“Yet in all societies, even those that are most vicious, the tendency to a virtuous attachment is so strong that there is a constant effort towards an increase of population. This constant effort as constantly tends to subject the lower classes of the society to distress and to prevent any great permanent amelioration of their condition”
Thomas Robert Malthus was a British cleric and scholar. His principle work “An Essay on the Principle of Population” published in 1798 suggested that while population rises exponentially, agricultural output could only increase arithmetically due to the finite amount of land available. As a result, “positive checks” (described by Malthus as higher mortality caused by famine, disease and war) were necessary to bring the number of people back in line with the capacity to feed them.
In the second edition, published in 1803 Malthus softened his original harsh message by introducing the idea of moral restraint. Such a “preventive check”, operating through the birth rather than the death rate could provide a way to counter the otherwise inexorable logic of too many mouths chasing too little food. If couples had fewer children, population growth could be sufficiently arrested for agriculture to cope.
However the basic tenets of his theory has, until now at least proved to be false. What Malthus didn’t really count on was human ingenuity. Since the 1800’s dramatic improvements in agricultural productivity, the expansion in international trade and legislative reform (for example the abolition of Britain’s corn import duty, known as the Corn Laws in 1846) resulted in vast increases in food production and lower prices enabling a much larger population to be supported.
The writings of Malthus are by no means the last time concerns about population growth and the ability of the planet to cope have been voiced and probably won’t be the last. By the late nineteenth century, it was coal, not corn, that was the focus of a kind of Malthusian scarcity. More recently the book The Limits to Growth, commissioned by The Club of Rome was published in 1972. In a similar vein to Malthus the book stated that if the world’s consumption patterns and population growth continued at the same high rates of the time then the earth would hit its limit within a century.
What later became known as the Malthusian Catastrophe continues to be popular to this day. The recent food price hikes of 2008-2011 have reinvigorated proponents of Malthus’ theories that the world is facing a much more difficult future that may check population growth.
Environmental degradation of agricultural producing regions (lack of water, pollution etc.) and the likelihood that it will get worse over the next few decades may represent one of the greatest threats to the continued growth in agricultural productivity and the ability to feed a growing and increasingly wealthy human population.
However, agricultural productivity may well continue to rise as investments in farm equipment, genetically modified food and improvements in the way food is handled from farm to plate boost food availability.
Takeaway
Malthus thought that since agricultural output could only increase arithmetically, population would continue to rise exponentially meaning that sooner or later population growth would be checked by famine and disease. So far he has been proved wrong.