Economic history demonstrates conclusively that Malthus was wrong to believe that, without population controls, no human society could completely escape a downward pull towards subsistence. If Malthus’s Essay demonstrated anything, it is that the accuracy of forecasts of doom is inversely related to their political impact.
The Essay’s impact was immense, running to six editions in Malthus’s lifetime. It speaks volumes for the potency of the scare Malthus created that in the middle of the Napoleonic wars, fighting France, a country whose population of nearly thirty million was nearly double Britain’s (over one third of which was Irish and of doubtful loyalty), a growing population was seized on in Britain as a cause of alarm. Such was its effect in creating ‘alarmist’ views about the future (the word used by Britain’s Office of National Statistics in describing the episode) that in 1800, Parliament passed the Census Act.[26] The first official census took place in 1801, subsequent ones every ten years afterwards except during the Second World War.
The 1801 census found that England and Wales had a population of 8.9 million. At the 1851 census, it had doubled to 17.9 million, rising to 32.5 million in 1901.[27]
Had this nearly four-fold population increase led to greater disease and pestilence and put pressure on living standards?
While infant mortally rates remained almost unchanged during the nineteenth century, recent research suggests that the trend of increased life expectancy from around forty years in Malthus’s day to between seventy and eighty years at the end of the twentieth century began around 1850.[28]
Living standards rose as well.
Farming cash wages rose by twenty-eight per cent. Cash wages in industry rose by over fifty per cent.[29] These rises understate the rise in living standards because prices fell and the purchasing power of money more than doubled.[30] Living standards benefited even more from falling prices than rising wages.
None of these trends is consistent with Malthus’s prediction of population growth triggering reversions to subsistence. Instead, high population growth was associated with a sustained move from subsistence to becoming a society which Malthus claimed could not possibly exist.
How could the economy support a larger population that nearly quadrupled in one hundred years? Industrial production increased twelve-fold and the output from Britain’s coalmines rose tenfold between 1815 and 1901.[31]
In the preface to the Essay, Malthus wrote that, even if in theory he could be shown to have been wrong, he would ‘gladly retract his present opinions and rejoice in the conviction of his error’.[32]
Although he was to live thirty-four years into the new century, the economic evidence did not lead him to retract and rejoice. Neither did it lead to his views being quietly forgotten. The power of the Malthusian substructure of sin, punishment and redemption overwhelmed the contrary evidence to become a recurring feature of the consequences of man’s relationship with the Earth and with nature. Modern man’s escape from the Malthusian trap is either illusory or temporary.
Take for example Maurice Strong, the Canadian environmentalist who was secretary of first United Nations (UN) conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972 and the Rio Earth Summit twenty years later. The first chapter of Strong’s 1999 autobiography Where on Earth are We Going? is set in 2031. It foretells humanity’s fate unless, that is, we are ‘very, very lucky’ or ‘very, very wise’.[33] Nation-states have imploded; the international order completely broken down; there are food shortages, energy shortages, more people perishing from severe weather than in the two world wars of the previous century; a Great Earthquake strikes in 2026; Americans are dying like flies from excessive heat (there was not enough electricity for air conditioners).
A mystic figure by the name of Tadi emerges to synthesise all the main world religions into one. ‘In this Time of Troubles God must call all to a new and transcendent unity,’ Tadi concluded.[34] There was, however, a presentiment of a New Dawn. The human population was falling to what it had been at the beginning of the twentieth century, ‘a consequence, yes, of death and destruction – but in the end a glimmer of hope for the future of our species and its potential for regeneration’.[35]
Sin, punishment, redemption.
Malthus’s population theory’s most lasting impact was not in economics but in biology. In his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote about how it helped catalyse his theory of evolution:
In October 1838, that is, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work.[36]
In contrast to the struggle-for-existence models of Malthus and evolutionary biologists, modern economics has incorporated the greatest finding of his friend and rival, David Ricardo.* ‘Though an awareness of the benefits of specialisation must go back to the dim mists of antiquity in all civilisations,’ according to the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, ‘it was not until Ricardo that this deepest and most beautiful result in all economics was obtained.’[37] Specialisation and the increasing division of labour distinguish advanced societies from primitive ones. It was trade that enabled Britain to specialise in manufacturing and coal mining, importing food from the Americas and other parts of the world which had a comparative advantage in agriculture.
In debates on the environment and global warming from the late 1960s to our own day, biologists and other natural scientists tend to see economic processes through Malthusian spectacles. Most economists follow Ricardo. Because the Malthusian narrative is about man’s relationship with nature, the voices of natural scientists are generally given more weight in these debates.
Nature misleads when transposed to human society. It offers food chains, at the top of which are carnivores where the winner takes all and the loser forfeits their life. Nature also provides examples of symbiotic relationships (the closest to us physically being the flora lining our gut). But these latter relationships hardly compare to the conscious intent inherent in economic bargaining and to the specialisation of activities within a single species which exchange both enables and rewards.
There is nothing comparable in nature to Ricardo’s elucidation of comparative advantage. Trade depends on arguably man’s greatest invention – money. Trade is voluntary; the parties to an exchange only undertake it if each of them believes it will make them better off. Thus trade generates positive sum outcomes.
Natural scientists’ thinking about economic issues is also conditioned by the first law of thermodynamics. This states that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. How can mankind’s numbers grow and consumption increase, like an economic perpetual motion machine, without incurring some equivalent loss somewhere else? Economic activity must therefore have a limit because it consumes what it depends upon, so the argument goes. This leads scientists and environmentalists (often they’re the same people) to worry about resource depletion and the planet’s carrying capacity.
The analogy with physics does not hold because the driver pushing outwards the boundary of economic potential is the expansion of human knowledge. In this respect, the market economy has always been the ‘knowledge economy’. Knowledge is not like one of Paul Ehrlich’s rotting bananas. As Bacon put it, knowledge is power.
* Not all economists elevated Ricardo above Malthus. Keynes wrote in the 1930s, ‘if only Malthus, instead of Ricardo, had been the parent stem from which nineteenth-century economics proceeded, what a much wiser and richer place the world would be today’ – not that Keynes subscribed to fears about running out of resources.
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[1] Ronald H. Coase, ‘The Problem of Social Cost’, Journal of Law and Economics (1960).
[2] Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch (1968), p. xiii.
[3] William Rawley, The Life of the Right Honourable Francis Bacon, Vol. 1 of the Complete Works (1730), p. 5.
[4] Quoted in Benjamin Farrington, Philosopher of Industrial Science (1951), p. 64.
[5] Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, p. 129.
[6] Quoted in Farrington op. cit., p. 54.
[7] Francis Bacon, The Moral and Historical Works of Lord Bacon, ed. Joseph Devey (1874), p. 297.
[8] Karl Marx, Capital (1961), p. 136.
[9] Karl Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994), p. 198 (emphasis in the original).
[10] ibid., p. 193.
[11] A.N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1967), p. 12.
[12] ibid.
[13] Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994), p. 203.
[14] Kevin Rudd, Address to the Lowry Institute, 6th November 2009.
[15] Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (2002), p. 45.
[16] Popper, The Myth of the Framework (1994), p. xiii.
[17] ibid., p. 110.
[18] Thomas L Friedman, Our One-Party Democracy, New York Times, 9th September 2009.
[19] Martin Wolf, Why Globalisation Works (2004), p. 41.
[20] Paolo Rossi, Francis Bacon: From Magic to Science, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch (1968), p. xi.
[21] Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
[22] Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
[23] ibid.
[24] ibid.
[25] Geoffey Gilbert (ed.), TR Malthus Critical Responses (1998), Vol. 3, p. 178.
[26] www.ons.gov.uk/census/census-history/index.html
[27] B.R. Mitchell, International Historical Statistics Europe 1750–2000 (2003), Table A1.
[28] Sam Peltzman, ‘Mortality Inequality’, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 23, No. 4 (2009), pp. 175–90.
[29] Mitchell, International Historical Statistics Europe 1750–2000 (2003), Tables B4 & B5.
[30] ibid., Table H2.
[31] ibid., Tables D1 & D2.
[32] Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).
[33] Maurice Strong, Where on Earth are We Going? (2001), p. 7.
[34] Strong, Where on Earth are We Going? (2001), p. 21.
[35] ibid., p. 22.
[36] Charles Darwin, Autobiography (2010), p. 82.
[37] Ronald Findlay in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, ed. John Eatwell et al (1998), Vol. 1, p. 514.
3
Antecedents
Most of the population-theory teachers are Protestant pastors.
Karl Marx[1]
So far then as our wealth and progress depend upon the superior command of coal we must not only stop – we must go back.
William Stanley Jevons[2]
By the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, Malthus’s prediction – that it was impossible for any human society to escape subsistence without some form of population control – was no longer tenable. His theory had to be reformulated or discarded.
The critical responses of leading economists of the day prefigure those that accompanied the emergence of environmentalism at the end of the 1960s and the debates on global warming two decades later.
The first response is an ancestor of the global warming party. William Stanley Jevons was born in 1835, the year after Malthus died. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, a tough assessor of reputation – he thought Adam Smith much overrated – lauded Jevons for his ‘brilliant conceptions and profound insights’. Jevons was ‘without any doubt one of the most genuinely original economists who ever lived’, Schumpeter wrote.[3] Praise in economics does not come higher.
‘His definitive breakthrough came with the publication of The Coal Question in 1865, which predicted a decline in Britain’s prosperity due to the future exhaustion of cheaply extractable coal,’ Jevons’ biographer Harro Maas wrote.[4]
The Coal Question begins by rehearsing Malthus’s key argument: although human numbers tended to increase in a uniform ratio, the supply of food cannot be expected to keep up. ‘We cannot double the produce of the soil, time after time, ad infinitum.’[5] Conceding that innovation would ‘from time to time’ allow a considerable increase, this would only buy time. ‘Exterior nature presents a certain absolute and inexorable limit,’ Jevons maintained.[6] Although Malthus’s fundamental insight still held, Jevons argued that the growth of manufacturing and free trade ‘take us out of the scope of Malthus’s doctrine’.[7] But this would not free mankind from resource constraints. The inability to grow enough food was no longer the check on human progress. Now it was coal – ‘the Mainspring of Modern Material Civilization’, as he called the carbonaceous rock.[8] ‘With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of early times,’ Jevons claimed.[9] How Britain should respond to this challenge was not merely an economic issue; it was a question of ‘almost religious importance’.[10]
The transfer of the check on civilisation’s progress from farm to coal mine had actually worsened humanity’s material predicament. ‘A farm,’ Jevons argued, ‘however far pushed, will under proper cultivation continue to yield for ever a constant crop. But in a mine there is no reproduction, and the produce once pushed to the utmost will soon begin to fail and sink to zero.’[11] Jevons thus anticipated both the idea of ‘sustainability’ that was to emerge in the 1970s and the rationale for renewable energy.
Whereas exporting farm products – ‘the surplus yearly interest of the soil,’ as Jevons put it – could be unalloyed gain, Jevons argued that to export coal was to be ‘spendthrifts of our mineral wealth.’[12] ‘Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?’ Jevons asked.[13]
His answer was unequivocal. Britain should understand that any increase in its prosperity and its power in the world was temporary.
If we lavishly and boldly push forward in the creation and distribution of our riches, it is hard to over-estimate the pitch of beneficial influence to which we may attain in the present. But the maintenance of such a position is physically impossible. We have to make the momentous choice between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity.[14]
The second response provided the most vigorous counter-attack to Malthus. If Malthus was right, Marx and Engels had to be wrong. So they deployed some of their most cutting invective against him. In 1865, the same year as The Coal Question, Marx called Malthus’s essay a ‘libel against the human race’.[15] Twenty years earlier, Engels described Malthus’s law of population as ‘the most open declaration of war of the bourgeoisie upon the proletariat’.[16] His Essay was ‘nothing more than a schoolboyish, superficial plagiary’, Marx said, ridiculing Malthus’s vow of celibacy.[17]
‘Where has it been proved that the productivity of the land increases in arithmetical progression?’ Engels asked in his 1844 essay The Myth of Overpopulation. True, the area of land was limited. Even if it was assumed that additional labour did not always yield a proportionate increase in output, there was, Engels argued a third element, which ‘the economists, however, never consider as important’ – science. ‘What is impossible for science?’ Engels asked.[18]
Jevons was emphatic. Science could not free mankind from resource constraints. ‘A notio
n is very prevalent,’ Jevons wrote, ‘that, in the continuous progress of science some substitute for coal will be found, some source of motive power, as much surpassing steam as steam surpasses animal labour.’[19] He attacked a popular scientific writer of the time for spreading such notions as ‘inexcusable.’[20] The potential of electricity was based on ‘fallacious notions’, comparable to belief in perpetual motion machines.[21]
What about petroleum? While superior in some respects to coal, it was nothing but the essence of coal. Besides, there wasn’t very much of it. ‘Its natural supply is far more limited and uncertain than that of coal,’ its high price already reflected its scarcity.[22] According to Jevons, ‘an artificial supply can only be had by the distillation of some kind of coal at considerable cost.’[23] The future, Jevons asserted, lay in the development of the steam engine and the possibility of multiplying by at least threefold its fuel efficiency. ‘If there is anything certain in the progress of the arts and sciences it is that this gain will be achieved, and that all competition with the power of coal will then be out of the question,’ Jevons wrote.[24]
The Age of Global Warming: A History Page 3