The Message of the Monoliths

In October 2011, according to the United Nations, the world’s population reached seven billion.  It was the Malthusian nightmare seven fold, except it was no nightmare.  It was the occasion for digging up the corpse of poor old Thomas Malthus, who’s 1798 Essay on the Principles of Population warned that the capacity for population expansion could far exceed the increase in food production.  It was the occasion for giving the gloomy old prophet a good media kicking.

A headline in Forbes, an American business magazine, trumpeted Seven billion reasons Malthus was wrong.  Others followed the general condemnation, including Reuters, which said that he thought that women had as many children as physically possible, deepening the indictment by saying that he argued “without providing any reasons.”  The Independent said that he underestimated human inventiveness and was thus unaware of improvements in agricultural production. 

On and on it went, a perfect media storm, proving one thing: that none of these reputable sources had ever read Malthus.  Ah, but we all know Malthus, do we not?  Even his name has been turned into an adjective, a sure indication of his legacy.  We know him even if only from the pages of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, where Ebenezer Scrooge appears as the world’s first heartless Malthusian, saying that the poor better die and “thus decrease the surplus population.”

The truth is we do not know him at all, few doing him the courtesy of actually taking the trouble to read his book.  Forbes, in a wholly pompous and condescending manner, declared that “he was not a bad person just rather unimaginative.”  I was so grateful for the corrective provided by Professor Robert Mayhew writing in History Today (Malthus and the Seven Billion), who quite rightly said that the problem with imaginative insight lies not with Malthus but with his commentators;

It we dare actually to read Malthus rather than to merely bandy his name around we shall find a complex, subtle and open-minded scholar who pioneered the study of problems that are increasingly important in the age of climate change and concerns about food security.  By letting the real, historical Malthus speak in his own voice we may just open dialogues that help us to address our present and future planetary predicaments.

There are two nineteenth century paths here that one might care to take, the path of Marx and the path of Malthus.  For Marx the earth was a cornucopia, its resources unlimited.  Only Scrooge and the other heatless capitalists got in the way of Nirvana.  Malthus, in contrast, argued that the world’s resources were not limitless, that “The power of population is so superior to the power of earth to produce subsistence to humanity that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”

According to the World Health Organisation some eighteen million people die each year from malnutrition and outright starvation.  With the earth’s population heading towards ten billion by mid-century, more people will mean more death, more pressure on land, more pressure on resources, more pressure on food production, no matter how innovative we happen to be. 

Contrary to the ignorant comments in the media, Malthus was not ignorant.  He argued from reason based on a painstaking assembly of facts.  He was fully aware of human inventiveness, arguing that “Necessity has been with truth called the mother of invention…Had population and food increased in the same ratio, it is probable that man might never have emerged from the savage state.”  His point was that no matter the great agricultural and industrial improvements of the day, humanity could never be fully free from resource pressure.  Cornucopia’s Horn is not endless after all. 

There is Forbes, in complacent self-congratulation, looking over the past and blind to the present, at least the present for some.  But can it say, can anyone say, what the world will look like in twenty or thirty years from now?  For those a little more cautious than the media pundits Malthus has an abiding relevance.  As Mayhew writes he “…remains a vital well-spring for all who want to think rigorously about the nexus of population, resources, economics and the environment.”

Those who think less rigorously might actually take the trouble to read The Essay on the Principles of Population.  If they have not the intellectual stamina they might consider the fate of the people of Easter Island, a Malthusian nightmare in miniature.  There is a message in those monoliths, even for the heavy-witted journalists of Forbes.  

The fifth horseman

Blog Catalogue is one of the forums I belong to, a sort of encounter group for compulsive writers, chatterers of all sorts. Given the nature of the medium, and given the different levels of interest and experience, there is a lot of inconsequential ephemera, all sorts of trivia. Occasionaly, though, something comes up which stimulates my imagination, sets me off on yet another path. One such was a recent discussion on the nature of money.

It’s interesting to think about money, coins or paper, or debit cards backed up by nominal deposits of coins and paper. In itself it is nothing; it has no value and it has no use. When it comes to it money is little more than a kind of collective illusion, a shared belief in a form of magic, magic that persuades one to surrender real time and wealth into liquidity. But the magic can disappear; the confidence can disappear, corroded away by a form of fiscal disease, a disease that goes by the name of inflation.

In most normal circumstances inflation has a tendency to creep rather than run. But there are times when the disease acquires a frighteningly rapid character, undermining not just the economy but society itself. There are lots of examples here but the one I have in mind is the German inflation of the early 1920s, a time when money could not be printed fast enough to keep up with the rise in prices. The effects were devastating.

Consider the following example, a true one, I assure you. It concerns an individual who got a letter from his bank, saying that they were closing his account because it was simply no longer economic to manage. The deposit in question was the individual’s life savings, accumulated over thirty years of employment, some 30,000 marks, a reasonable nest-egg at pre-war values. Now the value and the time invested counted for less than nothing. The letter came enclosed with a note to the value of 10,000,000 marks, the lowest the bank had. If that was not bad enough the envelope was franked with a 50,000,000 mark postage stamp.

I have no doubt that inflation is an evil, not just a financial evil but a moral one also, destroying savings, destroying lives, attacking those on fixed incomes, the most vulnerable of all. Inflation eats away at society itself, eats away at the basis of social cohesion and civilization. To that extent it is a far greater evil than unemployment. Yes, I’m sure to be out of work is a traumatic experience but it’s most often a temporary set of affairs. Even when it’s prolonged it does not tend to tear the social fabric. It is possible to live with high unemployment just as it is impossible to live with consistently high inflation.

In the end inflation, if not checked, can at its most extreme turn history into reverse. It’s at the point where money is worthless that the most primitive forms of barter arise, where goods are exchanged directly for other goods, assuming one has goods to exchange. Here I have the example of Russia in mind, Russia in the years immediately following the Revolution of 1917, the world of the bagman, the cigarette-lighter economy, which made a partial reappearance in the economic crisis of the 1990s.

So, inflation is the great monster, one that robs money of its magic, one that would, if unchecked, reduce life to the most primitive state of being, a state of economic Darwinism. It’s the fifth horseman of the apocalypse.