The Terrible Idea That Will Not Die
Malthusianism and the population panic that never goes away.
In 1798, a mild-mannered English clergyman named Thomas Robert Malthus discovered something terrifying. Poor people were having sex. Not only that, but they were producing babies. Worse still, these babies were demanding food.
Naturally appalled by these observations, Malthus set himself to the task of forming an economic theory. In his Essay on the Principle of Population, he argued that human populations grow geometrically – 2, 4, 8, 16. Land, however, is finite. Agriculture improves only slowly. Food production grows arithmetically – 1, 2, 3, 4. Any fool could surmise from these calculations that population growth would soon outstrip the food supply, leading inevitably to starvation and misery.
Fortunately, the solution disclosed itself through the same logic. Charity towards the poor would only lead to them having more children, in turn exacerbating the demand for food and the need for further charity. It was unsustainable. The only forces preventing immediate catastrophe were what Malthus cheerfully called “positive checks”: war, disease, and famine. There were also “preventive checks”, such as late marriage and moral restraint. The poor, lacking the moral fibre for the latter, would breed to the point of starvation.
The solution was to let the natural order of things run its course: famine as the cure for starvation.
Within a generation, Malthusianism had become the respectable excuse – indeed, the “compassionate” excuse – for the well-off to do nothing about poverty. The mathematics were irrefutable. The matter was settled.
There was just one problem with this elegant bit of reasoning.
It was nonsense.
What Malthus got wrong
Human populations don’t grow exponentially without limit. Birth rates fall with prosperity, education, and urbanisation. The poorest have the most children while the rich have the fewest. This is completely obvious to anyone looking at current global trends, with rich countries like South Korea now experiencing a demographic emergency.
Agricultural productivity has refused to plod on arithmetically either. Global cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. The world already produces enough calories for ten billion people, and when famines occur today, they’re usually the result of political failures, not agricultural ones. More adults are now overweight than underweight.
Most fatally, Malthus assumed humans were mindless rabbits – driven by nothing but appetite, incapable of adaptation. Yet we have culture and technology and the awkward habit of solving problems that the gleefully pessimistic insist are insoluble. Take the Haber-Bosch process, for example. It practically conjures food from the air.
In short, the problem with his theory is that it treats people as passive objects of mathematical fate. The British Parliament embraced it anyway with a fervour bordering on the sadistic. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 introduced the workhouse, deliberately brutal and hellish places where cruelty was reasoned away as somehow necessary. This is Oliver Twist territory without the musical. Charles Dickens, in “A Walk in a Workhouse” (1850):
“In one place, the Newgate of the Workhouse, a company of boys and youths were locked up in a yard alone; their day-room being a kind of kennel where the casual poor used formerly to be littered down at night…They slunk about, like dispirited wolves or hyaenas; and made a pounce at their food when it was served out, much as those animals do”.
Perhaps there was nobody more “compassionate” by Malthusian logic than Charles Trevelyan, administrator of Irish famine relief. In 1847, Trevelyan wound down public works and closed the soup kitchens while ensuring exports continued even as the poor starved. In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan described the famine as “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.” One million died.
Today’s Malthusians
The most frustrating thing about Malthusianism isn’t that it was wrong. Lots of ideas are wrong – most are, in fact, which is why the good ones tend to survive, and the bad ones disappear. But Malthusianism doesn’t disappear, and it refuses to die. Worse, it has stalked public policy ever since because the logic on the surface is just too compelling, too convenient for those in charge.
Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968) predicted hundreds of millions would starve in the 1970s:
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.”
None of it happened. Ehrlich is still invited to give talks, naturally. The career penalty for being wrong turns out to be zero, as long as the error is made in the right direction, flattering the preconceptions of people who want it to be true. But at least his heart was in the right place. His apocalypse has simply been rescheduled, with new prophets and updated catastrophes taking its place.
China’s One-Child Policy was explicitly Malthusian. It produced an unprecedented demographic catastrophe – a missing generation, a collapsing workforce, an ageing population – while solving what turned out to be a non-problem.
Today’s Malthusians worry about emissions rather than calories, but the structure of the argument is identical: too many people consuming too much. It’s why “degrowth” has become fashionable among policymakers and academics who think shrinking the economy and lowering expectations are the right thing to do. Curiously, it is always other people’s expectations that need to be lowered. The professor advocating degrowth is not, in the main, proposing to degrade his own circumstances. He means yours.
As Yuval Noah Harari has made a career of insisting, human beings are little more than biochemical algorithms produced by blind evolutionary forces. Once you've accepted that, the distance between "humans are the problem" and "fewer humans would be better" is surprisingly short.
Environmental activists produce carbon footprint calculators to make poverty look virtuous. Anti-natalist movements frame having children as a moral failing. We shouldn’t be surprised that both attract so many misanthropes.
The point of it
The appeal of Malthusianism, and why it endures, is that it offers something more valuable than truth. It offers moral licence to see other humans as surplus to requirements, while framing that view as ethical and aligned with the greater good. It’s an inhumane, deeply misanthropic way of seeing the world made respectable by mathematics, which turns selfishness into science and cruelty into compassion.
So the next time someone instructs you that there are too many people or that growth cannot continue forever, remember: Malthus said it first at a time when the world had one billion people and the horse-and-carriage was considered bleeding-edge technology.
We are now at eight billion and better fed than at any point in human history. Despite this, the apocalypse keeps getting rescheduled by the intellectual descendants of Malthus.
Malthusianism is never really about population, or resources, or maths. It’s seized upon by people keen to advertise their compassion and empathy while explaining why other people deserve less.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably noticed the emperor has no clothes. Yet everyone around you is still complimenting his trousers.
Send The Gadfly to the trouser-people.
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I hope you enjoyed this piece. Let me know what you think.
I plan to write more essays like this on The Gadfly – revisiting influential ideas and episodes that once shaped public thinking but later proved disastrously wrong. Partly this is because these stories still matter today. But also because I’d rather The Gadfly didn’t become just another culture-war commentary feed.
The next piece in this series will look at lobotomy, a medical practice once endorsed by experts and institutions that also has some rather uncomfortable modern parallels.
Update – Turns out this post was its own terrible idea, at least in the way I distributed it. It's now unlocked, and the Victorian orphans have been moved down.
Second update – I just read that Paul Ehrlich died on March 13th, two days before I published this.
Not quite. Malthus was right in his description of 99% of human history. It really did work the way he described. He just had the bad luck to be writing just as the world was going through The Singularity, or as it is more commonly known, the Industrial Revolution, and entering this new fangled period of Modernity.
Sitting there in early 19th century you cant really blame him. Based on data up to that point the theory was correct.