Richard Gunderman – October 11, 2021 @ American Institute for Economic Research
Thomas Malthus wasn’t really a bad man. It’s just that he had a
really terrible idea—that the world always contains too many human
beings. Put a little more gently: Malthus thought that human beings
couldn’t be trusted to keep their numbers in check and maintain a
prudent presence in the order of creation. Malthus, whose very surname
begins with the Latin mal-, meaning evil, bad, or disease, and seems to
invoke malignancy, maliciousness, and malintent, is really not so bad.
In fact, his name derives from malthouse, a building in which grains are
prepared for use in brewing. It’s just that Malthus set us to viewing
one another with suspicion, envy, and jealousy—a malevolent brew that
shifts our attention from what we might contribute to what we stand to
lose to one another.
Things didn’t begin so badly for Thomas Malthus. He was born in 1766
into privilege. His father was a friend of the great Scottish
philosopher David Hume and an admirer of Rousseau, whose Emile
inspired the younger Malthus’s upbringing. Admitted to Jesus College,
Cambridge, Malthus quickly distinguished himself as a student, winning
prizes in classics and mathematics. Thereafter, he took holy orders and
became a parish curate. Later he married, fathering two daughters and a
son, and he subsequently became a professor of history and political
economy at the East India Company’s college. It was in 1798 that he
published his greatest work, An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future of Improvement of Society.
Malthus was responding to the writings of Godwin, Condorcet, and
others, whose hopes for growing happiness for humanity he regarded as
excessively optimistic. Having perceived through his work in the parish
that he always seemed to be performing more baptisms than funerals, he
began to conduct demographic investigations that convinced him that
human populations inevitably tend to outstrip the resources available to
them, or more concretely, that food supplies grow arithmetically while
the number of people grows geometrically. As Malthus put it, “The
perpetual tendency of the race of man to increase beyond the means of
subsistence is one of the general laws of animated nature, which we can
have no reason to expect to change.”
Counteracting the tendency of human populations to explode are two
forces, which Malthus labeled “preventive” and “positive” checks.
Preventive checks include delays in childbearing or the avoidance of
childbearing altogether. Women who begin to have children later in life
tend to have fewer children, and those who never marry, the conventions
of the day allowed him to assume, would bear no children at all.
Additional preventive checks include moral restraint—the hope that some
will refrain from childbearing out of a concern for the welfare of the
children they do bear, who are difficult enough for poor families to
support—and legislation, which might prove politically impossible to
enact. China’s recent one-child policy is an extreme version of the
latter. Malthus held out little hope for such restraints:
The laboring poor, to use a vulgar
expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants
employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even
when they have an opportunity of saving, they seldom exercise it, but
all that is beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking,
to the ale house.
The positive checks included war, plague, and famine. If people
failed to constrain their rate of reproduction, nature would eliminate
the problem of overpopulation when competition over scarce resources
brought cities and nations into conflict with one another, overcrowding
led to epidemics of disease, or there were simply too many mouths to
feed. Malthus saw in these principles not merely a description of what
in fact happens but a warrant to will it. He wrote,
It is an evident truth that,
whatever may be the rate of increase in the means of subsistence, the
increase in population must be limited by it, at least after the food
has been divided into the smallest shares that will support life. All
the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the
population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made
for them by the deaths of grown persons. To act consistently, therefore,
we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to
impede, the operation of nature in producing this mortality, and if we
dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we
should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we
compel nature to use.
In contrast to the optimists of his day, Malthus may be regarded as a
political pessimist. His account renders poverty the inescapable lot of
mankind. At best, efforts to reduce poverty are almost certain to fail,
and at worst, they will prove counterproductive. Charity, for example,
merely exacerbates the problem. By putting more food in the mouths of
the poor, charity workers act in unwitting collusion with the tendency
for numbers to grow beyond the means of support. England’s poor laws,
Malthus contended, encouraged large families and merely increased the
numbers of the miserable and dying. It would have been better had they
never existed, thereby increasing “the aggregate mass of happiness among
the common people.”
Malthus was, of course, wrong. For one thing, he never considered
that the resources available to support populations might exceed
expectations. Consider the work of the 20th-century American agronomist
Norman Borlaug, whose “green revolution” dramatically increased crop
yields and garnered him the Nobel Peace Prize. Some have even suggested
that Borlaug saved more lives than any single human being who has ever
lived. Malthus also failed, though understandably, to anticipate the
introduction of contraceptives. More significantly, he failed to foresee
the possibility that, enabled to control their own fertility, people
might choose to limit their fecundity in order to increase their
standard of living. In general, richer nations such as the US, Germany,
and Japan have relatively low fertility rates. In fact, to increase
standards of living, such nations need not fewer but more births.
Yet it was not only as a forecaster that Malthus was wrong. He was
also wrong in a moral sense, and in large part because of the influence
he exerted on other thinkers, such as Darwin. Malthus’s closed-fisted
nature, in which resources are never sufficient, played a crucial role
in shaping Darwin’s conception of a biological world dominated by a
principle of competition. If the earth provides enough for every
organism, then each can live and let live. But in a world characterized
by scarcity, a struggle to survive inevitably ensues, in which organisms
better adapted to prevailing conditions survive and those that do not
perish. It was but a small step from Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,”
repeatedly recharged by Malthusianism, to eugenics, the effort to
rebalance the fit and unfit.
Malthus evinced an awareness of the possibility of something very
much akin to eugenics but dismisses it as impractical. Considering the
notion that some enlightened families might take steps to protect their
best characteristics, he wrote,
I know of no well-directed
attempts of this kind, except in the ancient family of the Bickerstaffs,
who are said to have been very successful in whitening the skins and
increasing the height of their race by prudent marriages, particularly
by that very judicious cross with Maud, the milk-maid, by which some
capital defects in the constitutions of the family were corrected.
Inspired by Darwin, many intellectual descendants of Malthus
entertained no such laments, and instead advocated heartily for both
negative eugenics—programs to reduce the numbers of people bearing
undesirable traits—and positive eugenics—programs aiming to increase the
numbers of people with desirable traits.
Perhaps the most baleful feature of this benign man’s theory is the
scarcity mentality it both posits and reinforces, and which has crept
into contemporary thinking in biology, environmentalism, and economics.
According to Malthus, nature was a despot—in Longfellow’s formulation,
“red in tooth and claw.” Life was a zero-sum proposition, in which to
get enough for oneself and one’s own, others must be denied existence.
Should they manage to find their way into the world, they must endure
want and misery before suffering an early death. Malthus’s was a
desperate world—a crowded lifeboat, a tragedy of the commons, a
prisoner’s dilemma. One person’s happiness entailed another’s misery,
and the prudent must jealously guard everything they have for fear the
imprudent will gobble it up.
Reprinted from Law & Liberty
Richard Gunderman, MD, PhD, is
Chancellor’s Professor of Radiology, Pediatrics, Medical Education,
Philosophy, Liberal Arts, Philanthropy, and Medical Humanities and
Health Studies at Indiana University.
His most recent books are Marie Curie and Contagion.
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