Malthus’ ‘Essay’…was a reaction against the optimistic vision of humanity offered by Enlightenment thinkers. Authors such as Condorcet and Godwin argued that human misery was the product of defective social institutions; for Godwin, social reform held out the prospect of the perfectibility of human beings. Malthus rejected this approach.
Malthus upheld the idea of a ‘population optimum’ where human numbers would be held in balance with supply. However, he did not promote the use of contraception as a means of achieving the population optimum; rather, his solution was a rational and ‘virtuous’ abstention from marriage, particularly amongst the working classes. This preventative check of ‘moral restraint’ would operate in tandem with other positive checks, which would
-include all the causes which tend in any way prematurely to shorten the duration of human life, such as unwholesome occupations, severe labour and exposure to the seasons, bad and insufficient clothing arising from poverty . . . the whole train of common diseases and epidemics, wars, infanticide, plague, and famine. … Some of these checks, in various combinations and operating with various force …form the immediate causes which keep the population on a level with the means of subsistence.
If it was not his intent to promote overt population control policies per se, then what was Malthus’ primary modus operandi in writing The Principle of Population? Frank Furedi of the University of Kent (UK) has pointed out that Malthus’ reason for writing the tract was likely to justify the government’s economic and social policies which effectively abandoned the working classes.
First and foremost, his denunciation of population growth was informed by his opposition to the programme of social reform. Malthus’ ‘Essay’…was a reaction against the optimistic vision of humanity offered by Enlightenment thinkers. Authors such as Condorcet and Godwin argued that human misery was the product of defective social institutions; for Godwin, social reform held out the prospect of the perfectibility of human beings. Malthus rejected this approach. He argued that welfare measures like the English Poor Laws merely intensified impoverishment, since they allowed the poor to breed more. According to Malthus, any benefits from social reforms would be cancelled out by the consequent increase in fertility, since a larger population would have less food and resources. He mobilized the arguments about the dangers of population growth as weapons in his battle of ideas against social reform.
The ideas contained within The Principle of Population, then, were very much informed by the social, economic and historical milieu in which Malthus lived. And while his essay was a reflection on the larger contextual situation, it failed to extrapolate from it a correct prediction that could be later verified by historical experience. No theory can be said to be scientifically or empirically proven if that theory can not be verified by several trials where its predictions come to fruition every time. In this respect, the test of time has not been kind to Malthus.
Malthusian Theory Explained
In order to have a clear understanding of Malthus’ ‘Principle,’ it is necessary to look closely at the logic underlying his argument. He stated that population increases ‘geometrically’ or exponentially and that subsistence increases arithmetically. Thus, population increases along the order of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32..., whereas subsistence limps along at the rate of 1, 2, 3, 4, …. . Stanford economist Nathan Rosenberg provides a vivid illustration of how such a scenario might be worked out. He writes:
Malthus…developed [a] model of growth that can best be understood by thinking of Great Britain as a huge farm, of fixed acreage, confronted with a potential for rapid population growth. Such growth leads to an increase in the output of products, as more labor is applied to a fixed amount of land. But, although output does indeed grow, the increments to output grow at a declining rate due to the law of diminishing returns. Eventually population growth will lead to a situation where diminishing returns drive up the incremental output of additional labor down to zero—that is, at some point the addition of yet another laborer to a farm of fixed size yields no increase whatever in the output of food. At such a point, even though the working population receives no more than a bare subsistence wage, wage payments eat up—literally—the entire output of the economy. Further growth is impossible because no nonwage income is available for capital formation. The economy has arrived at a so-called stationary state, where population has grown to its maximum size and the bulk of the population is living at a bare subsistence level.
The fact as it panned out statistical data regarding crop yields produced by international bodies such as the United Nations and the World Bank. Both released reports that point out that world is no where near the mass starvation predicted by Ehrlich or Brown. For instance, the 1999 Human Development Report, published by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) pointed out that "despite rapid population growth, food production per capita increased by nearly 25% during 1990-1997. The per capita daily supply of calories rose from less than 2,500 to 2,750 and that of protein from 71 grams to 76." In a similar fashion, the World Bank devoted a segment of its Development Report to refer to the Green Revolution as a ‘paradigm’ for development and knowledge-sharing. It is through human ingenuity, the World Bank argues, that food production has stayed ahead of population growth; indeed, productivity gains in cereals such as rice, maize and wheat have been dramatic. |
