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The International Society of Malthus
Rationale and Core Principles*
Ronald Bleier
In 1830, when the English
political economist, Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) was still alive, the
world's human population reached an estimated one billion. It took about a
hundred years for the population to double to two billion. By the end of the
20th century, less than 70 years later, four billion more humans brought the
total to more than 6 billion. In the early years of the 21st century, we are
adding an estimated 73 million people every year. At this rate, a billion more
people will be added in less than 14 years. Tragically, the larger our numbers,
the harder it is to gain control over population increases while the devastating
human impacts on our environment continue inexorably.
Since prehistoric times the
institution of war has persisted in spite of its terrible danger and unbounded
tragedy. Why have humans never solved the problems of poverty, inequality, and
oppression? We are fortunate to have had Malthus to explain in simple terms the
connection between population pressure and misery, which he defined as famine,
poverty, disease and war. To promote his findings, to explore the lessons that
may be derived from his core principles, and to provide a forum for discussion,
the International Society of Malthus was launched in 1997, in time for the
bicentennial celebration of the publication of his 1798 classic, An Essay on
the Principle of Population.
The Core Principles of Malthus:
- Food is necessary for human existence.
- Human population, if not checked, tends to grow faster than the power in
the earth to produce subsistence.
- The effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
- Misery is the mechanism that balances human requirements and available
resources.
- Nature's requirement that the imbalance between demand and supply be
resolved forms the "strongest obstacle in the way of any very great
improvement of society," and thus makes "the perfectibility of man and
society" a theoretical and practical impossibility.
- The Principle of Population, i.e., the inevitability of misery due to the
power of population to overwhelm resources, provides the mainspring behind the
advance of human civilization by creating incentives for progress.
Malthus’s great contribution was to
emphasize the findings of those of his predecessors such as the author of
Ecclesiastes, Tertullian, Richard Cantillon, Robert Wallace,[i]
David Hume, Adam Smith and others who recognized the power of population to
overwhelm the means of subsistence. Malthus drew from their understanding that
there must necessarily be checks to the great power of population, or else, as
Cantillon put it, the “earth would be overstocked and become unable to support
its numerous inhabitants.” Or as Malthus put it, “The germs of existence
contained in this spot of earth, with ample food, and ample room to expand in,
would fill millions of worlds, in the course of a few thousand years.”
In his “Preface,” Malthus observed that
while other writers had noticed that population cannot grow beyond the supply of
food, no author before him had inquired particularly into the mechanism which
kept population down to the means of subsistence. Malthus also taught that
the balancing phenomenon achieved by misery is a “constantly operating” and
cyclical occurrence. During good times human numbers increase to the point where
available resources are overwhelmed, at which point misery acts to reduce the
numbers. Malthus understood that “this necessary oscillation, this constantly
subsisting cause of periodical misery, has existed ever since we have had any
histories of mankind, does exist at present and will for ever continue to
exist…”
Malthus and the structural basis of poverty
Malthus explained how it happens that misery
does not fall evenly on all sectors of the population, but falls mainly on the
poor. In Chapter II he writes that there is a
constant effort towards an increase in population [which tends to] subject
the lower classes of society to distress and to prevent any great permanent
amelioration of their condition…The way in which these effects are produced
seems to be this. We will suppose the means of subsistence in any country just
equal to the easy support of its inhabitants. The constant effort towards
population …increases the number of people before the means of subsistence are
increased. The food, therefore which before supplied seven millions must now
be divided among seven millions and half or eight millions. The poor
consequently must live much worse, and many of them be reduced to severe
distress. (Chapter II)
Malthusian theory: a window on history
Malthus’s notion of a constantly operating
check on population provides a lens through which to view all of history and
politics, which can be defined as the struggle to control resources. For
example, in Chapter III, Malthus employed the principle of population to explain
the growth of those forces that were responsible for the fall of the Roman
Empire.
Want [scarcity] was the goad that drove the Scythian shepherds[ii]
from their native haunts, like so many famished wolves in search of prey. Set
in motion by this all powerful cause, clouds of Barbarians seemed to collect
from all points of the northern hemisphere. Gathering fresh darkness and
terror as they rolled on, the congregated bodies at length obscured the sun of
Italy and sunk the whole world in universal night. These tremendous effects,
so long and so deeply felt throughout the fairest portions of the earth, may
be traced to the simple cause of the superior power of population to the means
of subsistence.
Malthus asserts that the famous leaders of
the Central Asian steppes may have been fighting for glory but the “true cause”
that drove them was the more fundamental power of population.
An Alaric, an Attila, or a Zingis Khan, and
the chiefs around them, might fight for glory, for the fame of extensive
conquests, but the true cause that set in motion the great tide of northern
emigration, and that continued to propel it till it rolled at different
periods against China, Persia, Italy, and even Egypt, was a scarcity of food,
a population extended beyond the means of supporting it.
-
[i]
- Ecclesiastes:“When goods increase,
they are increased who eat them.”
- Tertullian (3rd cent AD church
leader), “The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars, and earthquakes have
come to be regarded a blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to
prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race.” -De Anima, quoted
in Hardin, 1998, “Feast of Malthus.”
- Richard Cantillon (d. 1734) Men
multiply like mice in a barn if they have unlimited means of subsistence.
- Robert Wallace (1761) Under a
perfect government, the inconveniences of having a family would be so
entirely removed that…mankind would increase so prodigiously, that the earth
would at last be so overstocked, and become unable to support its numerous
inhabitants, 1761.)
- [ii]
- A reference to the nomads of the Central
Asian steppe. Malthus uses the terminology first applied by Herodotus (5th
cent BCE).
[MFS note: there
are several Malthus papers on the Website; please see "table of contents" or
"search".]
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* Courtesy of Ronald Bleier, Editor and (Acting) Secretary
The International Society of Malthus
See original at <
http://desip.igc.org/malthus/principles.html >.
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