Paul Krugman reiterates: "Malthus was right for the whole of human history until his own time." Now here's my question -- is it a coincidence that Malthus' work appeared just at the time when his conclusions were, for the first time ever, no longer true? Or is the origin of Malthus' level of understanding of the economic system inextricably linked to the fact that the Malthusian era was ending.
« Conservative PC | Main | Military Analysts »
The Malthus Coincidence
19 Apr 2008 05:15 pm
Comments (46)
"Now here's my question -- is it a coincidence that Malthus' work appeared just at the time when his conclusions were, for the first time ever, no longer true?"
No. Does this really need to be explained at length?
Malthus was reacting to the hyper-optimists of the Enlightenment, particularly Condorcet, who thought "the perfectibility of man is unlimited" and that "the progress of preventative medicine as a preservative...will eventually banish communicable or contagious illnesses." Thinking human nature essentially malleable, Condorcet thought material progress would not lead to famines because people, having become more reasonable than he at the time could imagine, would only have as many children as the earth could support.
Malthus was part of a pessimistic movement in response to the faith in order and reason of classicism and the Enlightenment that began after the 1755 Lisbon Earth and matured into Romanticism circa the disappointment of the Terror in the 1790s. The Romantics and Malthus were not necessarily wrong--witness Global Warming, Deforestation, and the prospect of future fresh water and oil shortages. Modernity has produced two World Wars, a Nuclear Age, and plenty of aesthetic ugliness--which is to say it has not been an unblemished success. So it was definitely not a coincidence that he was writing at a time of unprecedented material progress and attendant population growth. But he was write to see these as highly portentous trends.
Malthus was reacting to the hyper-optimists of the Enlightenment, particularly Condorcet, who thought "the perfectibility of man is unlimited" and that "the progress of preventative medicine as a preservative...will eventually banish communicable or contagious illnesses." Thinking human nature essentially malleable, Condorcet thought material progress would not lead to famines because people, having become more reasonable than he at the time could imagine, would only have as many children as the earth could support.
Malthus was part of a pessimistic movement in response to the faith in order and reason of classicism and the Enlightenment that began after the 1755 Lisbon Earth and matured into Romanticism circa the disappointment of the Terror in the 1790s. The Romantics and Malthus were not necessarily wrong--witness Global Warming, Deforestation, and the prospect of future fresh water and oil shortages. Modernity has produced two World Wars, a Nuclear Age, and plenty of aesthetic ugliness--which is to say it has not been an unblemished success. So it was definitely not a coincidence that he was writing at a time of unprecedented material progress and attendant population growth. But he was write to see these as highly portentous trends.
Malthus was reacting to the hyper-optimists of the Enlightenment, particularly Condorcet, who thought "the perfectibility of man is unlimited" and that "the progress of preventative medicine as a preservative...will eventually banish communicable or contagious illnesses." Thinking human nature essentially malleable, Condorcet thought material progress would not lead to famines because people, having become more reasonable than he at the time could imagine, would only have as many children as the earth could support.
Malthus was part of a pessimistic movement in response to the faith in order and reason of classicism and the Enlightenment that began after the 1755 Lisbon Earth and matured into Romanticism circa the disappointment of the Terror in the 1790s. The Romantics and Malthus were not necessarily wrong--witness Global Warming, Deforestation, and the prospect of future fresh water and oil shortages. Modernity has produced two World Wars, a Nuclear Age, and plenty of aesthetic ugliness--which is to say it has not been an unblemished success. So it was definitely not a coincidence that he was writing at a time of unprecedented material progress and attendant population growth. But he was write to see these as highly portentous trends.
Although Krugman and Gregory Clark like to say this, really, what they've actually found, statistically, is that Malthus was right on average over many centuries. And, by that standard, he is still right now. The new growth school of magic knowledge growth is pretty silly. But there are plenty of exceptions in the past - and Clark, by bracketing the effects of trade, doesn't let you see this. For instance, the Netherlands by the end of the 17th century was, by Malthusian standards, entering into hell - it no longer grew enough food to support its population. Why didn't all the dutch curl up on their wooden shoes? Because they became the world leader in the world grain market. They monopolized the Baltic grain growing areas. And so not only did they have enough to eat and prosper, but they sold grains to the french and english and made a huge surplus.
The burst in population in Ming China is similarly inexplicable using Malthusian standards. Technically, we know that Malthus pulled his sequence of the arithmetic increase of productivity out of his ass. It responds to no socio-economic phenomena, but it makes for a good comparative.
From the Krug:
Was Malthus just unlucky? No. The same forces that made the industrial revolution possible — above all, the spirit of inquiry and rationality — also led to the birth of analytical economics. There probably couldn’t have been a Malthus until the world was on the verge of becoming non-Malthusian.
You had to click through one more link:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/malthus-was-right/
"is the origin of Malthus' level of understanding of the economic system inextricably linked to the fact that the Malthusian era was ending."
The origin of Mathus' level of understanding of the economic system is inextricably linked not to the fact that the Malthusian era was ending, but instead is inextricably linked to the fact that the industrial age had begun.
The same coal engines that produced the leisure that made Malthus' book inevitable also made the world Malthus was describing a world of the past.
It's basically like rain on your wedding day.
From the Krug:
Was Malthus just unlucky? No. The same forces that made the industrial revolution possible — above all, the spirit of inquiry and rationality — also led to the birth of analytical economics. There probably couldn’t have been a Malthus until the world was on the verge of becoming non-Malthusian.
You had to click through one more link:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/malthus-was-right/
Oh--I didn't realize the Krugman link I posted is linked in MY's original post. So does Matt just disagree with Krugman here? Is he asking rhetorically? As a conversation starter? Questions abound.
They are only linked if you believe the economic and capitalist thought of the 18th century (and early 19th century in Malthus' case) caused the industrial revolution and destroyed the malthusian growth model. This does not appear to be the case as technology seems to be the primary reason for the industrial revolution. Had the industrial revolution not occurred though, his model would still apply everywhere.
Yet I disagree with both you and Krugman when you contend the Malthusian era is over. Just look outside of the industrialized world (especially Africa) and you can see his model still applies. The real question Krugman should be asking is to what extent the Malthusian growth model still applies and how should our aid policies adapt to overcome this issue.
The Irish famine was Malthusian -- after Malthus was long gone. South Asia pre-Green Revolution also had Malthusian elements, although there are also issues of democracy and political participation in the Irish and Indian famines, as Sen has noted. But there parts of Africa today still in a Malthusian trap. Parts of his thesis are still valid.
Well, you can step back a little and say that Krugman's reference to 'the spirit of inquiry and rationality' needs to be unpacked a little in terms of culture and social history.
Robert's triple-post upthread talks about particular influences, and you can talk about the confluence of economic and intellectual interests in what you might now call 'systems analysis'.
Malthus waits.
"They are only linked if you believe the economic and capitalist thought of the 18th century (and early 19th century in Malthus' case) caused the industrial revolution"
You've got cause and effect backwards here.
Humans figured out basically everything between about 1740 and 1880 because of the leisure produced by burning carbon.
Have you even been on a drive with your wife, and she suddenly says "wow, there's no traffic on the road today"?
Next thing you know is you turn the curve, and bam! stuck in traffic for hours.
The observance and mass reportage of a long standing trend tends to mark the end of the trend.
I think that one might make a case that Malthus's work was more likely to appear at the dawn of the industrial era, but I think one can't maintain that it couldn't have appeared before then. Plenty of good science was done during that era of agrarian population equilibrium, and plenty of technological progress was made (albeit with population growth being quick enough to catch up).
The pre-industrial era may have been approximately stagnant (with up and down fluctuations) in terms of standards of living for ordinary people, but they certainly were not stagnant in terms of knowledge or intellectual development. Archimedes invented cool tools his drainage screw two thousand years prior to the industrial revolution. The medeival Europeans created windmills as labor-saving devices to grind cereals. Newton devised the laws of classical mechanics, etc.
It's certainly not too hard for me to imagine Malthus as a 15th century Florentine thinker, 4th century BC Athenian philosopher, 13th century Confucian Chinese scholar, or 3rd century BC Mauryan administrator, with his views of population in agrarian societies not being followed shortly thereafter by the demographic transition, but by the continuing truth of his observations for centuries or millenia thereafter.
Now, in the enlightenment, scholarly inquiry was at something of a high ebb by previous standards, so it's not surprising that Malthus, like many other thinkers from Condorcet to Hume to Benjamin Franklin, was doing his work then. That doesn't mean, however, that he couldn't have done it at any other time.
In short, given that Chicago has a population of over two million, and Poughkeepsie has a population of about 30,000, it's not surprising that I live in Chicago rather than Poughkeepsie, but that doesn't mean that it would be impossible for me to live in Poughkeepsie. One might think of, say, 1750-1850 as the temporal equivalent of Chicago in terms of the number of scholars and original thinkers, and think of, say, 900-1000 (or some other 100-year period) as the temporal equivalent of Poughkeepsie in terms of the number of scholars and original thinkers. More -- including, not coincidentally, Malthus -- lived from 1750-1850, but that doesn't mean that it would be impossible for Malthus to have lived from 900-1000.
I agree with the above--it was surely no coincidence; the industrial revolution allowed the burning of hydrocarbons to substitute for human labour. (Leisure certainly wasn't invented with the industrial revolution, by the way.)
The industrial revolution never delivered well-being : that is a total myth. By the time the satanic mills and slums were cleaned up, large numbers of people outside the industrialised world remained essential to the system and in great misery.
While material conditions have undoubtedly improved in the first world it is not at all clear that general wellbeing has progressed likewise (rise of mental illnesses). Now that the environment is collapsing under the weight of the exponential increase in the burning of hdrocarbons it is looking very much like a temporary aberration in Malthus's law.
This is a mistake Krugman has been making lately, in that he only has part of the equation and then suggests that this proves a definitive answer. Malthus was discussing issues of population, but at this point you cannot separate the way in which we think about Malthus from the way in which we think about Darwin (Darwin took a decent part of his theory - the idea of intraspecies and interspecies competition for limited resources - from Malthus). So when Malthus made his assertion (more than half a century prior to Darwin's publication of Origins) he was in one sense correct, but you can make an excellent argument against the idea that he was "right" (not a distinction without a difference in this case). The second half of the Darwin's equation which is the issue of adaptation (which Darwin got in part from Charles Lyell).
The idea is that any surviving species group must adapt to a changing environment. Now a growing population is part of that environment, but it is not part and parcel of what would cause extinction. That is there is always, with every species, a push and pull between an increasing population and changing resources. Natural occurrences like famine and intercine battles might alleviate competition for resources, but this is the grossest form of adaptation and basically is part of every species struggle for survival. What is unique about humans is their advanced abilities to "adapt on the fly" thanks to language and plannning. That is there are other adapttive processes than natural population control - to give just one example - migration (and humans certainly aren't the only species that migrates). To give another example - husbandry. Many of these adaptive strategies had absolutely nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution (and may have even been hampered by such).
Anyway, Malthus did not take adaptation in to account. So you can point to periods where natural limits to population helped in survival, but probably many more at both the micro and macro level where there were other forms of adaptation that allowed the human species to survive.
Whether Malthus was wrong or right depends on how narrowly you construe what he said. He was certainly wrong in his short term predictions, and he was also probably wrong in assuming that humans, and other species, would grow exponentially. (In the long run, populations show a remarkable ability to adapt their birth rates to resource constraints. It's not entirely clear whether the long term human population growth is going to follow a logistic model or a cyclic model or what.) He was too pessimistic in failing to see that at least in the short term, science and technology would have the power to raise the human carrying capacity by quite a bit.
How right he was in the long term remains to be seen. Our carrying capacity is certainly higher than it used to be, but it's no less real for that. There is some maximum number of humans that the world can support, and no combination of economic structures and scientific progress is going to evade that fact. We don't know what that carrying capacity is, of course- it might be higher than today, or it might be much lower. There are plenty of populations which have collapsed to total extinction after overshooting its resources.
It's also worth bearing in mind that in some measure Malthus was wrong in his short term predictions for the same reason that Marx was. The very act of making the prediction, and of being able to convince people that the prediction was likely, motivated them to try to take measures to stave it off. The efforts throughout the world to reduce population growth rates in the last few decades have been due in large part to the influence of Malthusian thinking- and the fact that the Malthusian catastrophe no longer appears imminent is a testament to their success.
I don't pretend to know what the human carrying capacity at any given standard of living might be. But I do have absolutely no doubt that the chimera of endless economic growth that so many people think will continue indefinitely is just that, a chimera. The zero-growth stable state is the long-term norm for human civilization and it is the norm to which we will eventually return, the sooner the better.
Malthus wasn't the only one who did this sort of thing.
Thomas Hobbes missed the rise of capitalism. He says somewhere in Leviathan that wealth is power up to the point that it allows you to hire people to carry weapons for you, but not beyond that. Once you've got your feudal manor and its retainers, what else is there for you to spend money on?
Adam Smith, likewise, missed the nascent Industrial Revolution. Wealth of Nations is about an economy based on cottage industry and individual free enterprise, not mass production and the corporation.
This makes a certain kind of sense: maybe it's only possible to see a system in its entirety once you can look at it from the outside.
For instance, we're only now--at the end of our society's industrial age--beginning to understand what industrialization really meant for our relationship with our environment. Maybe Malthus and the Luddites were onto something after all.
"It's certainly not too hard for me to imagine Malthus as a 15th century Florentine thinker, 4th century BC Athenian philosopher, 13th century Confucian Chinese scholar, or 3rd century BC Mauryan administrator, with his views of population in agrarian societies not being followed shortly thereafter by the demographic transition, but by the continuing truth of his observations for centuries or millenia thereafter."
Funny you should mention a Confucian Malthus...you were off by five centuries, not bad though:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Hung+liang+chi+and+malthus&hl=en&start=0&sa=N
Wilbur - That is there are other adapttive processes than natural population control - to give just one example - migration (and humans certainly aren't the only species that migrates).
Exactly where do the surplus billions of humans living in squalor migrate to? Other boundless arable lands? None remain that are not settled, and where there still is margin - the settled people are opposed to 100s of millions of unwanted Africans, Asians, Muslims, Latins moving there. The doors to "Open Borders" are slowly swinging shut as Americans begin to realize their border and citizenship generosity will mean the exinction of their existing culture and the US rising to 438 million people in 2050, 720 million in 2100 unless laws and Ruling Elites are changed. That realization has hit the other countries still taking in "wretched refuse from distant teeming shores".
There is the likely alternate method of migration - invade your overpopulated neighbor's land with your overpopulated people, kill them off, and you temporarily relieve your population pressure and continue to claim for a little while longer that 8 kids per family is a "right" or "Allah's wishes".
***************
Jeffrey Davis - Malthus waits
The world did not become “non-Malthusian” at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the unexpected and massive influx of energy from fossil fuels suddenly changed the resource base of the planet, and were in turn leveraged to allow us to exploit more nonhydrocarbon resources and have the leisure to figure out how to beat all the great diseases and afflictions that kept mankinds numbers lower and in better environmental balance - except old age, cancer, and war.. They gave us the ability to be more adaptive in other ways that boosted population and gave us the surplus to feed and support large fractions of maladapted parasites that contribute nothing except large families and crime...The biological limits Malthus predicted still applied but the carrying capacity of the planet was suddenly much larger than it was because we were much more effective at exploiting those resources.
With the impending decline in fossil fuel availability our carrying capacity will revert back to something lower and we will understand that, no matter what we choose to believe, humans are still subject to the laws of nature. That reverting back looks to be an exceptionally ugly process related to eliminating too many people on the planet, not eliminate SUVs and meat-eating and all but government employees riding in planes - to gain another 2 billion people for 20 years until their breeding rates double numbers again.
Ugly things like one-child policies, Borders closed to immigration except for vital high skill jobs, and even those in limited numbers, food aid only going to those nations making progress towards sustainable numbers - withheld from nations whose religion/culture demand high fecundity. Ugly choices like going with nuclear and coal when the fake hype about exciting alternative energy and conservation not even covering growth in most countries outside Japan and now-depopulating Europe. Ugly choices like telling the next generation to retire that they will not have 30-35 years of golf, free medical care, and immigrants to care for them at US taxpayer expense - but will have to do useful work at least part-time to pay their own way.
The English had already been behaving in the way Malthus recommended for the prior 6 centuries at least -- virtually no premarital sex for women, and people didn't marry until they could afford it. Average age of marriage for Englishwomen from 1200-1800 was 24-26, with poorer women not marrying until they were in their 30s. And a fraction of women never married. This kept England's population from booming and busting like in China, where universal teen marriage led to big growths in population, followed by massive die-offs when the government screwed up -- as recently as Mao's famine of the early 1960s.
Translation:
The English were moral, upstanding, and genetically superior to everyone, including the Chinese, who, while better than the blacks, were, and are, still inferior to white folk.
What Sailer is referring to is called the 'European mode of population growth' I believe. It's a valid and accepted concept in demographics although I think it's supposed to be typical of all of Europe not just England, and most particularly Ireland.
As for premarital sex for women, I don't know that that's particularly related to population growth. The Muslim Arab societies today have little premarital sex and skyrocketing population growth. (The Christian Arabs who are generally more educated and progressive, appear to have a low birthrate only a little bit above the Western countries. In Israel, Christian Arabs have a lower birthrate than their much richer Jewish neighbors.)
The English were moral, upstanding, and genetically superior to everyone, including the Chinese, who, while better than the blacks, were, and are, still inferior to white folk.
I especially like the part about the good old days when there was "virtually no premarital sex for women, and people didn't marry until they could afford it." O Tempora! O Mores!
"The Irish famine was Malthusian"
From what I've read - on this topic, I must add, neither deeply nor widely - grain and livestock was being imported from Ireland in large quantities during the famine. Additionally, quite a lot of Irish land had been seized and redistributed to British Protestant owners/settlers in the preceding centuries, with the result that Ireland ended up looking like something not unlike a feudal or sharecropping society: vast English/Anglo-Irish-owned estates with often impoverished and powerless, Irish & Catholic tenants dependent on the potato because it was at least generally productive enough to allow them to feed themselves from their tiny plots without requiring the kind extensive labor that they couldn't hope to supply.
That may be Hector. But one has to ask why Sailor brings up these sorts of things all the time. It isn't racist to say such things by themselves, but go check out his blog and tell me I didn't translate it correctly.
Hey, I'm not denying that Sailor is a racist. But give him credit, he's the most educated and, well, "articulate" racist in America.
If you look at the recent whole-genome HAPMAP scans, you'll see that there are a lot of genes undergoing recent selection. In the Voight-Pritchard study, they found about six hundred, mostly regional and with an average age of approximately 6600 years in Europe and East Asia.
From the timing, and in a number of cases from the biochemical details (lactase tolerance for example) they look like adaptations to a a Malthusian agricultural society. There is reason to believe that population density among hunter-gatherers was limited by violence (see War Before Civilization), while population was limited more by starvation in strong agricultural states.
These adaptations included changes in central nervous system genes, which presumably increased fitness in those new hierarchical societies: for example new versions of serotonin transporters in both Europe and east Asia (such as SLC6A4). There are other neurotransmitter-related changes, also changes in genes that affect brain development. For example, east Asians have a new version of DAB1, a gene involved in the development of the layers of the cerebral cortex, while there is a fairly common new version of NKX2-2 (a brain homeobox gene) in Europeans.
Nobody had these gene variants 10,000 years ago, but they're common today. It's possible that some time when between then and now, some populations had changed enough to make some new social patterns possible.
"Wilbur: This is a mistake Krugman has been making lately, in that he only has part of the equation and then suggests that this proves a definitive answer."
Lately? This is Krugman's whole MO, always has been.
Ths issue of the "carrying capacity of the Earth" vis-a-vis humans will be resolved in this century - by resolving humans into something else.
What that "something else" will be - either Transhumans or dead meat - your choice.
The obvious lesson here is being correct ab out much that has happened does not authorize or legitimate claims about what will happen. Prediction is a mug's game even for those who understand what has occurred. So when some smart young thing shows up with a long list of those things that worked or didn't work in the past and insists that this long list of things will work in the present, the bright young thing, more often than not, is wrong. In short, I told Wilbur; I told Orville, and I am telling you know: it will never fly. Owlishly or otherwise.
Mr. Hack,
All right, I'll humor you. Why exactly should those of us who oppose 'Transhumanism' allow you to carry out your schemes? If 'transhumanism' ever makes any headway then it will be outlawed, as it should be. The teleological goal of human societies and states is to advance human (and divine) goods. To allow a mode of thought that would lead to the 'resolving' of humans into something else would mean the negation of the very essence of society and the state.
As for premarital sex for women, I don't know that that's particularly related to population growth.
By itself, no, but combined with not marrying until one can afford a family, what it comes down to is that most women did not have sex until they could afford to have children. Sailer's point was that the lack of premarital sex made marriage restrictions a good way to inhibit population growth.
The Muslim Arab societies today have little premarital sex and skyrocketing population growth. (The Christian Arabs who are generally more educated and progressive, appear to have a low birthrate only a little bit above the Western countries. In Israel, Christian Arabs have a lower birthrate than their much richer Jewish neighbors.)
Yes, but the Muslims marry relatively early in life (compared to current life expectancies). The English on the other hand married relatively late, compared to the life expectancy of their age. Besides, the real issue is not sex per se but procreative sex, so you can only compare societies with different attitudes or accessibilities to contraception if you only count sex acts that are not contracepted (or, to put it another way, view sex with contraception as an equivalent act to forgoing sex).
Another way to express what Sailer was saying:
At a time when contraception was not widely accessible, the English customs suppressed sex (at least for women, although unless there were a few really active promiscuous people or a lot of male homosexuals would also translate into supressing sex for men) until they could afford to deal with the consequences, leading to fewer Malthusian cycles.
Shorter Steve Sailor Translator:
Not only can't I spell Steve Sailer's name correctly, but I think that it is racist to point out inconvenient facts if those facts go against my belief in total racial equality.
Well, Muslim _women_ marry early, true. The Muslim _men_ marry late, at least in the higher social classes (I think), which may explain the traditional penchant for homosexuality among Arab and Turkish Muslim elites. But you're pretty much right since it's _female_ fertility that counts here.
The English (and we should actually say, European and Irish) fertility pattern was of course the product of a particular set of religious and cultural ideas- it wasn't just a response to economic pressures. Perhaps since Christ was a lifelong celibate, Christianity valorized virginity as few other cultures (with the exception of some of the Christian heresies) have (in a generally healthy way, I mean- I'm not talking about pathological "honor" cultures here like some variants of Islam). Absent that religious and ideological environment we are unlikely to get it back even if we wanted to, nor to export it to other countries which don't share the Christian heritage.
Contraception was generally 'available' in one form or another in olden times (see "silphium") the problem being that they were 1) often had abortifacient effects therefore morally problematic and 2) often toxic.
Hector: "Why exactly should those of us who oppose 'Transhumanism' allow you to carry out your schemes?"
Ain't gonna be any "allow" about it...
"To allow a mode of thought that would lead to the 'resolving' of humans into something else would mean the negation of the very essence of society and the state."
By George, I think he's got it!
on consideration my post above was unclear. To clarify, some of the Christian heresies, and some of the extinct religions, valorized virginity as much or more than orthodox Christianity, but of the major world religions existing today Christianity is, I believe unique in this regard.
Mr. Hack,
Oh, I believe that the prisons and firing squads of the state are plenty well equipped to 'allow' or 'forbid' whatever they choose. The state cannot and should not allow or tolerate that which would negate the very existence of the human species. To what end, exactly, do you welcome this 'transhuman' nonesense?
This is a mistake Krugman has been making lately, in that he only has part of the equation and then suggests that this proves a definitive answer.
The real world s always going to be more complicated than the models we build to try to explain it. I rather suspect that Krugman understands this (my model Krugman certainly does).
That our models don't and can't explain everything doesn't mean that they aren't useful.
Hector, I know you to be an idiotic Christian, so I wouldn't waste my time trying to explain any of this to you, as you simply haven't the conceptual background to comprehend any of it.
Suffice it to say that your "prisons and firing squads" aren't going to be relevant much longer. Technology is nearing the point where an individual, let alone a movement, will be able to destroy a state - or at least those who run it, if not immediately all those who believe in it. In due time, that power will expand to the ability to destroy or remake those who believe in the state as well.
And that applies to religions also.
There are no limits except the laws of physics - and some of them may be "bendable", if not breakable.
Neither state nor religion can stand before technology - and before the end of this century, neither shall do so.
The very act of making the prediction, and of being able to convince people that the prediction was likely, motivated them to try to take measures to stave it off. The efforts throughout the world to reduce population growth rates in the last few decades have been due in large part to the influence of Malthusian thinking- and the fact that the Malthusian catastrophe no longer appears imminent is a testament to their success.
Incorrect. Rates of population growth began falling long before anyone tried systematic efforts at population control. This was noted even by contemporaries of Malthus and scholars who wrote shortly thereafter. By the 1840s, Frederic Bastiat could mock Malthus by noting that in the most prosperous European countries of the time the rate of population growth had declined to near replacement levels. Rising education levels and prosperity have contributed far more to declining population growth rates than to any efforts by fretting neo-Malthusians.
its breathtaking to read people actually take Malthus so seriously. Read some Boserup first, then try and defend his thesis.
A point about marriage and population growth:
The English model that Steve Sailer praises seems to be mainly myth. Women in England had many children, much more than the 2 that would lead to zero population growth. Though that belays the fact that infant mortality rates in England were very high during the industrial revolution. You would expect that a woman in England would have at least 6 or 8 children, but that half of them would die before the age of 5. That was true in much of the world until the 20th century. Rather, many of these population booms that Mr. Sailer and others deride in less developed regions of the world are mainly due to women having children as if infant mortality rates were still at premodern rates. The average Saudi woman has 8 children, which is about average for an Englishwoman in the 18th century, however the infant mortality rate in Saudi Arabia is sufficiently low that most of them will become adults and have children.
I do find it intellectually dishonest to claim that the Chinese famines during the great leap forward were Malthusian. They were the result of collective farming and communist inefficiencies. I don't know why a conservative would argue anything but.
Comments closed May 03, 2008.
| 
Heads in the Sand
As my friend Georg Wilhelm used to say:
"Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug."
(The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk)
Posted by Simplicissimus | April 19, 2008 5:29 PM