Thomas Robert Malthus 1766-1834, who went by his middle name, was an English reverend who taught political economy at the East India Company College until his death. He was a pioneer of economics during its early years, but is best remembered for his population theory. Malthus wrote An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 in response to utopians like William Godwin, against whom the essay was written, who thought that the world could be rid of scarcity with a radical reordering of society, such as was attempted during the radical phase of the French Revolution. Condorcet the philosophe, also discussed in the essay, was ironically was put to death by radicals during the French Revolution while writing about the perfectibility of man.
Malthus' arguments if true are "conclusive against the perfectibility of the mass of mankind." Malthus' argument against the perfectibility of mankind is based on two postulates: "food is necessary to the existence of man" and "the passion between the sexes is necessary and will remain nearly in its present state." The latter force is greater than the former which faces inherent limits. There must be a strive toward more population for it made sense to have as many offspring as possible in the hope some survive, given the high rate of death for most of history. The survival of offspring however is limited by the food supply which keeps down the population. (From such reasoning Darwin and Wallace independently developed natural selection after reading Malthus).
Population has a tendency when unchecked to outstrip the means to sustain it; this is Malthus' famous population principle.
Malthus' defense of the population principle is mathematical: "Population, when unchecked, increases at a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio." If every couple reproduces at the replacement rate of two and their offspring do likewise the next generation, then the population will go 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512 and so on. Of course this assumes no deaths, every couple has a boy and a girl, and some incest. Nevertheless the math checks out. Malthus' principle works much like the Fibonacci sequence in which each successive number is the addition of the two previous numbers: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55. Fibonacci's own example was breeding pairs of rabbits, so I wouldn't be surprised if that is where Malthus got his principle.
Subsistence or simply food grows arithmetically: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. This is for two reasons: the availability of fertile land and the cost of the subsistence of labor. Only 30% of Earth's surface is land, and only a portion of that can be used for agriculture, less than 40%, given deserts and tundra. Population cannot grow more than the space for it and cannot be sustained more than arable land can provide for. Food in massive quantities must also be cultivated which means paying people from increased production. Each additional unit of food has the cost of using more land, feeding more mouths, and paying more laborers, so increases are only arithmetic.
Malthus' relation of population to subsistence tends towards disequilibrium in the short term. As Keynes (who was influenced by Malthus) said in the long run we are all dead, as will be the surplus population, but in the short term we strive to get all we can and reproduce as much we desire to.
Malthus named two checks to population growth which have prevented catastrophe: positive and preventative checks. Positive checks are disease, famine, war, infanticide, extreme poverty, and malnutrition which restrict population growth by increasing the death rate. Preventative checks are birth control, celibacy, abstinence and vices like prostitution which decrease the birth rate. Positive checks tend to operate unfortunately on the lower classes and preventative checks are used by the upper class. The former Malthus called misery and the latter vice, as the preventative checks limited birth outside the confines of marriage and by non-procreative sex. Malthus as a cleric preferred the virtue of self control, but nonetheless positive and preventative checks have worked in keeping the population down.
In Malthus' time population was beginning to grow rapidly. The world population of Malthus' time was under a billion. It took three hundred before that for the world population to double from 1500 to 1800. The population doubled again in 1927 to 2 billion, doubled again in 1974 to 4 billion in the 1970s, and is set to double again by the 2020s to 8 billion.
Malthus predicted that unchecked the world population would double every generation, 25 years. If this happened the world population would be around 48 billion instead of 7 billion at the early 21st century. This is taken by critics as disproving Malthus. But Malthus didn't conclude that population collapse was inevitable, given checks and ability to increase the food supply. His principle just like the Fibonacci sequence is under unchecked ideal conditions. Luckily innovations in agriculture such as mechanization and the "green revolution" of the late 20th century in Asia have grown the food supply. Nevertheless hundreds of millions of people still live in poverty and face malnutrition. Population is still checked positively and preventatively, sometimes by coercive measures such as the one child policy by China which has only recently been changed. Even without drastic measures birth rates have declined over time due to family planning and education which accompany industrialization. Even so, because people are living longer the population grows from a larger base which as it grows wealthier consumes more, and so we face a similar problem regarding subsistence.
Malthus' principle was meant to disprove the existence of an ideal society under ideal conditions in which there is continual growth of the food supply, nobody died, and food was equally available. What would happen is that everybody would want more food and produce more mouths to feed than the land can provide. Even if people restricted the children they had preventatively, a higher standard of living for all would eat up the increases in subsistence and reduce the population and/or standard of living. Private property would be required to ensure a higher standard of living for some and not for others who would be less well off. Those who don't own land or the means of production would enter into the service of those who do as slaves, serfs, or proletarians. Property would be defended from the have nots by a state paid by wealth extracted from the bulk of population, and so we're out of the anarcho-communist utopia of bread, land, and peace.
"And thus it appears, that a society constituted according to the most beautiful form that imagination can conceive, with benevolence for its moving principle, instead of self-love, and with every evil disposition in all its members corrected by reason and not force, would, from the inevitable laws of nature, and not from any original depravity of man, in a very short period degenerate into a society constructed upon a plan not essentially different from that which prevails in every known state at present; I mean, a society divided into a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers, and with self-love the main-spring of the great machine."
Malthus' principle does not assume that humans are wicked and selfish which feed such institutions, but that structural conditions put into place diminishing returns from increases in wealth which lead to unequal allocation of resources.
As an economist Malthus was concerned with the relation of such scarcity to economic policy. Wages can't be more than subsistence in the long run as population would increase and then there would more laborers looking for work competing for the higher wages, which altogether both will decrease subsistence and lower wages back down. This is the iron law of wages which Malthus thought of and was elaborated by David Ricardo. It is a direct consequence of the population principle. Given the unalterable scarcity of the Earth, attempts to increase living conditions for the mass of mankind by government will not work in the long run.
Malthus' economic policy would be much like Adam Smith's of freeing the hand of government and allowing supply and demand to regulate prices and wages. The other main proposal of his was to reform the poor laws to require work and uncomfortable conditions to receive aid, which should not be so much as to discourage work and more mouths to feed. Upon reading the essay William Pitt the Younger shelved a bill expanding poor relief and later the poor laws were amended in 1834 to Malthus' recommendations of work and uncomfortable conditions.
At the end of the essay Malthus implores us to not despair at this unfortunate condition of human existence. "Evil exists in the world not to create despair but activity. We are not patiently to submit to it, but to exert ourselves to avoid it." If there were nothing to struggle against, there would be no motive to improve or purpose to progress towards. Such checks exist to push us towards industry and virtue which if cultivated can secure a good life. God is not a nasty being, but one which puts inherent checks on our ambitious designs.
There is reason for cheer for those living in the twentieth first century. The market economics championed by Smith and Malthus have succeeded in reducing extreme poverty from over 90% of the world population in the early 19th century to about 15% by the beginning of the 21st century. Progress was slow over the 19th century, but has increased in tandem with greater economic freedom. Population growth rates have also slowed under industrialization, and a new problem for developed countries is keeping population at replacement. Zero population growth doesn't mean below replacement in the long run, given longer lifespans fewer children per couple could be better.. The Cold War was won by capitalism which opened up Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. Great progress has been made from the state controlled economies, but there is much to be done. Capitalism generates greater inequality within nations and unequal resource consumption between nations. The US is 5% of the world population but consumes a quarter of its resources. 12% of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60% of consumption, while the third of the world living in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa accounts for only 3.2%. Meanwhile the population increases have been mostly in the third world which has less means to support itself. This is a different problem than improving the worst off, and so proponents of the free market should be wary of utopian stirrings.
Malthus is one of those figures in history who is both popular and unpopular at the same time. His ideas are very influential and well known, but not well liked despite their truth. In this Malthus joins Machiavelli, Hobbes, Darwin, and Nietzsche whose isms are associated with nasty ideas which nevertheless have great truth to them. This is to be expected as Malthus set out to disprove the excessive optimism of the enlightenment which sought a radical reordering of society. Among his greatest critics were Marx, Engels, and Lenin whose ideas of the perfectibility of society in application caused great misery in the twentieth century (along with agricultural disasters). A strong dose of pessimism is needed from time to time to save ourselves.
"To prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alas! beyond the power of man. In the vain endeavour to attain what in the nature of things is impossible, we now sacrifice not only possible but certain benefits. We tell the common people that if they will submit to a code of tyrannical regulations, they shall never be in want. They do submit to these regulations. They perform their part of the contract, but we do not, nay cannot, perform ours, and thus the poor sacrifice the valuable blessing of liberty and receive nothing that can be called an equivalent in return."
How prescient.
No comments:
Post a Comment