Reviews for Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population

The average rating for Malthus: An Essay on the Principle of Population based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-02-24 00:00:00 William Hill Humans tend to increase faster than they can create food, so at a certain point they will be unable to support themselves. There are two ways to control this: decrease birth rate (preventive checks) or increase death rate (positive checks); if the first one doesn't happen, the second inevitably will. That general idea is so obvious that it seems hard to believe someone would have to come up with it, and Malthus is just the guy who laid it out most clearly. People have known that since the dawn of time. But he's also been consistently misinterpreted and vilified since day one by people who, for example, think he's advocating policies to kill off poor people. That's sortof the same as using Darwin to justify eugenics; there's a logical leap in the middle that makes no sense. There's a third way, first pointed out by Engels (the other dude who wrote The Communist Manifesto). It seems possible, he said, through science, to increase the amount of food we can produce in order to keep up with our population. That's what's happened so far: the "Green Revolution" of the 20th century greatly increased farm yield, preventing a calamitous population collapse in the nick of time. Unfortunately, we now suspect that rather than preventing a calamitous collapse, the Green Revolution may just have forestalled a catastrophic one; the new farming techniques are destroying our soil. The world is becoming exhausted. (See Charles Mann's cover story in National Geographic, September 2008 for more.) We need a new silver bullet. Or else birth control. Either way. Genetically modified crops could be that bullet; just like the Green Revolution, they offer to greatly increase farm yield, bringing along a number of dire-sounding, poorly understood side effects. (See the "Potato" section of Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire for a thoroughly pessimistic take on that.) My own take is that the human urge for expansion and invention will always be much greater than our capacity for sober reflection; to ask us to slow down would be like asking a 13-year-old to quit masturbating. You might explain that it'll only result in decreased sensitivity and a shortage of socks, but he is going to keep at it with endless industry and innovation. In the end, this either will or won't work out. We'll either be able to innovate fast enough to barely stay ahead of our own unforeseen consequences, or something else will happen. He'll either get a girlfriend or die of autoerotic asphyxiation in his parents' basement. (I'm not flogging this metaphor too much, am I?) But it's human nature: show us a piece of land, and we will put stuff on it; give us an idea, and we will pursue it. We damn the torpedoes. We Frankensteins will always have our monsters. ETA: Cecily directs me to a couple of poems that say pretty much what I've said but much better and they rhyme. I've pasted them in a comment.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-18 00:00:00 Blake Moritz I'm not sure what exactly I expected from this little book. Certainly, I expected to see Malthus's oft cited argument concerning the rate of food production vs. that of population increase (but I wondered if an entire book, however brief, could be filled on that topic). I just as certainly did not expect to meet such a charming writer and incisive thinker. But why has this book stood the test of time? Doubtless, Malthus was wrong about every specific prediction he ventured to make. He did not foresee the widespread use of contraceptives, nor the dazzling improvements in farming technology that would appear in the years to come. I wonder what Malthus would say if you told him that, in the future, less than 2% of the population of the United States would be farmers, and that the population of the world would exceed 7 billion. Probably nothing, he would just laugh at you. So, he's no Nostradamus. But then why has Malthus been brought up in every class on the environment that I have ever taken? This must be because, although Malthus was gloriously (and thankfully) wrong in the specifics, the general problem that he elucidates here is an important one that somehow eluded the attention of every major thinker before him. As the human species continues to multiply at an ever-increasing rate, the ghost of Malthus will continue to haunt us. I have heard it said that Malthus was an enemy of the poor'a lassez-faire capitalist that didn't want welfare states to impinge on the free market. Yes, he was opposed to the Poor Laws in England; but not because he cared little for the well-being of the poor. Malthus genuinely, and for good reason, believed that simply giving money to the poor without increasing the food supply wasn't likely to make their conditions any better. In point of fact, the central concern of this book is to improve the lot of the greatest possible number of people. True, for reasons he lays forth, Malthus is not very optimistic about this prospect. The tension he identifies between food supplies and population increase lead him to conclude that some poverty and suffering is inevitable, and that a perfect utopia is an idle dream. But don't mistake this realistic view of things for gloating about the destitution of the masses. Surely, if he thought that suffering could be entirely extirpated, he would throw all his weight behind that solution. Population explosion will likely be the major issue of our time. If the world is to be improved, it does no good to play around with utopian dreams where the streets are paved with gold and everyone eats candy without gaining weight or getting cavities. The solution will require a hard-headed, realistic analysis of the problem, our identifying what we can reasonably expect to work based on what has worked in the past, and our working with what is currently possible given the political situation. And when we look back at how much has already been done, we can thank Malthus for giving us a head start.