It's true that if human population on Earth grew to the point where there was no room for one more human on Earth, then we'd have huge problems. But this is a) very bloody obvious, b) exceedingly simplified, and c) misses the whole point of what actually happened and what others predicted would happen: that population would stabilize (and even fall, perhaps dramatically) long before we might starve from lack of room to make food in.
First of all, there have been huge advancements in food production technology in all the years since Malthus. Second of all, there are huge advancements in the pipeline (basically indoors vegetables growing with minimal food waste and extreme space-efficiency, and lab printing of meat). Third, we clearly want fewer children when infant mortality is low and life expectancy high. Malthus could not have foreseen all of this, but he certainly lacked imagination, and worse: malthusians in the last 100+ years really didn't need that imagination, just normal powers of observation, and STILL they have all missed how wrong malthusianism was.
"But still, he was right!" No, he wasn't. We could grow and grow and grow if we get off the Earth -- hard to imagine that at this time, but maybe not in a few hundred years. "But we could run out of habitable planets in the Milky Way!" Well, yes, we sure could, but I think that's just not something we should worry about today and for thousands of years yet.
Q: Why are there any malthusians?
A1: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist.
A2: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist, which means that cynical people / psychopaths can take advantage of the rest of us.
Doesn't make Malthus right.
> First of all, there have been huge advancements in food production technology in all the years since Malthus. Second of all, there are huge advancements in the pipeline (basically indoors vegetables growing with minimal food waste and extreme space-efficiency, and lab printing of meat).
These are not good counter-Malthusian points. There were huge advancements in food production technology all throughout history (ploughs / iron ploughs / crop rotation / plants from the new world... the list really is endless), but things were in a much more Malthusian state.
The non-Malthusian state of affairs we enjoy today is entirely a function of people choosing not to have children, not a function of better technology. People who were so inclined could easily wipe out (per capita) the gains from productivity, by increasing the number of capita.
Most of the tech improvements came well before population growth curve flattening. It's quite clear that we develop realistic technology that we need. It's also true that if we didn't naturally (i.e., without force) reduce population growth by now that we'd be in trouble (there would be no getting off the planet fast enough to prevent collapse), but the tech came first, not the other way around.
> There were huge advancements in food production technology all throughout history
The current world population could not be fed without Nitrogen fixation and synthetic fertilizers. The Haber-Bosch process is a huge counter-Malthusian point by itself.
No, it isn't, because it's a productivity technology and those are not relevant to the Malthus dynamic. You know what had a massively larger impact than the Haber-Bosch process? Agriculture.
But the development of agriculture made the world more Malthusian, not less.
In contrast, the Black Plague made Europe much less Malthusian by the simple expedient of killing maybe one person in three. This made everyone more productive without any accompanying technology gains. But the point isn't the productivity gain - it's the population drop.
>It's true that if human population on Earth grew to the point where there was no room for one more human on Earth, then we'd have huge problems. But this is a) very bloody obvious
And also a strawman. We can have huge starvation crises, and struggles for power, migration etc with much much less population, even 2x the current number can yield catastrophic power struggles.
>Q: Why are there any malthusians? A1: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist. A2: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist, which means that cynical people / psychopaths can take advantage of the rest of us. Doesn't make Malthus right
Actually you've got it backwards. We're wired to be pessimistic and alarmist so that fewer cynical people / psychopaths can take advantage of the rest of us.
If we were optimistic / eager to believe we'd be far worse.
>If we were optimistic / eager to believe we'd be far worse.
That is an awesome thought, I always like how there's almost a bias in things we consider which always center around, I'm not sure how to articulate it, but center around things that have been demonstrated.
Consider something like gun deaths, a very tangible concrete easy to measure indisputable thing. Yet the possible outcomes from alternatives that have not yet been demonstrated is always a complex hypothetical thing. In the gun example how many folks have been saved because of guns, etc. That's not an easy metric to measure by any means because where do you draw the line and what examples to include, etc.
Exciting stuff to consider what a system would be like out of tune from the current backdrop of being tuned a certain way that we take for granted and maybe never even notice. Definitely welcome anyone to comment and develop these thoughts or share some formal concepts in this space.
I feel you just described a core reason that many people are conservative. Even if they don't know it. The risks of the hypotheticals outweigh the potential benefits.
No, being pessimistic means being vulnerable to those who preach that the sky is falling. Not always, obviously. For example, Churchill spent the 30s isolated and ostracized for doing just that, but he was right. Appeasement in the 30s is a bit of a special case though: to believe the sky was falling was to believe that war was needed, and no one in Allied countries wanted war after the Great War -- there was a greater pessimism about war than there was about Hitler and Nazi Germany.
Malthusianism has been wrong for centuries, and people still buy that garbage. This is because people are born every day and want to believe the sky is falling. Most eventually grow up.
It's true that if human population on Earth grew to the point where there was no room for one more human on Earth, then we'd have huge problems. But this is a) very bloody obvious, b) exceedingly simplified, and c) misses the whole point of what actually happened and what others predicted would happen: that population would stabilize (and even fall, perhaps dramatically) long before we might starve from lack of room to make food in.
First of all, there have been huge advancements in food production technology in all the years since Malthus. Second of all, there are huge advancements in the pipeline (basically indoors vegetables growing with minimal food waste and extreme space-efficiency, and lab printing of meat). Third, we clearly want fewer children when infant mortality is low and life expectancy high. Malthus could not have foreseen all of this, but he certainly lacked imagination, and worse: malthusians in the last 100+ years really didn't need that imagination, just normal powers of observation, and STILL they have all missed how wrong malthusianism was.
"But still, he was right!" No, he wasn't. We could grow and grow and grow if we get off the Earth -- hard to imagine that at this time, but maybe not in a few hundred years. "But we could run out of habitable planets in the Milky Way!" Well, yes, we sure could, but I think that's just not something we should worry about today and for thousands of years yet.
Q: Why are there any malthusians? A1: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist. A2: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist, which means that cynical people / psychopaths can take advantage of the rest of us. Doesn't make Malthus right.
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