy we have ways to harvest suns energy much more efficiently than pre carbon age. But because of energy crisis, population is likely to peak before 2050 and then decline slowly. My guess is 4 billion by the end of the century.

[gottaB]

3. Right to provide pseudoscientific rationalizations for social injustice?

Sure, why not?

[bhikkhu]

5. Likely Correct.

Whatever the social implications, a fact on the ground is ignored or reinterpreted at peril. Throughout my schooling, he was seldom mentioned in a sentence without a "discredited" clause. Largely because cheap oil fueled the industrialization of food production. And in the 60's and seventies industrial fertilizers fueled another big food production increase.

The genetically engineered modern produce is supposed to fuel the next increase, but there are two problems. The first is water. You can engineer corn, for instance, to produce a dozen heads per plant, but this production is still dependent upon a water quota per head. More water, more production, less water, less production. Few places in the world have fresh water resources which are not being fully utilized already. The second problem is peak oil. Modern farming can't be done without machines, and as oil becomes more scarce the real energy-out vs energy in equation starts going the wrong way.

Malthus's predictions have been kept at bay for nearly two hundred years, but the tools we used to avoid them are wearing out. He may well be a more common topic of discussion sooner than any of us would like.

[MissMarple]

6. So, is this like a true, true, and unrelated answer?

So he was correct, the operative question is... so now what?

[Spiffarino]

7. Off-topic, but

...are the thinkers finally coming back to DU?

Thank God!

[420inTN]

13. Part of China's Population Control program is due to strained resources...

The Chinese government realized that they were increasingly needing to import food in order to feed their population.

As the population rises, more resources are needed to sustain the population. That's one reason why the Amazonian rainforrest is being razed in order to raise cattle. However, the razed land is only good for a couple of years, so "they" have to keep cutting into the rainforrest for more land.

This is also part of the reason why land is overfarmed resulting in increased desertification. Additionally, forrests are razed for building supplies and housing subdivisions.

How many acres of land are needed to provide for the largest population centers (NY, Chicago, LA, Detroit, London, Paris, Hong Kong, etc.)?

If we don't control our own population, nature will eventually intervene, and we will have a population crash (provided Global Warming/Ice Age doesn't do it first).

[depakid]

16. While Malthus may have been corrrect in terms of

biological economics- his twisting of the principles into what would later be called Social Darwinism was one of the worst rationalizations of scientific principle to public policy ever devised.

Abolishment of the Poor Law accomplished nothing other than to give rise to the conditions we read about so vividly in Charles Dickens and was failures in every extent that Malthus might have imagined.

As Hazlitt stated in his reply to Malthus:

"The greater part of a community ought not to be paupers or starving. When the interests of the many are thus regularly and outrageously sacrificed to those of the few, the social order needs repairing. A street lined with coaches and with beggars dying at the Steps of the doors, gives a strong lesson to common thought and political foresight, if not to humanity."

[cornfedyank]

17. i remember an episode of death valley days

A fellow is trying to cross a desert. Sees a ghost town. He comes to a hand pumped well with a note attached to the pump. Note reads " Buried 10 feet away is a gallon jug full of water. Pour the water down the pump to swell the leathers, then you can pump all the water you want. Refill and rebury the jar."

the thirsty traveler has to make a decision. Believe the note or drink the bird in the hand.

NASA and Hubble have shown me that there are many roads homo sapien can choose. I will be ashamed if we just empty the bottle and leave it empty for the next passerby.

[mhr]

18. Peak Oil Will Be The Defining Limitation That Won't Be Solved By

A 1,000 NASAs.

Google peak oil and begin to read. The analysis is real and the end of cheap oil is in sight. Regrettably, there is no ready substitute for the benefits derived from oil. This is particularly true for transportation and agriculture. What many forget, simply becoming more efficient will only delay the problem. In the end we will still run out of oil.

[cornfedyank]

19. there have to be alternatives. Even for peak oil

if the scene is already set for the next hundred years, then we might as well quit fooling ourselves about being humane beings and continue the "growling dog with both paws wrapped around the food dish" neocolonialist strategy. If that is the case, then homo sapien is an evolutionary deadend.

[mhr]

22. Many People Would Like To Believe In The "Technology Will Save Us"

mantra. Sadly, there does not appear to be a silver bullet solution this time around. Mind you, there are mitigating technologies that will ameliorate some pain and suffering.

However, there is no one bright shining star of a solution to appear on the horizon. Consequently, "Peak Oil" will still be the defining limitation over the next hundred years.

[JohnOneillsMemory]

30. Very interesting parable. Gonna repeat it, thanks. n/t

[yellowcanine]

20. Malthus was mostly correct but wrong on some details.

Where he was "wrong" was mainly in the details - he probably greatly underestimated the carrying capacity of the earth by not taking into account the possibility of technology and use of fossil fuels greatly increasing our capacity for food production. It turns out that the limiting factor probably won't be food production per se but waste production. The other thing he failed to take into account was the degree to which migration tends to mitigate the effects of overpopulation in one area of the world. Also, most animal and plant populations, including humans, are kept below carrying capacity by predators and parasites. With humans, there is another factor at work. As countries industrialize and people's standard of living increases, they tend to have smaller families and more importantly - delay age of 1st reproduction (2 earner families, longer time in job training and education, access to birth control, etc. contribute to this.). If you want to try an interesting exercise sometime, take the exponential equation for population rate of increase and plug in different numbers for generation time and see what happens. Delaying reproduction has a far greater effect than the number of offspring, although of course delaying reproduction generally also means there will be fewer offspring, because fertility rates decrease with age.

[teryang]

25. Malthusianism is an imperialist concommitant

When "free trade" notions and the unseen hand fail, the powers that be return to carving up world markets and resources. Peaceful commerce, competition and innovation are replaced by theories of survival and brute force.

Changed behaviors, technologies, and distribution systems offset the inevitability of Malthusian diasters. However, those regimes incapable of changed behaviors or more effective distribution networks will ultimately fail. There are always those ruling elites who would rather fight than switch. Why innovate and pursue more rewarding cost benefit ratios when you can go to war in a short sighted grab for resources? Malthusianism with its alleged inevitability provides a tolerable rationalization for the brutish behaviors that accompany its rise. The inequitable distribution of the costs of such behavior makes it appear profitable to those who don't pay the price but reap the benefits.

It is all too obvious from the examples of the asian tigers that western models of economic development need to be adapted to conditions of population and distribution realities in Asia. However, those importing the western model of development lock, stock, and barrel, will choke on their own air before they understand that car ownership, as one example, is not viable as an economic behavior for long. Another example is the water supply in Asia which is loaded with filth, due to an inadequate public works capitalization while billions are spent on armaments and the "tallest buildings in the world."

[enki23]

29. he was right about the big picture

but when he tried to make predictions based on it he failed utterly. we haven't played out our endgame on earth yet, but we will someday if we keep expanding (if something else doesn't get us first).

[TWiley]

32. Two German philosophers, Hankel and Hegel I believe,

formulated a theory that was eventually called "social Darwinism" where the principles discovered by Darwin were directly applied to civilization and the human race.

I believe that the principle of strife, the idea that species only improve or evolve during harsh periods of survival was misused by those philosophers to justify the harsh conditions created by Plato's republic where the ideal was the government of the masses by the few without a middle class. Rulers and peasants. The basis of modern day conservative republicanism.

Aristotle, on the other hand, believed the best way to govern was through a huge middle class. He correctly reasoned that the middle class would protect the rich from the tyranny of the poor, and at other times, protect the poor from the tyranny of the rich. The creation and maintenance of a huge middle class is in direct conflict with the principle of strife.

You will also notice that the NAZI party melted the philosophy of Hankel with religion to create the basis of their racist world view.

We cannot view the world as a farmer would. The best breeding stock for food, the best stock for manual labor, and the best for the landfill. You will notice that it is the southern farmer that benefited most from the slavery of the past, and farmers in general today exploit all types of different nationalities, rarely the white race. We must be better than that.

There will be no peace when one race is dominated by another, we will never win the war on terrorism if we follow the path of social Darwinism.

It might sound quaint, but a world of equality between the sexes, religions, and races is the only answer.