Malthus Was Not a Malthusian
Why would anyone today recommend reading Thomas Robert Malthus’s two-centuries-old Essay on Population (1798)? My gosh, we’re in the twenty-first century. The population crisis that Malthus predicted did not happen, thanks to human ingenuity providing scientific, technological, and moral progress. Malthus famously claimed that human population grows geometrically and food production grows arithmetically. Therefore, at some point population overtakes food production.
The Malthusian warning was and still is for disciples such as Paul Ehrlich that unless we take steps to control population, we will find ourselves in a crisis with mass starvation. But history reveals that Malthus and his followers were wrong. Malthus had a nice little model for the preindustrial and pre-electronic world in which he lived, but we have abundant food and, thanks to readily available artificial birth control, below-replacement fertility rates. Even in the poorest areas of the globe, rates of undernourishment and deaths from famine are historically low. Caloric intake, not population, is growing exponentially around the world. The United States is in a crisis of obesity, not hunger! Only someone whose view is blinkered by ideology could remain a Malthusian today.
Despite the fact that technological progress has provided abundant, low-cost food, declines in undernourishment and growth of overnourishment, as well as below-replacement fertility, all of which undercut Malthusian gloom, I argue that Malthus’s Essay on Population is essential reading for 2020. Why? The short answer is that Malthus was not a Malthusian. He did not predict a population crisis unless population control was put into place. He did not even advocate artificial birth control. His Essay on Population has been badly misinterpreted by disciples and critics alike.1 Read in the appropriate context, it is as important today at it was at the turn of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is even more important. Malthus was prophetic in warning of dangers ahead. But the dangers were not of population overrunning capacity to produce food and other essentials. He warned against destruction of social institutions to make way for utopian schemes inspired by the ideas behind the French Revolution.
We must begin with Malthus wrote in the and he wrote it. The what and why cannot be separated, for he wrote is he wrote. This is the problem of reading in the writer’s context. Having the text and context in view, we will be able to see that the message in the is as important today as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century. Malthus may best be labeled a conservative who warned of the dangers of antinomian social theories associated with the French Revolution. He is better paired with Edmund Burke than with Paul Ehrlich, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or the Soros-funded Open Society Institute.
