Sunday 15 July 2012

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.  



17 comments:

  1. Look into The "Georgia Guidestones" ( US State of Georgia ), also UN Agenda 21 on sustainable resources. Who built the Easter Island monoliths?

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    1. The Rapu Nui, Anthony, people of Polynesian extraction.

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    2. Or so it is said about the monoliths. Food is a commodity and a weapon control the food and you control the people. look into what Monsanto Corp. is up to these days.

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    3. Who built the monoliths on Mars?

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    4. Good point about Monsanto. Sorry, Anthony, that I do not know.

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  2. ana, this is eloquent and convincing!
    the quote of Robert Mayhew was totally pertinent.

    "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. "
    --- exactly! i like your using words "fully free from". i also said (in chinese forum) that even if one day that humans totally get rid of this problem (not likely at all), we would still owe malthus for his prediction in such an early time (not sure how "early" though) in history.

    i think those economists (no matter how orthodox they were/are) who refuted malthusian theory just by a few decades' (maximum a couple of hundred years) economic changes were shortsighted. and i think this population issue is not only related to economics, but also natural science, even some cultural or historical issues.

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    1. Indeed so, Yun Yi. I would like to thank you for helping me to focus my thoughts here.

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  3. Just to be clear, Ana, what is the message of the monoliths?

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    1. Seymour, there is quite a good article on the history of Easter Island on Wikipedia, but in short it’s a story of environmental despoliation, of the overexploitation of resources, of a population increasingly unable to feed itself from the resources available, of conflict and war over diminishing resources, of starvation and of cannibalism.

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    2. i was curious about that too. being too much focus on the contents i was not really sure about the monoliths reference. thanks for clarifying. now i remember i heard that story too long time ago. it was an excellent inspiration for such topic.

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    3. It really just came to me as I was writing, Yun Yi. Sorry for the ambiguity; I thought the story was widely known. Still, if it motivates people to look in to the history of Easter Island it's all to the good. :-)

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  4. Heretic! Read a primary source? Next you'll be suggesting that commentators should actually read An Inquiry Into the Wealth of Nations or On the Origin of Species before critiquing economics or evolutionary theory. Think what damage that might cause to social intercourse in Islington and Notting Hill.

    Malthus was born in the middle of the agricultural revolution when the enclosures acts were proceeding at a ferocious pace, and innovations in agriculture and selective breeding were transforming farm productivity. How far sighted and clear was his vision to perceive that human fecundity would easily match pace with every scientific advance. There is a smug conceit among certain people that our current state of food security is somehow guaranteed, and that it will continue to grow to keep pace with human population indefinitely. I believe they could not be more wrong.

    Few places on Earth are more than a couple of weeks away from starvation if international food transport should be interrupted. The measures we have had to undertake to ensure even this level of supply have caused enormous damage to the natural environment. Even more troubling, the hands that control leading agribusiness are no more competent than those that control foreign relations or international finance.

    It is true that the predicted shortages and mass starvation predicted by some in the 1960s did not come to pass as predicted. This was largely due to heroic efforts by plant breeders such as Norman Borlaug, who developed new grain varieties suitable for some of the least promising agricultural regions . . . but we are nearing the limits of production increase for his varieties, and some of the resources needed to grow them have been carelessly depleted. Famine could easily return to Asia, Africa, and South America. And then there are are the dangers of new pathogens emerging. We are dependent on remarkably few plant species, especially cereals and such families as the solanaceae.

    Mass extinctions have occurred on Earth many times in the past, for reasons we do not fully understand. There is no guarantee we will not cause one that includes ourselves.

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    1. Heretic, yes, exactly, Calvin! It's the complacency that I find most unsettling. I can just see Malthus in the role of the soothsayer. "The Ides of March have come", says Forbes and all who followed in the same path. "Aye, but they have not yet gone."

      So far as reading original sources, there is a story in Dominick Sandbrooks' latest instalment on the history of modern Britain (I'm just about to add a review) that really sickened me. It concerns a bright kid from Guyana who came to London in the 1970s. He came from a family that valued literacy only to end up in one of those awful experimental schools run at the time by bearded Trots, people who did not value literacy. "What are you reading now?", he was asked by one of the teachers. "Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.", he replied. The teacher, so he says, 'pissed' himself laughing.

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  5. I remember the ballyhoo over the arrival of the seven billionth human on the planet, but perhaps because I was in Hong Kong I missed the attempts to denigrate Malthus. That is probably just as well, because I get annoyed easily by people who rubbish ideas they don’t understand. Malthus wasn’t a scientist in any conventional sense, but his conclusion—that population increases geometrically but food resources increase only arithmetically—is mathematically unfalsifiable. Advances in agriculture during the intervening period have provided a short-term pick-up in food production, but in the long term the human race has as much chance of avoiding a Malthusian apocalypse as an electron has of contravening the Pauli exclusion principle.

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  6. well I have to confess to also using Malthus's quote, without having checking out the original source. However in my defence it has always been to argue for the need to deal with the problems of population growth, changing consumption patterns and diminishing resources.

    A wonderful book dealing with these issues (including Easter Island) is Jarred Diamonds "Collapse", a true eye-opener and a deserved classic..

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    1. Your defence is accepted, CWB. :-) I'm going to add your recommendation to my reading list.

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