Malthus Was Wrong; So Were William Vogt and Paul Ehrlich

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October 22, 2001 - Vol. 8 No. 41

Malthus Was Wrong; So Were William Vogt and Paul Ehrlich


One of the most dangerous ideas abroad in the political/economic arena today is neo-Malthusianism.

Thomas Robert Malthus was an 18th-19th century clergymen whose father, a liberal, had been a friend of Jean Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher whose ideas engendered the Reign of Terror that followed the French Revolution; whose corrupting ideas still influence public education today.

The younger Malthus soon left his parish to take a teaching position with the East India Company. Fascinated by the new "science" of political economics, in 1798 he published his simplistic theorem in An Essay on Population. Malthus' idea was that population increases geometrically (in the ratio 1, 2, 4, 8...), while production of food only increases mathematically (in the ratio 1, 2, 3, 4...). Thus, said Malthus, there must be periodic wars, famines or plagues to "reduce the surplus population", or we would soon be standing shoulder to shoulder.

Malthus has had many modern imitators. One was William Vogt, who in 1960 wrote a book entitled People! The Threat to Survival. Another was Paul Ehrlich, author of the 1960 book The Population Bomb, which predicted a world-wide famine by 1975, caused (he said) by the earth's population outgrowing our ability to produce food.

But they were wrong. Today, India - which at the time Vogt and Ehrlich wrote, had to import food and still experienced regular cycles of famine - now has a population more than twice as large as in 1960 and is a net exporter of food!

Today, the United Nations population agency warns that the world's population will, within a couple of decades, enter a period of a global decline ten times as rapid as the population growth of the last 50 years. Throughout the industrialized nations, the birth rate has fallen dramatically below the "replacement rate" of 2.1 children per woman. And as Third World nations strive to emulate the prosperity of the West, their birth rates are falling too. Canada's birth rate is already far below replacement. Quebec's is the lowest in Canada.

A "birth dearth" and accompanying population decline, warns the UN, will plunge the world into a depression far worse than the 1930s.

Another neo-Malthusian political-economic perspective is put forth by the Green Party. The Greens, who have some excellent policies on environmentally-friendly industrial and energy development, warn that it is folly to expect the economy to keep expanding forever, because eventually expanding industry must consume the entire planet. It's Malthus redux. But while there seems to be a certain logic to their theory, it neglects two important factors: innovation, and Divine providence.

The "new economy" associated with the transition from the Industrial Age into the Information Age provides an excellent example of the impact of innovation. Instead of increasing productivity by increasing inputs to generate more output, the information economy innovates to maintain or even increase output, while reducing inputs; greater efficiency provides higher standards of living without increasing consumption of inputs. And that sets us free from the chains of Mathus' gloomy forecasts.

American economist Paul Zane Pilzer has provided a good illustration: computer chips, he points out, have utterly changed the way we do almost everything. In automobiles, for example, they make possible (and affordable) highly-efficient fuel injection systems that more than double the mileage cars can obtain from a litre of gasoline. In the '50s and '60s, fuel injection was limited to a few very expensive high-performance cars; now almost all cars have the system, so we get much better mileage from the gas we buy. Computers have also helped to design cars that have greater aerodynamic and volumetric efficiencies. And they have helped us to find and recover oil reserves that were formerly inaccessible.

The result is that the world's oil reserves - which the Club of Rome warned would be exhausted by the mid 1990s - are actually greater than they were when that neo-Malthusian study was written in the1960s!

What made the difference? Computers. And, Pilzer points out, "we make 'em out of dirt". The chips that make our super-computers and microchip mini-computers possible are based on the most plentiful element on earth: Silicon. Sand. Dirt.

New innovations in nano-technology will soon vastly accelerate the efficiency of all kinds of production, reducing inputs while outputs soar.

Yes, it's wise to conserve limited resources; but it's unwise to strangle our ability to provide for ourselves and our children because we fear a non-existent "population crisis". And it's foolish not to appreciate the role innovation can play in meeting the needs of our population, if we should have the good sense to reverse the incipient decline in the gift of human life.

That decline poses the real threat to our future. Because life is a gift of Divine providence. And we scorn His gift at our peril.

By RON GRAY
CHP National Leader