Malthusian Theory

10 Key excerpts on "Malthusian Theory"

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  Population and Development

  • W.T.S. Gould(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Despite this range of qualifications and counter-arguments, the neo-Malthusian discourse remains prominent in public debate about population/development relationships. Famines continue to occur – though globally food production has been growing much more rapidly than population, and in many parts of the world there is a food surplus. Major diseases and under-nutrition continue to be a scourge – though the technologies for much disease control and reducing hunger are available and there have been some conspicuous successes in reducing or even eliminating some contagious diseases. Some areas continue to experience high rates of population growth, and these may be the same areas as those with famines or under-nutrition and high disease prevalence. The world is a finite place with finite (but not fixed) resources, and there are no longer major areas of new land immediately available for human settlement or for food production. The world population is expected to grow by 50 per cent in the next 50 years, and this will again raise the Malthusian threat of overpopulation and increasing poverty, at least in some areas. Despite its initial attractiveness and apparent logic, the neo-Malthusian discourse at the beginning of the twenty-first century does seem to have important limitations, and these are of four types: empirical evidence, the long-term perspective, environmentalist discourses, and global poverty and inequality.

  Empirical evidence

  In the first place, 200 years on from Malthus, there is now a much better awareness and understanding of the wide range of empirical circumstances in which the population/development relationship has evolved (as identified in Chapter 1 ). Only in some circumstances have high rates of population growth been argued to be the major constraint on development. Malthus himself made use of wide-ranging empirical evidence in his essays, from Europe and India, as well as Great Britain (Wrigley 1986). Areas of severe environmental hazard, such as the Sahel belt in West Africa taken as a whole, have experienced levels of population growth (though these have been lower than elsewhere in Africa) that seem to threaten the resource base, at least for small-scale agricultural and livestock livelihoods, and seem to offer the clearest exemplification of a Malthusian scenario (Box 2.2

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  Encyclopedia of Human Geography

  • Barney Warf(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  MALTHUSIANISM One of the first social scientists to tackle the matter of population growth and its consequences was the Englishman Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), whose famous book Essay on the Principles of Population Growth (published in 1798) electrified the world. Malthus’s ideas, contrived in the early days of the Industrial Revolution during the late 18th century, had an enormous impact on political economy and demography. Malthus was concerned with the growing poverty evident in British cities at the time, and his explanation was largely centered on the high rates of population growth that he observed and that are common to early industrializing societies. Thus, it is with Malthus that the theory of overpopu-lation originated. His pessimistic worldview earned economics the label of the “dismal science.” The essence of Malthus’s line of thought is that human populations, like those of most animal species, grow exponentially (or, in the parlance of his times, geometrically). A geometric series of numbers increases at an increasing rate of time. For example, in the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and so on, the number doubles at each time period, and so the increase rises from 1 to 2, to 4, to 8, and so on. Exponential popula-tion growth, in the absence of significant constraints, is widely observed in bacteria and rodents, to take but a few examples from zoology. Note that there is an important assumption regarding fertility embedded in Malthus’s analysis; he portrayed fertility as a biologi-cal inevitability, not as a social construction. This argument was in keeping with the large size of British families at the time. In short, in Malthus’s view, humans, like animals, always reproduced at the biological maximum; they were portrayed as prisoners of their genetic urges to reproduce.

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  Politics and Population Control

  A Documentary History

  • Kathleen A. Tobin(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  Marxism appealed to Loria, and it is evident in his criticism of prevailing population theory. Very impor- tantly, he reexamines fears of scarce resources and a threatened food supply through a twentieth-century perspective. Following decades of rapid tech- nological advancements in agricultural production, short food supply seemed almost a problem of the distant past. The emergence of the United States as an essential supplier of food to the world proved to Loria that Malthus's philosophy should be reexamined. Among the social doctrines which have filled our century with learned con- troversies and philosophical arguments, none has found more valiant support- ers and more determined adversaries than Malthus's theory of population. Received at first with enthusiasm and later bitterly denounced, it has continued, up to the present time, to be the object of serious investigations and erudite dis- cussions. The reader, therefore, will not be surprised, if, before examining cer- Resources 9 tain more important questions, I devote some time to a discussion of a theory which has found both devoted defenders and bitter enemies. The doctrine may be summarized in a few words: The number of beings who may exist at any time, says the pastor of Hailey- bury, clearly is rigorously determined by the amount of provisions at their dis- posal; consequently if, at a certain moment, there is only food enough for one hundred persons, and a hundred and one are born, some will necessarily suffer from deficient nourishment. This lack of equilibrium between population and food is a constant and inevitable phenomenon in life, and not a rare or hypo- thetical one. For while the amount of food available increases very slowly, owing to the decreasing productivity of land which has been long cultivated, and to the diminishing returns from capital too often turned, population, owing to the uncontrollable instinct implanted in every organic being, increases with unabated energy.

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  The Classical Theory of Economic Growth

  • W. Eltis(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  4 Malthus's Theory of Population Growth There are striking statements about the explosive nature of potential population growth from Malthus's predecessors - such as those by Cantillon and Smith which were quoted in previous chapters. 1 It was Malthus, however, who fully and systematically set out the complete classical theory of population growth together with its powerful social implications. He was much impressed by the evidence of extremely rapid population growth in the North American colonies, and in 1798 when he published his first Essay on Population he quoted examples of population in the various colonies doubling or more than doubling in twenty-five years. The evidence he relied on was first published in Boston in 1761 by Dr Edward Styles, President of Yale College, and it was republished in London by Richard Price in numerous publica- tions from 1769 onwards, and Malthus saw it in one of these. 2 He appreciated its full implications and the first of his famous proposi- tions was based on this evidence: In the United States of America, where the means of subsistence have been more ample, the manners of the people more pure, and consequently the checks to early marriages fewer, than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population has been found to double itself in twenty-five years. This ratio of increase, though short of the utmost power of population, yet as the result of actual experience, we will take as our rule; and say, that population, when unchecked, goes on doubling itself every twenty-five years, or increases in a geomet- rical ratio. (Pop ednl That assumes, of course, that the American expansion was all natural 106 Malthus's Theory of Population Growth 107 increase when some must have been due to immigration. Malthus's second celebrated proposition, that the supply of food would grow at most in an arithmetic ratio was a departure from the work of his predecessors.

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  Malthus

  The Life and Legacies of an Untimely Prophet

  • Robert J. Mayhew(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  Both trajectories lead to Malthusian concerns. On the one hand, population growth in the developing world leads to fairly “orthodox” Malthusian worries. While global population growth may have peaked a quarter century ago, for example, we still see the ad-dition of nearly 80 million people annually. This led the distinguished naturalist and television star Sir David Attenborough recently to pen an unrepentantly Malthusian article, “This Heaving Planet,” which argued that “the fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this earth than can be fed.” Attenbor-ough went on to call on us all to break the “taboo” on talking about population. More considered arguments come from demographers and development economists who address the two-speed issue, the fact that 99 percent of projected global population growth to 2050 will be in de-veloping countries. In this context, it is only parts of the globe that are “heaving,” that may see a Malthusian problem of population increase pressing on available resources. As such, present arguments have replaced the “global” Malthusian concerns of Paul Ehrlich with more “regional” or “national” ones. Regionally, it is Africa that is most regularly viewed in these terms: “Africa is a Malthusian train crash waiting to happen.” And yet even this regional scale of analysis is too coarse to capture the more geographically nuanced realities most demographers detect. “Malthus’s theorem may not be the global constraint that he imagined. But at the level that matters practically—the individual country—food production often does not keep up with population growth.” As such, it is at the na-tional scale that most look to find Malthusian problems emerging: there are what the World Bank demographer John May calls “demographic hotspots,” nations such as Yemen.

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  The Savage Wars of Peace

  England, Japan and the Malthusian Trap

  • A. Macfarlane(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Yet the Malthusian analysis has largely been borne out as a description of most civilizations before the nineteenth century. Almost all agrarian societies have conformed to his predictions. If there were gains in resources, these were soon swallowed up by rapidly rising population through a high fertility rate and lowered death rates. This would lead to denser populations which in turn led to 18 Smith, Wealth, I, 89,163,90. 19 Wrigley, Two Kinds, 99,101,103,103. 20 Wrigley, Population and History, 111. The Malthusian Trap 17 the negative feed-back of a rise in mortality. This cycle prevented long-term and sustained economic growth. As David Landes summarized the evidence ‘An amelioration of the conditions of existence, hence of survival, and an increase in economic opportunity had always been followed by a rise in population that eventually consumed the gains achieved.’ 21 Wrigley has described the Malthusian world as one ‘where fertility and mortality are high, population is large relative to available resources and growth is curbed principally by the positive check.’ 22 In fact, within the long period when it was mortality which tended to be most important in checking the growth of population there were two distinct patterns. Conventional population theory assumed that in the thousands of years up to the ‘demographic tran- sition’, since mortality and fertility were clearly balanced, this was achieved by ‘perennial malnutrition and everyday disease.’ Thus it was suggested that year in and year out mortality ran at about the same level as fertility both at a high level. 23 Wrigley describes this situation as one where ‘mortality was always high because the disease environment was so unfavourable . . . in this sense high mortality could be said to have ‘caused’ high fertility.’ 24 There are, however, very few cases of this pattern in recorded history.

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  The Biodemography of Subsistence Farming

  Population, Food and Family

  • James W. Wood(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Modern scholarship has verified that migration to North America had in fact greatly declined by the second half of the eighteenth century (Bailyn, 1986: 90–104). 6 Thus, Malthus maintained that human population could theoretically grow as an approximate exponential function, and do so through sheer natural increase, as long as conditions were unusually favorable – as they were in the land-rich USA once the native population had been pushed aside. And the evidence suggests that he was more or less right. The specific doubling time or growth rate is immaterial to the rest of his argument – but, in the case of the USA, Malthus was more or less right about that as well. What happens when a linear increase in food supply is combined with an expo- nential increase in population? Even if the population starts out well below what its expanding food supply could support, given enough time it will always catch up (Figure 5.3). If Malthus’s assumptions are correct, this conclusion is a matter of mathematical necessity: population increases each year by multiplying the current population by a fixed quantity (e r ), whereas food increases each year by adding a fixed quantity to its current level. In the long run, the “hare” of population (to borrow Malthus’s own metaphor) will always outrace the “tortoise” of food – unless “we can persuade the hare to go to sleep” (Malthus 1986 [orig. 1872: 407]). That is, unless population growth is purposefully restrained, given enough time population will always reach and then keep up with the maximum allowed by its food supply, no Figure 5.3 The tortoise of food versus the hare of population. 5 It should be of interest to technical demographers that, in making this argument, Malthus anticipated some aspects of A. J. Lotka’s stable population theory by seven decades.

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  An Hypothesis of Population Growth

  • Ezra Bowen(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  But the question on which we are now engaged has to do not only with growth of the population, but with population and production. The average income must be raised, and there are two ways in which this may be affected; 1 Pierson, N. G., Principles of Economics, New York, 1912, p. 165. CRITICS OF MALTHUS 57 the one consists in what we have set forth (voluntary parent-hood) the other in increasing the volume of production. Do any of these men submit a complete theory of popula-tion growth ? They are all content with attacking Malthus, or they present population theories which upon close examination turn out to be explanations of poverty—or of well-being—and not explanations of the mode of human in-crease. For that matter, it may be recalled that the essential and surviving idea contained in Malthus' essay explains the universality of poverty rather than the growth of popula-tions. But it is not quite fair to say that Malthus did not at least attempt a complete theory of population growth: he said that food tends to increase in arithmetic ratio and population in geometric ratio: that was a theory of popula-tion growth—but a wrong one. None of the Optimists however even attempts an explanation of the mode of human increase. That, no orthodox economist has essayed—since Malthus. C H A P T E R I V E A S T AND PEARL FOLLOWING the World War, interest in population prob-lems increased. Several excellent works appeared in West-ern Europe and in the United States. Two of the most significant came, curiously enough, from American biolo-gists—curiously enough because no first-rate biologist has heretofore grappled with the population problem; and again, because America was for a century preceding the World War considered the one nation of Western civilization that had no population problem.

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  New Perspectives on Malthus

  • Robert J. Mayhew(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  53 None had grasped the principle of population. But if state-oriented political arithmetic was neither attitudinally nor doctrinally Malthusian, alternative uses of the approach suggest other bases for comparison. What initially seems an archaic adoption of quan- tification for religious polemic, for instance, turns out on closer examin- ation to illuminate the structural assumptions of demographic discourse already sketched, and to show their capacity to contribute to disparate areas of intellectual endeavour. Sacred historians had in fact a long trad- ition of speculating about the history of human multiplication; estab- lishing that Adam and Eve, or Noah’s sons might have filled the earth with people in a small number of generations helped obviate objections to the short chronology (around 5,000 years) that scripture allowed from Who were the pre-Malthusians? 37 Creation to the present. In the wake of Graunt and Petty, however, these discussions took on a new complexity, as mathematicians including John Arbuthnot, physico-theologians like William Derham, and theorists of the earth such as William Whiston emphasized not simply the mathem- atical possibility but the empirical and environmental probability of their demographic arguments. While Arbuthnot and others followed Graunt in citing the sex ratio as an empirical proof of providential demographic management, Whiston and more orthodox sacred historians debated both the climatic and institutional constraints operating on biblical life- span and multiplication. In a tradition that kept up steam at least until mid-century, population emerged as a global phenomenon governed by God through a complex set of secondary causes, including human cus- toms but also by a mixture of historically variable economies of nature and permanent, incontrovertible natural laws. 54 These laws were adjusted, to be sure, for human happiness – but only in the aggregate, and only over the long haul.

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  Human Empire

  Mobility and Demographic Thought in the British Atlantic World, 1500–1800

  • Ted McCormick(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  36 This was the case in Britain itself, and by extension in other modern nations: In the natural progress of the population of any country, more good land will, cæteris paribus, be taken into cultivation in the earlier stages of it than in the later. And a greater proportional yearly increase of produce will almost invariably be followed by a greater proportional increase of population. 37 As better land was exhausted and worse pressed into use, increases in pro- duce declined before population; crowding, poor diets and epidemics fol- lowed, and with them “discouragements to marriage … vicious habits, war, luxury, the silent though certain depopulation of large towns, and the 31 Malthus, Essay (1798), p. 92. 32 Malthus, Essay (1798), p. 95. 33 Malthus, Essay (1798), p. 98. 34 Malthus, Essay (1798), p. 101. 35 Malthus, Essay (1798), p. 104. 36 Malthus, Essay (1798), p. 109. 37 Malthus, Essay (1798), p. 123. 243 The Malthusian Division close habitations, and insufficient food of many of the poor.” 38 While “the fact” of checks to population was inescapable, however, “the modes which nature takes to prevent or repress a redundant population” var- ied. 39 Banishing misery was an idle dream, but its nature and scope might change. This was cold comfort for revolutionaries and utopians. Much of the rest of the Essay attacked the bold and sunny speculations of Wallace, Price, Condorcet and especially Godwin in greater detail. These critiques, all of them grounded in the inevitable clash between the power of popula- tion and that of the earth’s production, have been studied thoroughly and need no elaboration here. Yet even in this most polemical portion of the Essay, the keynote of Malthus’s commentary on the power of policy – or, more generally, human art – to ameliorate the effects of nature was ambiv- alence rather than flat denial. Perfectibility was a sham. 40 Lifespan was fixed. 41 Equality was impossible.

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