Malthusian overpopulation theory

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Barbarians inside the Gates. pp. 25 - 27

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Unnatural resources

IT WAS JUST A PASSING PHRASE in a news story about the recent population conference in Cairo, but it said more than longer and more pretentious discussions: "Conference activists, many of whom are recipients of U. S. grants. . ." Inevitably, these activists ended up asking for billions more to be spent to stop "overpopulation."

Those billions will, of course, employ more people like themselves and give them both largess to dispense among their colleagues and power to wield over others. Government-funded efforts to get more government funding is the political equivalent of a perpetual motion machine. A steady drumbeat of alarms about "overpopulation," punctuated from time to time by headline-producing conferences, is one result.

How real is the danger that we are being constantly warned about?

The short answer is that the Malthusians have had nearly two centuries since Malthus first wrote about this supposed danger in 1798, and they have yet to show any correlation between population and poverty. There are, of course, densely populated poor countries like India, with 757 people per square mile, but there are also very prosperous countries like Japan with 814 people per square mile.

Then there are prosperous and thinly populated countries like the United States, with only 71 people per square mile—and desperately poor regions like sub-Saharan Africa with an average of 61 people per square mile.

As of any given time, both rich and poor countries are scattered across a wide spectrum of population densities. If this gives no support to overpopulation theories, history undermines those theories completely. Rising population and rising living standards have gone together ever since Malthus' time.

Those spreading population hysteria love to tell us how long it will take for the world's population to double. But they don't tell us what country's standard of living fell the last time its population doubled. Even among the supposedly most "overpopulated" countries, which one actually had a higher per capita income when their population was half of what it is today?

To those determined to believe in overpopulation theories, we have somehow just been lucky in having various methods of increasing the food supply come along—and our luck has got to run out sometime. Similarly, we have lucked out in discovering more natural resources when we needed them, but this luck too has to end, if we believe the Chicken Littles.

Both notions of "luck" assume away what is at issue: Was there any reason to believe the overpopulation theory in the first place? If not, then we need not make the further arbitrary assumption of "luck" in having escaped for the moment.

Malthus had no empirical data on which to base the famous geometrical ratios of population increase and arithmetic ratio of food growth which he unveiled in 1798. Like Marx, he had the gift of dramatic imagery, cataclysmic prophecy and an air of "science." It seems almost mean-spirited to expect him to have had his facts straight too.

Later editions of Matlhus' Essay on the Principle of Population had lots of numbers, but these were used as illustrations of a vision, not as empirical tests of an hypothesis. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist George Stigler put it: "Malthus simply had no canons of evidence." Neither do his latter-day followers.

The role of statistics remains that of illustrating a presupposition. These statistics show, for example, how long it takes population to double, or what will happen if you extrapolate any trend to infinity—almost invariably disaster.

Every evening, the temperature begins falling after sundown. Extrapolate that trend and the numbers will "prove" that we will all be frozen solid before the week is out. But numbers do not live lives of their own. They are generated by some process, and until you understand that process, the numbers mean nothing.

The same spinning of the earth which took us out of the sunlight in the evening will bring us back into the sunlight the next morning, and temperatures will begin to rise again. It is not a matter of escaping disaster by "luck."

Economic processes likewise signal through prices the costs of raising children and the costs of using natural resources. Moreover, contrary to the vision of the anointed, other people are not oblivious to their options or the costs of those options.

Contrary to hysteria about the exhaustion of natural resources, the known reserves of petroleum, for example, are greater than they were a quarter of a century ago, and the prices of many other natural resources have been falling as a result of their abundance.

That is good news for most of us but it is bad news for those trying every avenue by which they may impose their superior wisdom and virtue on others. Look for more international conferences, financed by the unnatural resources of government.

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2 June 2024