Malthus and Population Growth

This article describes the ideals of Thomas Robert Malthus, author of “An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculation of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers.” Malthusian tenets focus on the impending doom society faces as global population rates continually skyrocket to an unprecedented level, thus exhausting the natural resources necessary for survival. Malthus distinguishes between the growth of agriculture, which he termed "arithmetic progress," depicted in the following numerical sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8,and human expansion, dubbed "geometrical progress" (e.g., 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 132, 264). Furthermore, he differentiated between preventative checks, or the encumbrance of birth rates, and positive checks, or the acceleration of death rates, both of which are nature's way of compensating for overpopulation. Viewpoints of the two contemporaries whom Malthus references in his essay (the British writer William Godwin and the French philosopher Marquis de Condorcet) are discussed, as well as those who responded to his theory with either support or criticism, such as, respectively, Charles Darwin and George Purves. Current literature that affirms Malthusian principles, or the malaise that accompanies overpopulation, is presented, as well as a stance that welcomes gross human expansion, since it serves to produce innovators who typically create additional global resources. Finally, present-day matters related to poverty, along with strategic trends that are utilized to compensate for such deprivation are conferred (i.e., ethanol production), along with the repercussions that accompany such strategies, including pronounced poverty rates.

Keywords Arithmetic Progression; Ethanol; Eugenics; Geometric Progression; Malthus, Thomas; Positive Checks; Preventative Checks

Malthus & Population Growth

Overview

Thomas Robert Malthus was a British clergyman, demographer, and economist who became famous for an book published anonymously around 1798, expansively titled An Essay on the Principle of Population, as it affects the Future Improvement of Society with Remarks on the Speculation of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and other Writers (Attarian, 2003; Barrus, 2004; Collings, 2007; Heilbroner, 1996; Levin, 1967; Peterson, 1979). Malthus's manuscript dispensed a dire forecast for the future of the human race, due to his calculation surrounding the precarious escalation of people that continually inhabit the planet. His estimation claimed that the future would contain a world that was severely overpopulated and underfed, and two simplistic principles underlined this theoretical premise: that humankind is unequivocally reliant on edible sustenance to cultivate and prolong life, along with the fact that people are inherently sexual beings, with rampant, passionate yearnings and an instinctive desire for physical contact. Simply put, Malthus observed that human life is contingent on food consumption and copulation, the former of which nourishes life, the latter of which produces additional births, marking the commencement of an ever-expanding populace.

Moreover, Malthus described the skewed ratio between food and people which, over the course of time, he predicted, would continue to destructively distort. He claimed that the growth of agricultural provisions occurs arithmetically, whereas human expansion is geometrical (Malthus, 1998; Morton & Shaw, 1997). In other words, crop production grows numerically: farmer Joe may possess a designated piece of land, but over time he may secure additional allotments. His gain is sequentially additive, in that he has one section of land, adds a second section, and then adds a third section, which would translate into the following series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. Because there is a finite amount of land on which to farm crops, the progressional sequence caps at its eventual limit. On the other hand, human expansion proliferates geometrically; if each generation has only two children per household (an average number in modern developed societies, but a low number by historical standards), then a more accurate demonstration of human growth might be depicted through the following series: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64. In examining long-standing quantitative demographics, the growth of humankind is staggering, as is illustrated by Draper: "The earth had 1 billion people in 1825, and twice that number a hundred years later. It now has upward of 5.3 billion. By 2025 it will have 7.6 billion to 9.4 billion" (1993, p. 14).

Hence, Malthus deduced that human reproduction would supersede the amount of natural resources that are necessary for survival, as his mathematical formula predicted that human expansion would double in size every twenty-five years. It is essential to note, however, that Malthus's theory was confined to eighteenth- century agricultural technological devices. It was not until much later that farming innovations expanded their horizons with the formation of chemical agents (e.g., pesticides and fertilizer), genetic engineering, and machinery such as the tractor (Doyle, 2007). The use of the tractor in the twentieth century, for example, lowered the demand for farmers to preside over crops from 38 percent in 1900 to less than 3 percent as the twentieth century came to a close ("Agricultural achievements," 2007).

Preventative Checks

According to Malthus, society may temper mounting populations via two means, which he termed "preventative checks" and "positive checks" (Black, 1997; "Malthus, the False Prophet," 2008) Preventative checks hinder growing birth rates, and may manifest threefold, through moral restraint (Wallace, 1998), vices, or birth control. Malthus was doubtful that people could practice moral restraint; if they did, he surmised that such behavior would be indicative of sophisticated, high-class communities of people who were able to fetter their tempestuous libidos in favor of delayed nuptials and lower levels of procreation. Indeed, a current trend surrounding class relations indicates that those residing in lower-level economic brackets tend to marry at younger ages and produce more children (Dasgupta, 1995). Vices constituted behavior deemed at the time either amoral or anomalous, such as homosexual relationships, abortion, and sexual relations occurring outside marriage (e.g., prostitution, infidelity) that reduced the prospect of proactive and purposeful conception. In the eighteenth century, thwarting unplanned pregnancy via the use of birth control techniques was not socially accepted, and was a process that Malthus held in high contempt.

Positive Checks

Positive checks, on the other hand, contribute toward population control by encouraging an upsurge in death rates. Collectively, society mourns the tragic losses that coincide with widespread human annihilation, such as that which accompanies natural disasters, health-related endemics (e.g., the bubonic plague in the seventeenth century [Price 1999] or AIDS in the twentieth century [Ashraf, 1999]), or the large-scale bloodshed that accompanies international conflict such as the two world wars of the twentieth century. In the absence of such extensive ecological maladies, health scares, or military conflict, the scourge of human life is famine, the ultimate battle with food deprivation (Palmberg, 2008). According to Malthus, such atrocities are meaningful and beneficially balance disproportionate population spurts, and assist nature's inevitable and time-honored responsibility of feeding the masses. In alignment with this notion, Jamieson (1992) points out that the positive medical strides that have transpired in recent decades, including vaccinations that ward off potential blights as well as curative remedies that heal diseases, have negatively impacted the inherent Malthusian equilibrium that prohibits human proliferation from exceeding a reasonable threshold. More cynically, Jamieson affirms: "Aid to the poor countries already grappling with Malthusian restraints merely exacerbates the problem by helping more young people in those countries survive to reproduce" (1992, p. 8).

Malthus's Critics

In order to thoroughly comprehend Malthusian tenets, it is necessary to broach the two references that Malthus cites in the title of his notorious essay, "Mr. Godwin and M. Condorcet" (Arie, 2007; Peterson, 1998; Winch, 1996), and examine their relevance to his philosophy. William Godwin, a devout Calvinist, penned the book Enquiry concerning Political Justice (Chaplin, 2008), which criticized the dictates of governmental involvement, and professed that people should be wary of all institutional provisions, including that of marriage and organized education. Godwin wholeheartedly believed that people had the capacity to continually evolve, but needed to rely on their refined ability to disentangle from the muddied waters of emotionality and focus on cogency, logic, and clear-minded rationality. Hence, if people shed their dependence on organized leadership and utilized restraint toward sentiment and desire, while relying solely on their own intellectual prowess, Godwin was optimistic that humankind would progressively ascend toward enlightenment and perfection. Malthus, in response, felt that Godwin's ideals were lofty and unrealistic, and the two scholars bantered back and forth about their divergent perspectives. For example, Godwin felt that Malthus's premise about the exponential growth of humankind was pessimistic and lacked scientific credence. Godwin was also hopeful about the vast amount of land that could host crops, as well as prospective technology that would enable food production and distribution, and which would eventually account for a flourishing society.

According to Malthus, Condorcet's ideas paralleled those of Godwin's with regard to his romantic, impractical, and naïve outlook. Condorcet upheld egalitarian views, and thought that all human life should be approached on equitable, unbiased terms. Furthermore, he felt that humans have progressed together sequentially as a collective unit, in which they commenced their evolutionary journey by traversing through prehistoric eras when their unrefined behavioral norms lacked sophistication and wisdom. Condorcet indicated that each generational cohort collectively improves its acumen and expertise, and over the course of time, humankind will culminate into a state of utopia. Such a state would be evidenced by human relations that are harmonious, and in which moral righteousness, happiness, and virtue are in absolute abundance.

Viewpoints

Reaction to Malthusian Premise

Since the creation of his population hypothesis, Malthus has spawned both tremendous condemnation and acclaim among the general public (Eldredge, 1999; Hardy, 1990), as well as among fellow theorists. Several authors (Claeys, 2000; Conniff, 2008; Young, 1999) have associated Malthus with Charles Darwin, author of On the Origin of Species, the grand theorist who advanced scientific thought by elaborating the theory of human evolution. Indeed, it is likely that Malthus served as a source of inspiration to Darwin. Perhaps Darwin mulled over the concepts of "positive checks" and the demise of large masses of sickly persons rife with disease who thereby opened the platform for the hearty remainder to thrive (i.e., "the survival of the fittest"), and was henceforth able to refine his theory surrounding natural selection.

On the other hand, there has been a tremendous amount of speculation and criticism surrounding Malthusian principles. According to Peterson (1979), a nineteenth-century author by the name of George Purves, writing under the pseudonym "Simon Gray," published the book Gray versus Malthus, a scathing attack on Malthus's population ideology. Whereas Malthus put forth the notion that human growth would surpass the growth of commodities necessary to nurture and sustain life, Purves confidently acknowledged that that the masses do indeed propagate geometrically, but that such amplification is paralleled by an increased amount of edible wares that fuel their existence. For Malthus, food accessibility was the vulnerable variable that ultimately resulted in population control, which would otherwise spiral out of control; Purves, on the other hand, felt that resources were produced in response to the amount of people demanding such goods. Additionally, Malthus felt that an overextended surplus of people could be isolated as the culprit for many social ills, including poverty, unemployment, and acts of depravity. Purves felt that the more populated a society became, the more jobs must be created to put members of a burgeoning community to work, hence creating productivity and a high morale. Finally, Malthus pointed to overpopulation as the origins of immense poverty, but Purves cited that the underlying sources of evil deeds surrounding overindulgence and glut.

Issues

Overpopulation

Current literature validates Malthus's perspective on the correlation between overpopulation and malaise. Nicholson-Lord (2004) discusses the faulty conception that people have possessed throughout the last two hundred years, concerning the belief that population explosion equates with social progress and achievement. People liken inflated birth rates with prosperity, although in reality an abundance of youth permeating communities is associated with heightened levels of crime, and overpopulation in general corresponds with deflated levels of community cohesion and a strain on the environment. Furthermore, elevated unemployment rates have been outlined by social scientists (Daly, 2008), some of whom urge the existence of policies regulating the number of children that each couple can procreate (Two-child limit, 2007), akin to legislation enforced in China (Grace, 1997). In the absence of such policies, they conclude, serious social woes will grow, and culminate in global blights such as poverty and war. Nearly a century ago, Kuczynski (1928) warned of the territorial nature of human beings, inclining them to compete over a limited amount of land, leading inevitably to war if not properly addressed through population-control mechanisms. Another possible correlation between international strife and poverty surrounds scarcity as the causal root of terrorism (Wolfensohn, 2002). In the ongoing struggle between the "haves and the have-nots," the "have-nots," or those who endure lifelong struggles with destitution and insolvency, may lash back in resentment at the forces they deem oppressive, inequitable, or ignorant to the plight of the masses.

Benefits of Overpopulation

Mankiw (1998) assumes an inverse Malthusian stance, and believes that society reaps significant benefits from its densely populated corridors. Specifically, the world is fortunate to be infrequently graced with the presence of momentous innovators such as Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton. Assuming, as an example, the theoretical possibility that for every million babies that enter the planet, one solitary child might become an intellectual genius, eminent artist, or noble humanitarian. Given that basis, it would behoove people to give birth to as many offspring as possible, because despite the inevitability of overpopulation, the probability that more births will permit additional groundbreaking pioneers in our midst will drastically increase. More commonly, though, average people also give birth to new ideas and better ways of doing things. Instead of focusing on the superfluity of resources that people devour, a more appropriate question asks whether the ratio between waste and production leans more heavily in favor of creation.

Global Poverty

Living in Western society makes it difficult to ignore the staggering and disquieting global poverty rates. Every day, the media presents poignant commercials and newspaper articles depicting the underprivileged realities that plague children in developing countries, and there are countless opportunities (e.g., booths at malls, donation baskets at religious facilities, etc.) that enable the general public to contribute money toward the sponsorship, nourishment, or education of those who are less fortunate. An interesting rendition on the issue of international starvation coupled with overpopulation was presented by Wilson (2008), who uncovered global poverty concerns that are currently afflicting countries like Pakistan, Egypt, and Haiti. The problem, however, does not surround a Malthusian crisis, in which overpopulation is causing worldwide inhabitants to withstand continually diminished diets. Rather, there are pockets of people who are incessantly hungry, and pockets of people who are overfed, wasteful, and indulgent. The United States (Menifield, Doty, & Fletcher, 2008), for example, has been targeted as a region with growing rates of obesity due to both inactivity, as well as an endless amount of food that is easily within reach. Paradoxically, according to Wilson, there is enough food production to feed the entire world, thus the predicament relates to the incongruity between poor countries that barely have enough means to scrape by, and wealthy nations that are awash in resources and consumer goods.

An imminent trend that is entering into the Western world surrounds the conversion of corn into ethanol, which is considered an environmentally responsible alternative to oil (Kim & Dale, 2008). Advocates of this process suggest that it will alleviate dependence on countries such as Saudi Arabia, which have an abundance of natural fossil fuels at their fingertips, and which has consequently thrust these countries into prominent positions of worldwide power (Doyle, 2004; Mouawad, 2006). More importantly, oil is a finite resource with a restricted sum quantity (Motavelli, 2006), whereas corn is a renewable resource that is easily generated and unlimited in its amount. As such, the utilization of corn as biofuel has inherent appeal, although researchers suspect that there are negative implications associated with an otherwise seamless approach toward fuel production. At present time, the price of corn doubled throughout the course of one year, starting at two dollars a bushel in 2006 and skyrocketing to four dollars a bushel in 2007, and this price differential has produced serious consequences (Carter & Miller, 2007). Many food-producing farm animals eat corn grain, and the inflated amount it takes to feed them has simultaneously increased the cost of meat and dairy products. Countries that rely on corn products as their main staple have been inconvenienced by augmented corn prices, such as the corn tortilla in Mexico. Also, the United States reliably sends respite in the form of corn products to developing countries that are susceptible to malnourishment (Naylor, Liska, Burke, et al., 2007). Due to corn prices escalating into a high-priced commodity, the United States may feel the need to curtail such reprieve, thus contributing toward the increase of worldwide hunger.

Conclusion

Although Malthus put forth his theoretical conjecture over two centuries ago, the debate surrounding the legitimacy of his claims is still vibrant. Anti-Malthusian critics such as Julien Simon (Wattenberg, 1998) have advocated on behalf of human ingenuity, and feel that Malthus's ominous outlook underestimates society's ability to surmount significant barriers. Proponents of his premise, or neo-Malthusians (Macionis, 2001), focus on today's millions of poverty-stricken, developing-world inhabitants and the circumstances that have rendered their living conditions abysmal. Solutions that remedy such life-threatening situations, including an equitable distribution of food, money, medical supplies, contraception, and family planning resources, are riddled with inherent political, social, transportation, and environmental obstacles. When asked in what ways they shall contribute toward community activism, a common response given by well-intentioned Miss America contenders is that they want to end world hunger. Regardless of their stance on neo- or anti-Malthusian ideals, it is clear that enacting such an endeavor is both multifaceted and taxing.

Terms & Concepts

Arithmetic Progression: Malthus claimed that the growth of agricultural provisions occurs arithmetically, (i.e., numerically), as is demonstrated in the following series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.

Ethanol: A corn-based product that is considered an environmentally responsible alternative to oil.

Eugenics: During Malthus's lifespan, a common form of birth control surrounded that of eugenics, or the sterilization of individuals whom governmental officials deemed inferior, including the disabled, people of minority status, and those stricken by poverty.

Geometric Progression: Malthus claimed that human expansion proliferated exponentially, as is demonstrated in the following series: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 132, 264, 528.

Preventative Checks: The encumbrance of birth rates, which is nature's way of compensating for overpopulation.

Positive Checks: The acceleration of death rates, which is nature's way of compensating for overpopulation.

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Suggested Reading

Bonar, J. (2004). Malthus and his work. USA: Kessinger Publishing.

Boudreaux, T., & Givens, D. (2007). Ethanol and biodiesel: What you need to know. Houston: Hart Energy Publishing.

Mosher, S. W. (2008). Population control: Real costs, illusionary benefits. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.

Rao, M., & Sexton, S. (2010). Markets and Malthus: Population, gender and health in neo-liberal times. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.