Should we be bullish or bearish on humanity’s future? Simon Wilson considers the pessimistic views of Thomas Malthus.
Who was Malthus anyway?
An English philosopher, political economist, and Anglican clergyman, Thomas Malthus predicted in his Essay on the Principle of Population (of 1798) that exponential growth in population would inevitably outstrip society’s ability to produce food. The result would be famine, disease, civil war and every other kind of “misery and vice” imaginable. Thomas, in short, was very much a glass-half-empty kind of chap. Indeed, it was Malthus’ doom-laden writings on population growth that later led Thomas Carlyle to dub economics the “dismal science”. Malthus was writing in explicit response to 18th-century optimists, such as William Godwin, the Marquis de Condorcet, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – all of whom he regarded as wishful thinkers who believed in charming-but-naïve ideas – such as man’s faculty for self-improvement, political freedom and greater prosperity for all. In short, Malthus was thoroughly sceptical of the idea of progress: he was not just a pessimist, he was an anti-optimist.
Was he right?
First, let it be said clearly: Malthus has been consistently proved wrong. As many recent authors have convincingly argued, from Fred Pearce in Peoplequake to George Friedman in The Next 100 Years, rising prosperity levels have proved the most effective contraceptive in history – and that happy state of affairs is set to continue (helped, of course, by reliable condoms and safe oral contraceptives for women). As developing societies get richer, people choose to have fewer children, and that means that most mainstream projections for peak global population now cluster around the eight billion mark by mid-century – far fewer than was predicted a few short decades ago.
Sounds good?
It gets better. Malthus was wrong because he missed two crucial facts about the future: that population growth can be slowed by voluntary means, and that technological advances would boost food production. That’s doubly good news, because it’s an example of why Malthus’ wrongness matters so much. He (like everyone else) could not predict the future. He did not, and could not, foresee the range of ways in which human ingenuity – embodied in applied technology – would improve the lot of humankind: boosting life expectancy, pulling billions out of poverty and leading to rising prosperity for most of us. For a vivid and entertaining illustration of this, you could do far worse, one afternoon during the post-Christmas lull, than spend five minutes in the company of Hans Rosling, of the BBC’s The Joy of Stats:
What’s Rosling’s point?
He thinks that progress is real and things really are getting better. Rosling presents a simple graph plotting life-expectancy up the vertical axis and wealth along the horizontal, with each nation of the world represented by a small dot or large circle, according to its size. He then “fast-forwards” the resulting graph from 1810 to 2010. Viewers can watch the blobs drift inexorably from the poor-and-sick bottom-left in 1810 (when only the Netherlands and Britain had a life expectancy of more than 40) to the rich-and-healthy top-right in 2010. Moreover, it shows how particular countries, such as China, which were stuck in the bottom-left until just a few decades ago, have dragged themselves out of it very rapidly.
What’s the catch?
We can’t get complacent. For example (as Jeffrey Sachs argued in a recent lecture on Malthus and sustainability) optimists might argue that the history of food production since the time of Malthus provides backing for their position. If food becomes scarce, the price will rise, and this will stimulate innovation and boost farm productivity.
In fact, such optimism is misplaced in theory and dangerous in practice. “Unless we are proactive, hundreds of millions of people can suffer from deep hunger, and often an early death, before the requisite productivity increases take hold.” (And for every optimist trumpeting the fact that Shanghai in 2010 enjoys the same level of health and wealth as Italy, there is another pessimist pointing out that rural residents of Guizhou province remain in the same situation as Ghanaians – poor and sick.)
How can we keep making progress?
So can we relax about the world’s woes? We’ve solved our problems in the past, after all. Or is it our capacity for imagining the worst that makes us act to avoid catastrophe? It’s a debate that Microsoft founder Bill Gates has been having with Matt Ridley, the zoologist and former Northern Rock chairman, in The Wall Street Journal. In his latest book, The Rational Optimist, Ridley argues that we worry too much about Africa, for example.
“Top-down” aid to stimulate economic growth (rather than aid targeted at specific causes) doesn’t work; what Africa needs is more trade and free enterprise, and less intervention. Gates counters that aid in fact helps to fund health improvements, in turn slowing population growth, which is a driver of long-term prosperity. Boiling it down, Ridley’s point is that if we are overly gloomy, we’ll waste time and resources on finding potentially counter-productive and rushed solutions to problems that have been blown out of proportion. Gates fears that if we’re too laid back, we’ll ignore potential threats that could grow into “real, large problems.” Perhaps what both are arguing for (albeit not the most satisfying conclusion) is a sense of healthy realism.