The theories proposed by Thomas Malthus in his career-defining work “An Essay on the Principle of Population” are almost irrefutably some of the most depression and worrisome social predictions ever calculated. The central argument which Malthus lays out in the work is surprisingly simple: population growth will always outpace the resources necessary to sustain everyone. In other words, the number of people inhabiting the planet will continue to grow exponentially in contrast to the relatively constant rate at which the resources necessary to support that population will grow. To put in even more simply: Malthus asserts that there has never and will never be enough food, shelter and other necessities for everybody alive to live.
While that outlook is certainly horrifying, it is not necessarily relevant to the field of economics. The really depressing part of Malthus’s theories situated in the leap that he made from what is basically a simple observation into how that observation applies to laws of economics. First up is what has come to be known as his Iron Law of Population: that exponential growth of people will naturally mean a growth in the labor force. The laws of supply and demand mandate that a surplus of labor will result in lower wages due to competition which for the working class always favors those willing to work for less so that the ownership class can enjoy greater profits. From this application Malthus extrapolated that as long as population growth continues to expand in an exponential manner, the inevitable result is poverty and from that poverty will come—for a large percentage of the population—famine.
This calculation is basically simple economic theory. But “An Essay on the Principle of Population” is no mere economic manifesto. It is, indeed a cultural manifesto that only keeps getting darker and more disturbing. Malthus next assumes that with growing labor forces pushing down wages comes a lowering of the standard of living. Only two possible ways exist to reverse this economic inevitability. The first option is to increase production to keep up with population growth which is, of course, a certifiable impossibility. Option two is the exact opposite: if you can increase production, you must reduce the population. And this is the point at which Malthusian economics takes its darkest turn.
Within option two are also two options. One, a worldwide concerted effort cut back on human reproduction which is about as likely as resources keeping up with the rate of population growth. Failing the ability to stop more people from coming into the world, Malthus suggests, the only sane strategy is reduce the population of those already here. And from this conclusion came Malthusian Economics which is far less a viable economic strategy than a night scenario for maintaining equilibrium between population growth and the ability to sustain that population as evenly as possible.
Wars are okay in the Malthusian playbook. Pestilence and disease as well. Any sort of large-scale epidemic of death in whatever form is a positive for the planet at large because it is the only possible way to deal with a problem in which every other solution fails miserably.
Malthus’s postulation that war, famine, disease and simple lack of human concern about faraway problems impacting population growth has proven to be correct. On the other hand, the part of his theory about resources not keeping up with population growth has not quite met the test of scientific fact. The reality is that there is more than enough food produced in developed countries to feed not only their own population, but to feed undeveloped countries with their unused surplus. The problem is not a lack of resources for those who need it most, but rather a lack of will to make sure they get it.
So where did Malthus go wrong? As might be expected from a work that is a social document rather than an economic one, he simply got the math wrong. Thomas Jefferson was not yet President when Malthus wrote his essay. His nightmare of needing war and famine and pestilence to keep half the globe from sinking into poverty was based on agrarian economics and did—could not—foresee the rise in productivity made possible by the Industrial Revolution.
Which does not mean that it is time to send all copies of his essay to the archives. Malthus may still be proven right. The productivity spark by steam in the Industrial Revolution gave way to oil in the 20th century. Oil is most definitely a limited resource and once it runs out, it’s gone. Unless there is a mechanism in place to replace the dependence upon oil as smoothly as oil replaced the dependence upon steam, even the direst predictions of Malthusian Economics could make a comeback.
