The latest Kaplan is out, and our favorite journalist and patron saint is in fine form! With a comment titled “The Return of Thomas Malthus,” the MAN himself talks about the rise in global food prices and a renewed focus on the apostle of demographic catastrophe.
In the 1990s, a number of writers, including me, were denounced as grim, deterministic Malthusians because of our emphasis on the role the natural world played in global affairs. It was an era without limits, it seemed, when any country could achieve prosperity and human rights. Contrarily, we argued that rising populations, depleted soils and water resources, and other natural phenomena might limit what could be achieved in specific places, and that there was therefore a need for tragic realism.
Now tragic realism is all the rage, and the media have started to look at Malthus positively. But journalists still misunderstand him. He was a more sympathetic figure than his philosophy may indicate, and his philosophy itself is far broader than the media’s concentration on his ill-starred demographic theory indicates.
Malthus’ specific theory that population increases geometrically while food supplies increase only arithmetically has been shown to be wrong because it did not take into account new technologies. The Industrial Revolution, larger farms, improved fertilizers and much more has consistently increased agricultural output such that famine is left in the dust (and as Kaplan showed in his first book Surrender or Starve, most famines that do occur are created by political manipulations by evil people vying for power). Today, even as Malthus’ name is reemerging in newspapers, Kaplan notes that our current interest in his theories may be short-lived if a new green revolution sweeps Africa, where the population is expected to more than double in my lifetime.
However, once again quoting Kaplan:
If Malthus is wrong, then why is it necessary to prove him wrong again and again, every decade and every century? Perhaps because a fear exists that at some fundamental level, Malthus is right. For the great contribution of this estimable man was to bring nature itself into the argument over politics. Indeed, in an era of global warming, Malthus may prove among the most-relevant philosophers of the Enlightenment.
P.S. Thanks Eddie! As always!
“Indeed, in an era of global warming, Malthus may prove among the most-relevant philosophers of the Enlightenment.”
Really, how bad of writing can one get?
Global warming increases net global crop yields, which would be Malthus’ concern. There’s a real and serious concern about the distribution & relocation of agriculture in the wake of climate change, but this gets into areas of logistics and markets which are outside of Malthus’ argument.
The irony of Malthus’ argument is that it was almost universally correct from the beginning of time until about the year that published. The rise of humanity above the subsistence level was really recent [1], but shows no signs of slowing.
Kaplan is off-base by interpreting Thomas Malthus as essentially a political philosopher in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. The work that made him famous was natural science, in the tradition of Charles Darwin. As such, the philosophical baggage or glory that Malthus brings along with him is irrelevant. He created a model of changes in population and agricultural productivity. He validated it based on past performance. He was wrong regarding future performance.
Praising him as a “realist’ is as besides the point as praising the phrenologists. His is not essentially a a philosophy that guides one to eternal truths. He was a scientist. Who was wrong.
[1] http://www.tdaxp.com/archive/2008/01/20/review-of-a-farewell-to-alms-by-gregory-clark.html
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What tells you that he’s wrong? For some time arithmetical growth can be faster than exponential growth if the line is steep enough. Nevertheless, at some point, the exponential growth always wins.
Malthus has only been “wrong” because we have lucked out a few times, i.e. the Haber-Bosch process and then the Green Revolution. So far, so good. But there is no Moore’s Law for food production. At some point, the curves could cross again.
Malthus was not “wrong”, based on the evidence he had at the time, and reasonable predictions based on it. And, in the longer term, he may, tragically if so, be “right”.
Alan Macfarlane’s ebook about Malthus is very much worth reading.
Any time economic growth fails to keep up with population growth, we face lower living standards. But our technological and economic growth is vastly outpacing our population growth, you say.
Why, yes, ours is, in the first world. But humanity is not all in the same boat. And sometime our well-intentioned efforts to, say, reduce infant mortality only hurt the people living in a less-developed economy. There, the marginal benefit of labor is less than cost of another mouth to feed.
No, Malthus is almost certainly wrong, but it’s one of those situation where the failure case is frightening enough that people get hypnotized by the prospect of “hard choices”.
And, like all modern famines, the current food crisis is a political manufacture: the foolish prioritization of inefficient fuel-stock usage over food-staple generation. One is tempted to make a comparison between the current crisis and the great potato famines, except so far as I know, there hasn’t been any actual outbreaks of actual, you know, famine as of yet.
Dan: “Global warming increases net global crop yields, which would be Malthus’ concern.”
Really, how bad of writing can one get?
Sorry to respond to the global warming bait, but…
crop yields would depend on how much warming and how fast (“known unknowns”?). The Nicholas Stern review and the IPCC reports provide some insights that I found interesting. For “fun”, I recently read Lyman’s more approachable “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet”, since I love reading scenarios. Most of the scenarios do not look good for crop yields. Even if you could increase yields in some new croplands while others went dry, you would have to do some big adjustments. The 19th and 20th centuries saw some huge famines (some artificially created or at the very least least exacerbated by deliberate policy); what will the 21st century’s be like?
There’s also the more considerable sin that Malthus committed besides not forecasting technological development: he ignored property rights. In places of the world with strong/moderate property rights, at the least a weak version of the Coase theorem would assure the failure of his prophecy. In places of the world with weak property rights, we would expect him to be right, or somewhere near right.
Daniel Larison mocks Robert Kaplan here.