What was wrong with Malthus or the food scare talked about in the article is simply that they made their argument about the wrong thing and at the wrong time, the rebuttal is based on contingent facts.
There may very well come the point, and as others have pointed out climate is already maybe one such issue, where we run into a situation where the right technical solution or political fix does not exist. Locally of course there have been countless of Malthusian examples, put a city under siege, or a country (see Yemen's blockade) and you will see how Malthusian the world is pretty quickly.
Of course some of the conclusions Malthus drew (the mentioned culling of the sick) in the article are inhumane and reprehensible, but nobody today really argues for any of that stuff. But what Malthus today is still useful for is provide an antidote to the 'perpetual growth' mindset that has no other answer to anything than to grow yourself out of every problem.
ahem
https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/themes/population-pol...
https://iiasa.ac.at/web/home/about/news/20140918-PDR-pop.htm...
https://blog.iiasa.ac.at/2014/02/27/what-is-the-optimal-fert...
https://www.ined.fr/en/glossary/population-policy/
Malthus should be targeted by the time-travellers for culling as soon as convenient ..
We don’t want 12-14 billion humans. The biosphere is already under enormous stress.
Are you making a handwaving argument about supposed genocide via birth control?
While there has certainly been some poor husbandry of the earth's resources, there have been and continue to be significant efforts to improve resource utilization in environmentally friendly ways - not the least of which is increased costs of basic resources leading to self-imposed limitations by consumers.
Basically, on net, people choose more luxury over more children. They economize when presented with prices that reflect the reality of underlying scarcity. They make choices that often result in improved environmental stewardship, either implicitly or explicitly.
That thought is pretty much enough to refute the refutation. The idea that a resource can't run out because "economics happens" is simply a non-sequitur. Economics is perfectly comfortable with optimising a bunch of humans out of the system because they can't produce enough to justify their resource consumption. That is what a Malthusian collapse would look like economically speaking.
The biggest fail of Malthus was that he made his argument at exactly the worst possible time, when the growth in productive capacity has for the first time in history exceeded the growth in population. However, since at his time, the past was much more of a mystery than it is now, predicting the past was almost as difficult back then as predicting the future. Since his predictions have been completely validated by the historical and archeological record we have since then recovered, this must be credited to him.
It's not about being right or wrong. It's about making good decisions. Malthusianism is a bad model. It takes two variables, population and resources and extrapolates. This is bad because the world is much more complicated. Making costly choices based on this bad mode is bad decision making
Indeed, Malthus actually ages better then he's given credit for. His solution to the problem he poses is pretty close to the modern one, that a more educated and well-off population will decrease their fertility, so that eventually population growth will level off. (Malthus's actual view of the mechanism here is pretty Victorian, he talks a lot about "Public Morality" and I don't think he mentions "birth-control" in any form, but his basic idea is correct)
The devil is in the details, and escaping the trap once isn't a permanent solution. Feeding us more efficiently now by poisoning our environment isn't a long term solution.
And food production following an O(2^n) curve is highly improbable, the best we can imho do is something polynomial or linear.
That's why Malthuus might have been a little wrong back then, but basic mathematics or computer science knowledge instantly proves him right, just not back then, because humanity got lucky.
I'm not aware of any era or place where many people have not expected the world to meet disaster soon. It's a part of all major religions.
I still think it's a good idea to allocate some resources towards mitigating low probability, high impact events.
But the number of times in human history the world has "ended" can be counted on one hand. That time 10k years ago when the human population had a big bottleneck, maybe a super volcano. The bronze age collapse is another. The fall of the western roman empire. That's about it.
But there are many more smaller events that still warrant emergency preparedness. Catastrophic weather, civil unrest and war count.
It's funny to watch, a lot of these have seen before and will again.
> The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
― Socrates (~470BC - 399BC)
[edit]
I do accept that it could become a whole-earth disaster that affects everything, but my point is that this may take generations.
No. I have that attitude, and I'm not dismissing either!
I think they're both serious problems that will cause a lot of pain as they're being worked through.
What I disagree with is doomsday scenarios where they'll be the end of human civilization.
Sci-fi novel plot starter: it's a quality that has been selected for by interstellar progenitors who seeded life on Earth, so that we would be wary of the need to mitigate real planet-scale disasters.
I've seen this used as a plot seed for any number of space operas, but as far as I can recall, I haven't seen any that used it and also explained how they were able to somehow instill traits which, over hundreds of millions or billions of years, could not only remain present but unexpressed in the genomes of Nth-generation offspring, but could then, in response to some kind of extremely specific and complex stimulus, be expressed - but only when needed, and in perfect accord with the original intelligent design.
It sounds like I'm making fun here, and I'll admit I picked the phrase "intelligent design" with puckishness aforethought. But it's a serious question, and what I'm really looking for is media recs. Does anyone actually reckon with this, in a way that's plausibly compossible with our current understanding of genomic heredity?
(Introns and pseudogenes don't count, and yes, I remember that hilarious TNG S6 episode that used them as an excuse to give Barclay even more not-very-well-depicted psychological problems. Sure, these regions aren't translated into proteins, but they remain as susceptible to all the ordinary mechanisms of mutation as any other part of the genome. Not only that, being unexpressed, they are if anything less likely to be conserved than exons, so the "alien space magic hidden in non-coding DNA!" thing doesn't fly.)
However, nonsense like that doesn’t change the fact that more co2 in the air increases the Earth’s temperature. And unfortunately we don’t seem to be that interested in significantly reducing our emissions anytime soon.
“The situation in the United States is that to get a response, the need must be somewhat overplayed”
As I grow older and start raising a child, I realize why the anger and will for change, the passion and hysteria you show when you're young are never followed by those who ve seen a bit more. This all doesn't matter, and living a regular monotonous life, making your little monkey turn into a human, is all most people end up caring about.
If the world blows up in your life time, at least it means you aren't missing out on anything after you're gone.
Perhaps the dread and angst is projected into concerns about society as a whole. Easier for some to worry about the coastline of Miami in 100 years instead of the indisputable fact that death is approaching.
Armageddon for me is thus not a one-day event like in movies such as The Day after Tomorrow, but a gradual and accelerating destruction all around. This is a “boil the ocean” project that humans have inadvertently initiated and it is taking the required time to complete.
Planning to be pleasantly surprised is not a clever plan. The fact that the world didn't end from 1960-2020 in defiance of the evidence of 3,000BCE through 1960AD is not that comforting.
There will also be doomsayers, but there will also always be resource constraints.
Why fertility rates declined worldwide is the big question. Worldwide, births per female were about 5 in 1960 and about 2.4 worldwide now. That is a huge, and unexpected, trend. Japan, South Korea, and the EU are in actual decline. Nobody really expected a change that big. It's still not really understood. The usual explanations are contraceptives, more women working, etc. Lower sperm counts, maybe, but probably not.
(Not central Africa, though. There, the fertility rate is still around 4.)
India population growth - graph.[1]
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/population
On an interview with an older guy from the 50s, he was explaining how a painter could have support a family and 6 kids and a house, all on a single income. Try doing that today. These days, it would be hard for a painter to just support himself, much less a wife, a house and six kids.
In the US, in blue states, millenials are now spending upwards of 40 to 50% of their incomes just on shelter.
In the bay area, it's not uncommon for couples in the highest income brackets to rent out rooms in their townhouse (notice i said townhouse) to make ends meat ( at least for those who bought recently). and that's just the top 2-3%. you can imagine how everyone else lives.
We need to get away from using GDP per capita as a measure of wealth and instead use number of hours worked to earn necessities (shelter, food, water, transportation, education and medical).
Is it really not that well understood? In countries and regions that are highly industrialized (like the societies you mention), having more than 2-3 children doesn't provide any more economic security like it does for largely agrarian and manual-labor based societies.
Low sperm count is not the reason why most people do not have three plus kids - it isn't like people give up on birth control at 30 or 40 and never have any kids again. Most of is "won't have more kids" as opposed to "can't have more kids".
What's your point?
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-arctic-microplastic-pollution....
are an unintended consequence of scale.
I don't have good solutions, and the way our economies are set up discourage population degrowth (see the panic in Europe), and there are many bad, immoral ways to go about it, but so many of our problems are not a problem with technologies employed, but the scale at which they are employed.
In any year, in any place where there is not a famine, we are, by definition, producing more food than anyone wants to consume, in aggregate at least if not for individuals. Whenever you are producing an excess of something, the price will fall.
Famine, if it happens, won't happen as a slow decline of food production, until at a predictable time we cross from producing 100.0000001% of the food the world needs to producing 99.9999999%. It will happen as a slow decline reducing our safety margin until some sort of three-sigma weather event makes for a really bad year -- flooding in some regions kill production here, drought in other regions kills production there, a blight on crops in otherwise fair weather, and the production for the next N months falls below the level of the stockpiles to last.
That is the point at which the market will react and food prices will go crazy. It won't do anything to help production -- some things take time, not money. It will just be the world playing musical chairs to see who gets left without enough food to eat.
So yes food is cheaper than ever to buy but we are burning through environmental capital at dangerous and irresponsible rate IMO. The cost of food will stay cheap until it's too late and the land stops producing at the current level.
Source? I don't think this is a matter of fact.
On the other hand, there's plenty of land that is nearly suitable for growing sustenance crops but just needs a little preparation. We don't always favour converting that land to agricultural use, e.g. in the Amazon rain forest.
However, the claim misses the point for a different reason. Even if all arable land is being farmed, it's very far from being exploited to its maximum capacity. In terms of calories per hectare per year, much of that land could be improved tenfold or more with a switch of crops or farming methods, if the economics demanded it and potatoes became as expensive as steak.
This is due to land use for agriculture per person dropping rapidly[3].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-area-o...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population?time=1985..lat...
[3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-agricultural-land-u...
This is not the point.
The point is the racist and genocidal undertones expressed by malthus and repeated even nowadays: "wealthy countries can thrive and use a lot of resources while people in the global south can starve and die of disease to reduce population"
EDIT: why all the downvotes, huh?
There is no reason to ignore that countries like Niger will inevitably run into even more problems if they continue reproducing according to contemporary UN models. The projections go to 70 million people for Niger in 2050, and they have actually slightly underestimated African population growth in the past.
Feeding 70 million people in a mostly desert country with no industry to speak of is a real issue and it should not be ignored just because America has developed an allergy on anything that might be construed as racism.
I wish our collective psychology was able to accept crises as serious without resorting to raising the stakes to cosmic levels or dismissing it as not a real problem if you, personally, come out mainly ok.
It seems fairly common to picture the earth heading to an unstable overpopulation but imo this is only a comfortably narrowed down perspective on large scale problems. Especially for western countries, it is tempting to focus on the global population issue because this is primarily a phenomenon of rural, poor regions, so not their own. The other three mayor factors at play here would unfortunately require to rethink basic economics and this would reach deep down into societies. I suspect some sort of psychological "the others fault" self defense emerging in large. I have to be honest here, i fell for it too at first.
Even if the overpopulation would be the only factor we face, its solution would still be large scale and system questioning because either you throw away any moral standards or you end up creating and distributing wealth in a sustainable way. No, simply the delivery of contraception is no solutions only good healthcare and especially the education of girls/women.
It is possible for you and me to climb Mt. Everest. In all likelihood, neither of us is going to spend several years and all his savings towards this goal.
Possible does not mean practical.
People are definitely going to say the same thing about climate change, if we manage to mitigate it: see, nothing bad happened, you wasted your time. No, the fact that we acted will have been why nothing bad happened.
In addition, we are well past the viable population for even a moderate footprint lifestyle. We got to neatly 8B by keeping half the world at 1/10th or less the resource and environmental footprint of the rest. It’s like a king in a massively overpopulated nation of relentlessly constrained citizens looking out at his gardens and saying, “see? No problems, and those fools predicted the country would collapse.”
The human population is expected to peak at around 11 billion; I have no idea whether the earth can support that many, certainly not with the way our civilization works right now.
The poorer parts of the world would stop having so many babies as they got richer anyway, it seems.
Still, we're depending on exponential growth (be it pension funding, companies, inflation, you name it).
We're lying to ourselves regarding population. Ok, too many people - we'll resort to a vegetarian diet - oh wait, that's not sustainable, too many people. Well, we'll be vegans! Oh wait, not sustainable also, we'll need gene editing (bad, but we'll accept that reaching a certain threshold). Well, then let's grow our food in vertical farms! Seems sustainable, until we reach the next (last?) limit.
This expands to anything (ICE vs EE, flying vs train travel). Unless we accept this inherent flaw and restrict us accordingly, we'll outgrow anything.
Oh well, then let's just ... ? Go to mars :) (I truly believe this is the only mid-term sustainable¹ option, since we'll never be able to have at most only 2 children as a population - and I'd love to gain as much hate for this statement as possible if I were proven false).
¹ Mars will not be enough in just a few centuries, probably even just decades
-In the mid 80's every newspaper in California was warning of killer bees[1] that were going to invade the state and kill many people, alot of my family members were quite nervous about them and the media made a point about its not a matter of if but when these bees arrive in the state, the coverage was blanket until about the 90's when it died down.
- Y2k meltdown - This was also hyped beyond belief by the media and doomsday scenarios were drummed up to an extraordinary frenzy until really nothing bad happened after the new years[2], I remember being at a new years party in menlo park and people were saying that the lights may go out due to the bug.
- In the years 2017/2018 the media was drumming up automation of all jobs by AI/robots/self driving cars, people were extremely worried that the most wouldn't have a job in a few years, but in 2019 unemployment hit a 50 year low[3], I'm not saying this won't come to pass, just the media's timeline was totally wrong.
The stuff thats been really bad, 9/11, financial crisis of 2008, covid-19 has all come on very suddenly and most people were caught totally off guard.
The things people should really worry about are:
Lack of water (aquifers that took tens of thousands of years to be filled are close to be drained in many parts of the midwest and west[4] of the US.
A large solar storm similar to the Carrington event[5] knocking out all of the electrical grid(and electronics) of a large portion of the planet.
A supervolcano/or caldera erupting and cooling the earths climate down dramatically, think crops dying and extreme famine.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem [3] - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/04/jobs-report---september-2019... [4] - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/vanishin... [5] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event
Maybe we do have a population crisis. Our climate issues are in large due to overpopulation and subsequent increasing demand for resources. Sure we can cut down even more of the Amazon rainforest to supply food for more people, but not attributing any of this to population growth seems dishonest.
... and.. it does ? https://www.worldvision.org/refugees-news-stories
Industrialization, not population is to blame. Maybe we have an industrialization crisis. But it's difficult to blame that on "developing nations" so it probably won't get much press.
Then again, things like the Paris Agreement provide incentives to move polluting industry to China, so nationalist anti-Chinese media may eventually lay the blame on industrialization.
But another way to say it that if we are to lift the materialistic standard of living for the other 4 billion people, there needs to be same or less population of them.
Countries like Denmark and Norway are a lot more detrimental to the planet's ecosystem because they consume a lot, lot more per capita compared to what Bangladesh does (and they consume lots of bad things that Bangladeshi people do not consume).
A million people in poverty is not the same as a million living a traditional middle class lifestyle.
As bloodthirsty capitalism pulls more and more people out of poverty we discover that putting a steak on everyone's table and a fresh car in everyone's garage is too taxing on the atmosphere, wildlife, forests and what not.
We seem to have to choose between a smaller luxurious population and billions and billions of people living in pods eating synthetic food.
This point of view comes up a lot in connection with climate change, and I always find it incredibly offensive. My dad was reminiscing the other day about his happy childhood growing up in a village in Bangladesh in the 1950s. This was back when 1 in 3 kids didn’t live to the age of 5.
Even an RCP 8.5 scenario isn’t going to turn the developed world into Bangladesh circus 1950. Hell it won’t turn Bangladesh into Bangladesh in 1950. People will still have a standard of living that makes life incredibly worthwhile, because we as human beings were designed to need little to find life worthwhile.
That’s not an argument against investing in renewables or whatever. But the Malthusian arguments about climate change are quite misanthropic. Trump got in trouble for calling places “shithole countries.” But nobody blinks and eye when someone casually implies that people in those countries would have been better off never having been born.
I currently live in Bangladesh. And my father made a off-handed comment few days ago about how there isn't many "thin" people in our village anymore. When he grew up in 60s, a big chunk of our village people didn't have two meals regularly, people dying of hunger wasn't so uncommon. Just two days ago a doctor friend told me hundreds of people die in his hospital every week due to lack of proper equipment. I have several times witnessed the heartbreaking scene in pharmacies where people ask for the price of a medicine, and then turn away without buying anything after hearing the price.
Overpopulation at least partly contributes to this, if not the biggest contributor. It may not be a global problem, but it definitely is a problem for a country like Bangladesh (and maybe India too). I'm not saying this people's life is worthless, but I would definitely not want a new generation of people to go through this.
Population control here is not just the pragmatic and necessary option, it's also the most humane thing to do.
Recent history shows that there's no holding previously backwards countries from advancing their consumption. As Russians joke, the global famine will come when the Chinese start using forks.
China, India and SE Asia are quickly upping their per-capita production and consumption of carbon-heavy goods. Brazil doesn't destroy Amazon out of spite.
We have no moral right to say "Nonono, you can't do what we did in the 20th century and live like us!".
The problem is the constant expansion (which comes with warfare and extreme waste) that capitalism mandates.
Also, news tell us that in Syria climate change has resulted in food shortage in recent years. But having to feed twice as many people from the same land compared to 1985 sure cannot be the reason, right?
The birth rate across the globe has been steadily on the decline for some time, there aren't many more places left where rapid doublings are still possible.
Climate change and the loss of species and such is one manifestation of overpopulation. Covid-19 could be viewed as another, in my opinion.
Obviously this is all rich coming from an American living in the suburbs (I don’t really see what my alternatives are), but I can’t help but think we can only sustain around a billion people without destroying the planet (speculation).
We live in a golden age of cheap energy and consumption. People get in gasoline powered cars and drive a mile down the road to get a snack. That’s impossible to maintain. Not only do we have overpopulation, but we built unsustainable cities, predicated on infinite cheap energy ($2.50 gas). Electric cars won’t fix this, although they’ll help.
"The myth, as is commonly told, tells the story of a mid-twentieth century world headed for disaster. There were too many people being born and not enough food being produced. This combination of forces would lead inexorably to famine, unchecked migration, conflict and other calamities. However, thanks to the inventiveness of Western scientists more food was produced, Armageddon was avoided, and the world did not experience a population crisis."
But also thanks to the green revolution we have pesticides and fertilisers that made this happen, that are causing cancer all over Punjab and created massive wealth disparities. Not to mention we never needed all this food, if the population was in control. But the population exploded because of Western invasions that resulted in mass poverty!
Thanks "western" scientists!
I disagree. IMO it exploded because improvements in medical care resulted in a dramatic reduction in child deaths, but people kept having the same number of children.
There are just scientists.
And deal with that chip.