Recommended reading:
by Thomas Malthus at Reading Rat
Friday, April 10, 2009
Thomas Malthus
...Malthus contrasts the rate at which population increases with the rate at which food increases; but his theory ignores the fact that food consists of organic populations, i.e., stuff that according to his principle is supposed to increase “arithmetically.” In later editions of his book, Malthus so modified what he said about the principle of population that he abandoned it in fact if not in words. --Roger Kimball, Friends of humanity? The New Criterion, November 2003
Recommended reading:
by Thomas Malthus at Reading Rat
Recommended reading:
by Thomas Malthus at Reading Rat
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Roger Kimball has it backwards, or so it seems to me. Malthus was contending that the human population (as, I suppose, any consuming population) would increase geometrically, or what one might call expoentially. It was the stuff to be consumed that could only increase arithmetically, and which must be overtaken by the consumers.
ReplyDeleteIf Mr. Kimball means that organic populations, such as cattle, should also increase geometrically, he makes an interesting point. But I think a more modern perspective tends to back up Malthus. The basic supply of food, indeed of energy, in the world is a function of the surface area of the Earth and the amount of sunlight which falls upon it. The amount of sunlight is fixed, within the limits of seasonal variation. The amount of surface area is fixed. Therefore, the maximum amount of energy available to support organic life has some upper limit.
Cattle are expensive. The basic food of mankind is grain - wheat, barley, rice, corn. As the population increases, it becomes harder to maintain supplies of meat, so we gradually eliminate the intermediate consumers of grass.
In the end, the population, which keeps increasing geometrically, comes up against the limit of the food supply. That limit was not where Malthus thought it was, but he was certainly right that people would take all sorts of steps, including some he considered immoral, to forestall the evil day.