Malthusianism

Malthusianism is a theory in demography regarding population growth. It holds that population expands faster than food supplies. Famine will result unless steps are taken to reduce population growth.

Over the centuries many theorists have considered one or another aspect of population, usually to promote the policy of more people (“pronatalist.”) The early Christian tradition, however, was “antinatalist”, with the highest prestige going to priests, monks and nuns who were celibate.

In the 17th and 18th century the general belief, called "mercantilism" was that the larger the population the better for the nation. Larger population meant more farmers and more food, more people in church (and more prayers), and larger, more powerful armies for deterrence, defense and expansion. People equaled power. As Frederick the Great of Prussia put it, "The number of the people makes the wealth of states." The policy implications were clear: the state should help raise population through annexation of territory and pronatalist subsidies that encourage large families. After 1800, a rising spirit of nationalism called out for more people to make a bigger and more powerful nation.

English writer Reverend Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), in the first edition (1798) of his pamphlet, "An Essay on the Principle of Population" turned the received wisdom upside down. His stunning conclusion was that more people might make it worse for everyone--that overpopulation was bad and unless proper steps were taken, disaster was inevitable. Population growth was exceedingly dangerous, he warned, for it threatened overpopulation and soon we would all starve to death. The British were taking over India at this time, and could see first-hand the horrors associated with overpopulation.

Malthus’s writings had impact because he had a model of society simple enough for any well-educated person to understand. Food depends on the acreage of farm land. Through geographical expansion and more careful cultivation, the amount of farmland can be expanded. The law of diminishing returns states that additional effort is less and less successful--that is, you get your biggest gains at first then after that the gains get smaller and smaller. Because of the law of diminishing returns food production can only grow arithmetically: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. On the other hand, the population next year depends on the population this year, so it always expands exponentially: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. In other words, population expands faster than the food supply, and eventually people will starve. The first sign of overpopulation is an excess number of workers accompanied by falling wages and more poverty. Sooner or later the ratio of people to land will cause poverty to turn to starvation; periodic famines occur inevitably and slash the population to acceptable levels before it starts growing again.

Malthus saw two ways to keep population down, "positive" and "preventive" checks. Positive checks were nasty: famine, plague and warfare. Preventive checks included voluntary actions reasonable people could take. Malthus (a clergyman) identified two types of voluntary action, the moral one of deferring marriage, and a variety of "vices" or immoral steps that included birth control, abortion, infanticide, adultery, prostitution and homosexuality.

The Malthus model was unusually powerful: it immediately generated predictions about the fate of mankind. Demography suddenly moved from an abstraction to concrete reality and attracted the attention of scholars and politicians. Economists used the model to show that the more workers there are the lower there wages will be. Charles Darwin made the struggle for food into the centerpiece of his theory of evolution of species. Malthus was a political conservative; one of his goals was to prove that the utopian dreamers of the era of the French Revolution were too optimistic about the future. Malthus's conservative policy prescriptions set the terms of the debate for the entire 19th century. One immediate policy implication was that it was a bad idea for the government to give away food to the poor because poor people would respond by having more children and thus create even more misery. (What England in fact did was set up a relief system under the "Poor Law" that made it very unattractive to live on charity.)

According to Malthus, the cause of poverty was an excess number of mouths to feed, and the fault was with the lack of foresight by the parents. Malthus acknowledged that the unequal distribution of wealth did contribute to poverty but believed that redistributing wealth would only make poverty worse. Strong themes indeed--and ones that echoed in 1996 as the United States Congress sharply cut back on how long poor people could stay on welfare. On an optimistic note, Malthus emphasized that prudence and education could lead to an ever-increasing standard of living for the working class, a proposition that was widely accepted by the 1990s.

Two key assumptions Malthus made were that the lure of sex was so strong that people would have babies no matter what the consequences and that technology would grow slowly or not at all. Both assumptions were wrong. Agricultural productivity has increased faster than population growth, and 200 years after Malthus the per capita food consumption in (nearly) all the world is much higher than it was then. [The exception in recent decades has been sub-Sahara Africa, where Malthusian predictions of overpopulation and famine have come true.] Controversy also surrounds a third argument by Malthus, that only moral restraint should be used to control fertility, and not contraception. (This particular debate continues to rage among Roman Catholics, pitting the Pope who condemns contraception against the laity who insist on practicing it.)

Regarding Malthus’s first assumption, all societies have created mechanisms to control fertility (for example, by delaying marriage until the couple had enough land to feed themselves.) Malthus himself finally recognized this in his second edition of 1803. Everywhere family formation is a social and economic arrangement (not a sexual tryst) and is closely correlated with the supply of land, and jobs. Even before Malthus observers had noted that people delayed marriage if they thought their social status would decline. In the 1803 edition Malthus admitted the existence of what he called "preventive checks," especially the characteristic late marriage pattern of western Europe, which he called "moral restraint." The demographic historian John Hajnal has explored in detail the propensity in Europe in the 18th and 19th century to use delay of marriage as a population control device, tied to the shortage of farmland. (In America, with no shortage of good land, the age of marriage plunged to 18 for women and 20 for men by 1800).

19th century responses to Malthus

Reaction was negative among Christians who felt Malthus denied God's providence and preferred sin and fornication to the misery and degradation of families forced to live in poverty. Later writers discussing marriage, abstinence, contraception, and morality, came to caricature Malthus's original ideas, even in his defense. John Stuart Mill, an English economist, argued 150 years ago that the standard of living was the key to desired family size. Mill was a pioneer feminist, and believed that wives wanted fewer children than husbands did, so as women became more liberated the birth rate would fall.

Arsene Dumont, writing 100 years ago in France, stressed the desire of parents to move upward on the social scale, and to gain more wealth. Having fewer children, he argued, saved money and made a rise more possible since the money save could be used for things. Dumont explained the declining French birth rate a century ago in terms of this quest for upward status.

Emile Durkheim, the French intellectual who helped found the discipline of sociology 100 years ago, emphasized the importance of division of labor. He argued there was a threshold "dynamic density" of population. Above a certain density it became easier to divide roles more efficiently as workers became increasing specialized and to improve their lot. This theme was picked up by Ester Boserup in the 1980s.

American statistican Francis Amasa Walker (1840-1897) in the 1890s examined American fertility decline. He combined Malthusianism, Darwinism, and racism to produce a new biological Malthusianism that identified a population calamity more harmful than overpopulation - biological deterioration due to immigration. Other American social scientists widely accepted biological Malthusianism, which helped animate the movement for immigration restriction 1900-1925.

Marxist opposition

Robert Owen, and the British proto-socialists, disagrees sharply with Malthus. Karl Marx, the founder of modern socialism, argued that population depends, like everything else, on the ownership of the means of production. This implied there can be no independent laws of population, hence Malthus must be dead wrong. Since poverty could never be the fault of the workers, it had to be blamed on capitalism. Furthermore, if workers reduced their numbers (by having fewer children), they would be politically weakened. Marxism believed that class conflict would eventually cause the overthrow of capitalism. Socialism will ensue, they promised, and cure all evils.

After the 1840s the Marxists tried to counter the influence of the Malthusians. Marx set the tone by vehemently ridiculing Malthus as guilty of spreading a "vile and infamous doctrine, this repulsive blasphemy against man and nature." Marx said that overpopulation can only occur under capitalism, because the capitalists want a large surplus population of workers (the unemployed constituted a "reserve army of labor”) in order to keep wages low and profits high. Under socialism, Marx argued, there would be a perfect harmony of interests, and a population of any size could be supported. The reason was because the surplus product of labor, previously stolen by the capitalists, would be returned to its rightful owners, the workers, thereby eliminating the cause of poverty. (This was the sort of utopianism that Malthus was trying to undercut.)

Malthus and Marx shared a strong concern about the plight of the poor. For Malthus the solution was conservative; he called for individual responsibility--the delay of marriage and childbearing. For Marx the only solution was a revolution that would destroy capitalism and install socialism.

20th century responses

There are two schools of thought that follow Malthus. The "Malthusians" and "Neo-Malthusians." Both see overpopulation as a serious threat to mankind, and both agree about the linkage between unrestrained fertility and poverty. The main difference is that the Neo-Malthusians favor birth control as the main solution and the Malthusians want delayed marriage.

Kingsley Davis, a leading American demographer of the post-World War II era, brought together the insights of Mill and Dumont. David observed that as infant mortality rates fall more children survive and are expensive to maintain. To keep up living standards, therefore, families have to limit their fertility. Demographer John Caldwell has emphasized the flip side of this argument: children are an economic burden and that is why parents have smaller families.

In the late 20th century Ester Boserup, a Danish demographer, and Julian Simon, an American economist, turned Malthus upside down. They contended that population growth is not necessarily bad and, in fact, may well be beneficial. Boserup reported that in poor agricultural countries population growth led to technical improvements in agriculture, raising productivity and providing more food per person than before. Simon argues that a growing human population is "the ultimate resource." Simon rejects the Malthusian conclusion that poverty is the inevitable result of population growth. Instead he argues that if a society has a certain level of freedom (especially free markets), then more people means more talents and more ideas. In a free market these new talents can be utilized. Productivity will go up for the society as a whole, and everyone will benefit.

The Simon and Boserup argument is not the same as the old nationalist argument (which is still around in some countries) to the effect that having more people means more power. Or more exactly, it is wise to have a larger population than your enemies, and if they are growing faster than you, you are at risk.

Bibliography

• Ester Boserup. Population and Technological Change: A Study of Long-Term Trends (1981) (1981),
• Ansley J. Coale and Susan C. Watkins, eds. The Decline of Fertility in Europe, (1986)
• Davis, Kingsley. "The World Demographic Transition." Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1945237: 1-11. in JSTOR, classic article that introduced concept of transition
• Dolan, Brian, ed. Malthus, Medicine and Morality: "Malthusianism" after 1798. 2000. 232 pp.

• Gillis, John R.; Louise A. Tilly; and David Levine; eds. The European Experience of Declining Fertility, 1850-1970: The Quiet Revolution. 1992.
• Susan Greenhalgh. "The Social Construction of Population Science: An Intellectual, Institutional, and Political History of Twentieth-Century Demography," Comparative Studies in Society and History, Volume 38, Issue 1 (Jan., 1996), 26-66. in JSTOR
• Hauser, Philip M., and Otis Dudley Duncan, eds. The Study of Population: An Inventory and Appraisal. 1959. sumamry of field at mid-century
• Malthus, Thomas. An Essay on the Principle of Population (1st ed 1798) (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) ed by Donald Winch 1992 ISBN 9780521429726
• Reed, James. From Private Vice to Public Virtue: The Birth Control Movement and American Society Since 1830. 1978.
• Spengler, Joseph J. France Faces Depopulation (2nd ed 1979)
• John R. Weeks. Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues (10th ed. 2007)

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