Malthus Lives

You remember Thomas Malthus, don't you? You don't? Well, here's a primer:

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, Malthus predicted population would outrun food supply, leading to a decrease in food per person. This prediction was based on the idea that population if unchecked increases at a geometric rate (i.e. 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, etc.) whereas the food supply grows at an arithmetic rate (i.e. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.) (See Malthusian catastrophe for more information.) Only misery, moral restraint and vice (which for Malthus included contraception) could check excessive population growth. Malthus favoured "moral restraint" (including late marriage and sexual abstinence) as a check on population growth. However, it is worth noting that Malthus proposed this only for the working and poor classes. Thus, the lower social classes took a great deal of responsibility for societal ills, according to his theory. Essentially what this resulted in was the promotion of legislation which degenerated the conditions of the poor in England.

Now, Malthus was writing in 1798, long before the American midwest or Canadian prairies were stolen and repurposed for agricultural exports. So it's not like it was unreasonable for him to think that the UK was overcrowded.

That said, we can say that Malthus really was wrong on a number of counts. Most importantly, the poor are not the drain on society's resources that Malthus believed. In fact, it is the wealthy who consume most (unsurprisingly) and therefore contribute disproportionately to resource scarcity. Someone who drives a Civic isn't contributing to high oil prices in the same way that someone who drives a Suburban. However, it's not like we can expect privileged English nobility to understand this.

But it has a lot of relevance today. Because of Malthus' focus on absolute numbers - and therefore his support for stringent laws persecuting the poor - he missed the larger point about individual consumption. It isn't numbers alone, but numbers and the rate of consumption which dictates resource scarcity or abundance. I got to thinking about all this reading this article last night, about the failure of space activsts to sell space through scare-scenarios:

The average American of 2005 is not living in one of those dystopias that the MIT professors or the California SciFi writers predicted thirty years ago. He is twice as rich as his counterpart in 1975, uses about half the energy per unit of GNP, breathes cleaner air, drinks cleaner water, has wider educational and career opportunities, and a bigger house in a greener suburb with less crime. You aren't going to convince this average voter that civilization is declining on Earth. Your claim is contradicted by every feature of his daily life....

The Space Greens ignore the birthrate statistics that show world population plunging by 2050, or the raw material prices which are lower than ever. The Space Libertarians ignore the Thatcher/Reagan Revolution, the collapse of Communism, the resurgence of regional languages like Gaelic, Hawaiian and Catalan, and the hundreds of micro-cultures on the Internet.

Okay, I'd like to state at the outset that I actually agree with the main thesis of the article - we who hope to die on Mars someday aren't going to achieve it by scaring the bejeezus out of people.

But there's a number of simply false statements in the paragraphs quoted above. First, most people are no better off than they were in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Between inflation, wage stagnation, and the deindustrialization of the economy, most households take home about what they took home in 1975 - albeit on two incomes rather than one. This has been demonstrated over and over, recently by the work of James K. Galbraith at the University of Texas. While the GDP in the west has about doubled, the percentage that went to wages has barely kept up with inflation. So most people are as rich or as poor as they were in 1975-1980.

The second falsehood follows from the first one - income dictates to a large degree the opportunities people have for education. This is especially the case when, as in Canada and the US, right-wing governments have cut the support for education and deregulated prices, meaning that effectively only a small portion of the population has access to higher education.

Thirdly, no statistics show global population "plunging" after 2050. Instead, the UNFPA projects that the global population will reach 9 billion by 2050, and may level off. It might just as soon increase further. You can read the (large PDF) here.

This is important, because it's possible we can't support the six billion we've got now. Which brings me to the fourth falsehood, that raw material prices are lower than ever. This simply isn't true. While some prices have stayed stable, the price of commodities in the last three years has increased substantially. The IMF reports regularly on commodity prices. According to their latest report:

• The price of rice has increased 47%
• The price of soybeans is up 30%.
• The price of olive oil is up 90%.

Now, I've highlighted the foods with some rather dramatic price increases - not all have increased, and a few have even declined, it's true. But look what happens when we take a look at metals. The IMF report lists 8 metals - Copper, Aluminum, Iron Ore, Tin, Nickel, Zinc, Lead and Uranium. The price increases are as follows:

Copper: +140%
Aluminum: +40%
Iron Ore: +125%
Tin: +80% (with a spike last year at 125%!)
Nickel: +120%
Zinc: +67%
Lead: +96%
Uranium: +200%

These price increases are all relative to the 2002 averages. So in less than three years, we've seen doublings and triplings of the price of major metals. And this isn't the worst of it - the price of molybdenum (as strategic metal used in steel production) has increased almost four-fold over the last two years. So along with high energy prices, Asian industrialization has brought us rapdily growing material prices. I'm not saying poverty is preferable - certainly not! - but we have to face the reality that our economies might not actually be able to sustain 6 billion middle-class people, certainly not at current levels of consumption.

Which brings me to my point. It's possible the Earth could have sustained 9 billion low-impact poor people. It's also possible the Earth could sustain 9 billion wealthy, eco-friendly Danes. Unfortunately, neither of those options seems likely at the moment. What seems likely is a planet with approximately 3 or 4 billion modestly wealthy, inefficient, polluting pseudo-Americans. The status quo means simply this - economic hardship followed quickly by ecological calamity. Even if we avoid economic hardship - say, we discover large new deposits of everything we need - the ecological calamity that awaits us becomes more certain, not less: the mining industry isn't exactly world-renowned for it's green credentials.

Malthus lives.

The optimistic corrollary to this, however, is that the nation which makes the new status quo - one based on radical efficiency, low consumption, and ecological sustainability - may very well run the world. Or at the very least, they might survive.