Comments on: Kaplan on Malthus

By: TGGP

TGGP — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:40:33 +0000

Daniel Larison mocks Robert Kaplan here.

By: Admiral

Admiral — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:13:28 +0000

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.

By: von Kaufman-Turkestansky

von Kaufman-Turkestansky — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 22:20:51 +0000

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?

By: Curzon

Curzon — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:22:36 +0000

Dan: “Global warming increases net global crop yields, which would be Malthusâ�� concern.”
Really, how bad of writing can one get?

By: Mitch H.

Mitch H. — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:58:06 +0000

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.

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:32:36 +0000

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.

By: Lexington Green

Lexington Green — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:26:39 +0000

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.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 15:00:39 +0000

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.

By: tdaxp » Blog Archive » The Sugar Buyout

tdaxp » Blog Archive » The Sugar Buyout — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:24:38 +0000

[...] rant to my attention (Sullivan was also wrong on his bizarre flat capital tax, btw), identified Kaplan’s piece on Malthus (also highlighted on Eddie’s blog), and recently shared this criticism of Florida’s [...]

By: Dan tdaxp

Dan tdaxp — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 14:07:06 +0000

“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