Thomas Malthus's 1798 essay, "An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers," neatly summarizes the biological limitations of earth for the needs of an undefined number of people. Since the food supply tends to increase more slowly than human reproduction, it is left to the whims of nature on how to dispose of the excess individuals. This is achieved through war, famine, and disease. What Malthus did not predict was the great revolutions the food industry would undergo from 1798 to the modern day. Napoleon's France began the canning industry that allowed foods to be shipped incredible distances and stored for several months which allowed burgeoning populations to remain active through winter. Farming equipment and improved yields, especially in the grain baskets of Germany and America, provided the means to maintain the growth of Europe's populations.
The last large-scale famine in Western countries was 1816, the Year Without a Summer. Because of spectacular innovations, trade, and preservation technology, exponential growth in Europe then the world has seen the human population double again and again within a single lifetime. As human numbers have increased, the means and minds to continue the increase in food supplies has expanded too.
"Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas ans I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there."Despite the worries of a continually enlarging population, growth trends have slowed from a global maximum of about a 20% increase in the 1960s to about five percent in the 2010s. The Green Revolution in Asia in the 1960s and 70s saved millions of lives and enabled several countries to feed their people without imports, notably China and India.
"Many can't go there; an many would rather die."
"If they would rather die," Said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843.
As humans reproduce, our population continues to grow as it has for the past twenty decades. As that rate slows, Malthus could be proven correct as resources like oil and water strain trade relations and power structures. Resource management is a significant component of the fear mongering that has gone on since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Malthus predicted that Europe would descend into ravenous hordes, but the 1800s saw Europe dominate the world in every imaginable way - including population growth.
It is not wrong to predict the problems of the future, but it is unhelpful to predict those problems and offer only despair and hopelessness as solutions. Charles Dickens exhibited the evidence of Britain's health and success in the 1843 short story "A Christmas Carol" where the streets of London have fresh fruits and edible delicacies available at modest prices even in the throes of winter. Even as Malthus's followers bemoaned the dismal possibilities of the future, Britain outproduced its needs. Therefore, let us look toward the years ahead with a eye for innovation and a heart full of hope instead of the useless dismality of the doomsday Malthusians.
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Agatha Tyche
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