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!

Does Africa get aid because it is poor or is it poor because it gets aid? A Kenyan economist speaking to Der Spiegel thinks the latter. Readers?