(Roughly) Daily

… a (possibly surprising) observation from Thomas Robert Malthus, a man whose dire predictions of paucity and doom have informed political philosophy and economics since the late 18th century… and given rise to the adjective “Malthusian.” In a review of Deborah Valenze‘s The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History, Oliver Cussen explores his (also possibly surprising) lasting impact…

For​ the late French historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Thomas Robert Malthus was an indispensable guide to the agrarian past. Le Roy Ladurie applied Malthus’s argument that population grows faster than subsistence to the archives of Languedoc, where, in the empirical detail of parish registers, cadastral surveys, tax rolls and price series, he perceived ‘the immense respiration of a social structure’ over the course of three centuries. In the 15th century, after the Black Death, the region’s population was at a historic low. Land was left fallow, and villagers complained about the encroachment of wild animals and forests on crops and pasture. Nature was taking its revenge for the great land colonisation movement of the Middle Ages. Civilisation recovered, but growth in a world of limits was ultimately self-defeating. The prosperity of the 16th century soon gave way to famine, drought, war and plague. It was only after modern technology unlocked the productive capacities of the earth that society was able to escape this cycle of expansion, crisis and renewal. Acknowledging his intellectual debt, Le Roy Ladurie pointed out the irony that the ‘Malthusian curse’ should lift just as it was being discovered in England in 1798. ‘Malthus was a clear-headed theoretician of traditional societies,’ he conceded, ‘but he was a prophet of the past; he was born too late in a world too new.’

Yet the spectre of Malthus continued to haunt industrial modernity. No sooner had the Great Exhibition of 1851 encouraged Victorians to embrace material gratification without guilt than William Stanley Jevons began to warn of the imminent exhaustion of the nation’s coal supply. Drawing explicitly on Malthus, Jevons argued that the increased demand on resources from a growing population was forcing mines into deeper and more inaccessible seams. ‘We shall begin as it were to see the further shore of our Black Indies,’ he warned. ‘The wave of population will break upon that shore, and roll back upon itself.’ John Maynard Keynes, who made no secret of his admiration for Malthus, attributed the First World War and the Russian Revolution to overpopulation and global competition for food. The ‘great acceleration’ of the second half of the 20th century, a period of unprecedented energy consumption, economic prosperity and demographic growth, produced its own peculiar versions of Malthusian catastrophism, from the neoliberal to the cosmological (the American scientist Garrett Hardin seriously entertained ‘interstellar migration’ as a solution to ‘the population problem’). When the first edition of the Essay on the Principle of Population appeared in 1798 there were just over ten million people in Britain and life expectancy was under forty. We are a long way from Malthus’s Britain, and further still from Le Roy Ladurie’s Languedoc. Why does a theory of scarcity endure in an age of abundance?…

And at what cost? A fascinating– and all-too-relevant– story: “Prophet of the Past,” from @lrb.co.uk‬.

(Image above: source)

* Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population

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As we ponder the prospect of progress, we might might send chilly birthday greetings to a man who helped breach some of the limits about which Malthus worried: Carl von Linde; he was born on this date in 1842. A scientist, engineer, and businessman, he discovered the refrigeration cycle, invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes, and laid the foundation for the development of the refrigerator and ultimately the cold chain— the supply chain that uses refrigeration to maintain perishable goods (meat and produce, pharmaceuticals, and other heat-sensitive goods) in transit, often across the globe.

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