Posts Tagged ‘Malthus’
“It may be said in truth that man is always susceptible of improvement”*…
… 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.
“There are too many of us, he thought. There are billions of us and that’s too many.”*…
Ever since Thomas Malthus got it started in 1798, people have been warning that population growth, given enough time, would lead to famine and environmental destruction. There would eventually be too many mouths to feed. But now a new study, published in The Lancet, forecasts new threats to the economic and social order caused by precipitous population decline.
Damned if you do (it), damned if you don’t.
The world population is now 7.8 billion, up from 3.5 billion less than 50 years ago. Previous estimates suggested we wouldn’t reach “peak humanity,” the point at which things start going to hell, for generations. The most recent United Nations projections see population growth stopping at around 11 billion people near the end of the century. This new study from the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington found that the population might peak at 9.7 billion around 2064 — much sooner than previously predicted — and then fall to 8.8 billion by 2100.
On the face of it, this seems like good news. There’s no doubt that fewer people would relieve pressure on the environment, especially if there were fewer meat-eating, car-driving, computer-buying people. Not as many people taking long-haul flights and buying houses means that a smaller portion of the earth will be devoted to filling the human maw. The authors of this new paper acknowledge that their findings are good news for those who seek to reverse climate change and save orangutans. Moreover, if the world met the UN’s sustainable development goals — educating kids, stamping out disease, providing access to contraception, and spreading prosperity — the planet’s population would likely fall even more abruptly. It’s now clear that improving people’s lives — not population control measures — have been key to driving down fertility rates.
In the future described by this study, richer countries like Japan could age into insignificance, while Nigeria might grow to become a vibrant power broker. By 2100, the populations of Japan, Spain, Italy and South Korea could be half the size they are today. The United States treads water in this projection, buoyed by immigration. Rich European countries like Germany and the Netherlands might stop restricting immigration and begin competing with each other to attract migrants.
So what’s the problem? Picture millions of confused seniors wandering around without enough youngsters to corral them. In 2100, if the paper’s projection prove correct, there will be five people over 80 for every one kid under the age of five, and fewer people with jobs than without. There would be a big increase in elderly folks grasping for pensions and healthcare as the number of taxpayers covering the cost of these benefits dwindle. Economies would sputter and choke…
The risks, spelled out: “The population bomb didn’t detonate. Turns out there’s a new problem.” See also “Fertility rate: ‘Jaw-dropping’ global crash in children being born.”
But to balance the dystopian sci-fi take in the title quote, this one, which would seem to suggest that fewer might be better:
Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who so survive. – Dune
* Fahrenheit 451
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As we study senescence, we might send well-armored birthday greetings to a man who did his part to combat population growth, Samuel Colt; he was born on this date in 1814. An inventor and the proprietor of Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company, he popularized the Colt 45 revolver (and other firearms) and made the mass production of revolvers commercially viable.
Colt’s manufacturing methods were sophisticated: his use of interchangeable parts helped him become one of the first to use the assembly line efficiently. But as impactfully, he was a pioneer in Barnum-like salesmanship and self-promotion. His innovative use of art, celebrity endorsements, and corporate gifts to promote his wares made him a pioneer of advertising, product placement, and mass marketing.
“The man who invented doritos has passed away at the age of 97. He asked to be buried with the creators of Fritos and Cheetos in a variety pack”*…
All told, there are 26 separate ingredients in Doritos Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips…
While most of these individual ingredients aren’t all that bad for us, they’re a cheese-dust-covered grenade when consumed together. “The more you mess with food, the more you’re demanding your immune system to figure out what the heck all these new things are — and it can make mistakes,” Shanahan says. For instance, studies show that over-processed foods have contributed to the rise in food allergies in Western countries.
Weirdly, while the ingredients that sound like they’d be unhealthy (i.e., disodium inosinate) aren’t really all that bad, the ingredients we think we recognize (i.e., vegetable oils) are slowly waging the real war on our insides. “The main thing people need to pay attention to are the first few ingredients in these foods, like vegetable oil,” Shanahan urges. “Vegetable oils alone can cause diabetes, and they don’t even contain any sugar.”
All 26 ingredients in America’s favorite cheese-flavored chip, singly and as a whole, explained: “What’s in This?: Doritos Nacho Cheese Tortilla Chips.”
* Jimmy Fallon
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As we wipe our fingers, we might send apocalyptic birthday greetings to The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus; he was born on this date in 1766. An English cleric and scholar, he was influential both in political economy and demography. He is best remembered for his 1798 essay on population growth, in which he argued that population multiplies geometrically and food arithmetically; thus, whenever the food supply increases, population will rapidly grow to eliminate the abundance, leading inevitably to disastrous results – famine, disease and/or war… a conclusion that remains controversial to this day.
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