by Tim Black, Spiked
The reason why such an army of present-day miserabilists are drawn to the gloomy reverend has far more to do with Malthus’s thorough-going social pessimism than his supposed laws of population growth.
Lisping, reclusive and reviled by the working class of his day, the Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) – the man behind the idea that the ‘lower orders of society’ breed too quickly – would probably be surprised by his current popularity. Because that’s what he is today: popular. Commentators, activists and academics positively fall over themselves in the rush to say, ‘you know what, that Malthus had a point. There are too many people and, what’s more, they are consuming far too much.’
Earlier this summer, a columnist for
Time magazine was in no doubt as to the pastor’s relevance. The global population is ‘ever larger, ever hungrier’, he noted, ‘food prices are near historic highs’ and ‘every report of drought or flooding raises fears of global shortages’. ‘Taking a look around us today’, he continued, ‘it would be easy to conclude that Malthus was prescient’. Writing in the British weekly, the
New Statesman, wildlife lover Sir David Attenborough was similarly convinced: ‘The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this Earth than can be fed.’ Not to be outdone, the liberal-left’s favourite broadsheet, the
Guardian, also suggested that Malthus may have been right after all: ‘[His] arguments were part of the inspiration for Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and they have validity in the natural world. On the savannah, in the rainforests, and across the tundra, animal populations explode when times are good, and crash when food reserves are exhausted. Is
homo sapiens an exception?’ The melancholy tone whispered its answer in the negative. Writing in the
New York Times, Paul Krugman was less coy: ‘Malthus was right!’ shouted the headline.
Given the encomia that are currently coming the way of Malthus you may well wonder what exactly it was that he was meant to be right about. To find the answer to this it is worth actually taking a look at the work, first published in 1798, on which his supposed prescience is based:
An Essay on the Principle of Population. It makes for surprising reading. (...)
‘The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind [eg, wars for resources] are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep of their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population.’
You can almost hear contemporary misery merchants trilling their approval. You’ve got wars for resources, you’ve got pandemics, you’ve got famine… Indeed, virtually every cataclysm, every End of Man is there, forecast in Malthus’s pulpit prose. No wonder environmentalists sidle up to Malthus’s corpse to whisper their approval: ‘You knew all along that nature would take its necessary revenge unless humans, breeding like rabbits, stopped consuming so damned much.’
But what’s strange about reading Malthus’s actual text is that the ‘imperious all-pervading law of nature’ he outlines – that nature will check population growth if humans don’t implement checks themselves – takes up just a few paragraphs of a work over 120 pages long. In fact, he barely bothers to justify his assertion that population grows geometrically while the means of subsistence expand arithmetically. His sole source for his relentless assertion about population growth seems to be ‘Dr [Richard] Price’s two volumes of
Observations’, a 1776 treatise on civil liberty which featured factoids about population growth in the New England colonies during the seventeenth century – ‘when the power of population was left to exert itself with perfect freedom’. As for his assertions about the development of the means of subsistence, there are admittedly a few sketchy paragraphs on the transition between hunter-gather societies and agricultural ones. But beyond that, nothing.
That Malthus’s actual ‘theory of population’ is, by any standard, groundless at least explains why it was vitiated by subsequent history. Because, make no mistake, Malthus has never ceased to be wrong. Not only did population not expand to anything like the ‘geometric’ degree he outlined, but more importantly, the technological developments of the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century and the agricultural, ‘green’ revolution of the twentieth century showed that our ability to support a growing population can, as it were, leap forward. The ‘arithmetic’ rate at which we develop the means of subsistence proved to be what it always was – an arbitrary assertion.
Yet, the flimsy nature of Malthus’s supposed laws of population growth should not be surprising. Why would they be anything else? After all, Malthus was never really interested in producing a work of demography. Even the bits he does produce were ripped off, either from Giammaria Ortes (1713-1790) or from Richard Price’s (1723-1791) work, to which he refers at any point he needs something as solid as a fact. What Malthus really wanted to produce was a refutation of social reform, or worse still, revolution.
Take a look at the full title of his essay:
An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr Godwin, M Condorcet, and Other Writers. His subject was not so much the principle of population growth – this Malthus was happy to take for granted, hence the scant attention he actually paid to justifying it. Rather, his real purpose was the extent to which a supposed law of population would confound those writers like Godwin and Condorcet who advocated social transformation. The theory, the so-called science, was always subservient to Malthus’s main objective of justifying the social order
as it is. As Malthus himself wrote: ‘The principal argument of this Essay only goes to prove the necessity of a class of proprietors, and a class of labourers.’ Malthus was not pessimistic about the chances of improving society because of his theory of population – that is the wrong way round. His wilful social pessimism, where misery was the lot of the majority, inspired his theory of population.
A member of the landed gentry – although being the youngest son he was without an estate – Malthus did have every reason to feel insecure. In the towns and cities of late-eighteenth-century England, the industrial bourgeoisie was emerging, much to the anxiety of a bedraggled, landed aristocrat like Malthus. This is why Malthus rejects the labour theory of value developed by David Ricardo and Adam Smith in favour of land and agriculture as the only true source of value. And on what basis? Because ‘the healthy labours of agriculture’, as opposed to the ‘unhealthy occupations of manufacturing industry’, produce things people really, really need – or, if you prefer, the means to subsist. ‘It is with some view to the real utility of the produce’, Malthus cautions, ‘that we ought to extricate the productiveness and unproductiveness of different sorts of labour’. In fact, so keen was Malthus to justify the leisured existence of the landed aristocracy, and the decidedly unleisurely existence of all who till the fields for her, that he remarks with a stunning
lack of prescience that: ‘By encouraging the industry of the towns more than the industry of the country, Europe may be said, perhaps, to have brought on a premature old age.’
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