Reinventing Malthus for the 21st Century: 

A Bicentennial Event on Malthus' Original Population Essay 

 

A presentation sponsored by 

Negative Population Growth (NPG) and The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)

held at National Press Club, Washington, DC, July 14, 1997 

 
 

Remarks from John Rohe Author, "A Bicentennial Malthusian Essay"

   
Thank you very much Sharon, Dan Stein, FAIR, NPG.  Let me read a quote. "Men and nature must work hand in hand.  The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men."  I had the privilege of encountering this quote yesterday while touring the new Roosevelt Memorial in downtown Washington, D.C.  Balance is what we are here to discuss today and balance is the big issue confronting mankind.  In this conference, we are inaugurating what I believe to be a bicentennial debate.  It's a debate on whether principles of two hundred years ago ö that were very revolutionary and controversial ö have any relevance whatsoever to the modern world.   

In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus wrote perhaps the most provocative essay in western thought. To understand this setting, it's important to look at what these times were like in 1798. England, where this was written, was still perhaps reeling from the American Revolution, while the French Revolution took place not too long before that. Mobilization was principally by foot or by horseback. It wouldn't be until 1812 that the steamship was in common use and the first Trans-Atlantic steam crossing would have taken place in 1827. In 1825, we had our first passenger trains. The world population in 1798, when Malthus wrote this essay, was about nine million people. Of course we are now about to touch upon six billion people on the face of the earth. The year 1790 was the first US census.  At that time we believed there were four million Americans in this country. And just two years before this Malthusian essay was written, a man named Jenner had discovered a vaccination for smallpox.  

So that was the setting in which Thomas Robert Malthus wrote this essay.  He emerged with this highly controversial essay.  It was really a reaction; a reaction to a sense of optimism that was very prevalent at that time. This optimism was reflected in the writings of Godwin, Thoreau and Rousseau. Man at the time, was believed to be approaching a state of "perfectibility." This was the dawn of the industrial revolution. We were beginning to make things. We harnessed tools of an enterprise, and for some, that improved the comforts of life, but certainly not for all as evidenced in the writings of Charles Dickens.  But for many, prosperity and wealth increased with the tools of production that we had been developing. And in this sense of optimism, there was a belief that if we make more stuff we would lead to more wealth and prosperity and if we had more people, we could make more and improve the lot of life for many. At the heart of this belief was the understanding that more people was a good thing. And it was in that context that Malthus came up with his insight.   

Let's say that mom and dad have four children. And then those four children would also have four children each.  So the population size of that family would proceed as follows: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024.  Soon this geometric progression has us through the roof.  That was an amazing finding, it was revolutionary, and it contravened the common belief at the time. Today, it  is very easy to overlook the significance of this finding. Many of us in this room understand the principles of exponential growth. But at the time, this notion of excess reproduction was absolutely astounding.   

If you read the Malthusian essay, you will develop a sense that this man was unlocking one of nature's best kept and most formidable secrets. That is the secret of excess reproduction ö every species in the animal and plant kingdom will reproduce more than its ecosystem will accommodate.   

These ideas, by the way, inspired another Englishman in 1838 to think of how this system might work more fully. His name was Charles Darwin. It's reflected directly in his diary.  In 1838, he read the Malthusian essay and the next day he reflected on the fact that he now had a way to explain what he was observing in the fossil record. Malthus pointed to our excess reproduction.  There is more reproduction than the system can accommodate.  Darwin took that one step further: who survives and who doesn't?  Darwin then determined that it was fitness that led to natural selection.   

Now Darwin kept that idea under wraps between 1838, when he stumbled across it by reading the Malthusian Essay, and 1859 when The Origin of the Species was published ö twenty-one years.  Perhaps he knew that by having developed a scientific basis for explaining how we got here and how the animal kingdom got here, he would be undermining the mystic revelations that had been very prevalent throughout our history.  These revolutionary findings challenged the intellectual underpinning of every self-conscious society at the time.   

Interestingly, the Malthusian Essay inspired another Englishman, Sir Russell Wallace to come up with the same idea of natural selection. As you recall Darwin and Wallace made a joint presentation of their ideas on natural selection at the time. The belief that more human beings aren't always necessarily a good thing would have been seen as a very dour view of mankind in 1789. In fact, interestingly, Malthus was the "grasping, squeezing, covinous old sinner" that Charles Dickens had written about in Scrooge. That was Malthus. This gives you some idea of just how these views were accepted at the time and just how revolutionary and controversial they were.   

Well, here at the bicentennial it might be appropriate for us to ask whether Malthus was that squeezing, grasping, covetous old sinner or whether he had a message that retains some relevance to us in our modern world. And what is that modern world?  Folks like Lester Brown have studied that exhaustively.  We have about a billion people going to bed hungry every night.  One out of six of us go to bed hungry.  Now these scenes aren't necessarily visible to us when we sit in our breakfast nook, but they are playing themselves out on the planet.  We have a few hundred thousand people that fall beyond the brink of malnutrition annually.  And we have a total daily net population gain, that is total births minus total deaths of about a quarter million people.  If a big city has a million people, we are replicating that big city every fourth day.  Nevertheless, we remain optimistic, much like the optimists two hundred years ago.  They were indifferent to limits.  We remain indifferent to limits.   

Population was a big issue on Earth Day 1970 ö and yet it is a forgotten cause on the Earth Days of the 90's. Has the world expanded?  Have we become less numerate? Are numbers too intimidating for us?  Why is it that population is not on the national radar screen?  Perhaps as a result of the bicentennial debate we will be able to restore population to its rightful place on the national agenda. Maybe we can start to lay the seeds for a nation to develop a population policy.   

Now as many of you know, population in this nation is not as great a problem as it is in the developing world.  We basically, since Earth Day 1970, if you want to pick a date, have for the domestic population adopted a more or less a replacement level fertility.  Of course that statistic is distorted dramatically by the massive influx of people under the post-1965 immigration laws.  But as to the domestic population we have made a very responsible decision in this nation without any coercion to adopt a replacement level fertility.  Nevertheless, we are indifferent to limits.  The problem in this country is our indifference to the limits of growth.  Economic growth, every economic forecast that you see, every time you turn on the TV and see the financial reports, every economist you talk to will assume that economic growth is good, and more growth is better.  I would respectfully submit that if the great mind of Thomas Robert Malthus were with us today, he would not only be writing about population and our indifference to the limits of population.  But today he would be writing about our indifference to the limits of economic growth.  This notion plagues so many of our decisions.  I see it as a lawyer in Michigan when I approach a zoning board.  They don't understand it.  They don't understand why someone might be opposed to a Wal-mart in a small town.  They don't have a sense for limits.  It doesn't just play itself out to a small town though. This is a national phenomenon.  It is an unchallenged and unexamined conviction that plagues the mind set of I would say every economic report that you see.  The belief that perpetual growth on a finite planet can continue is the mind set of a stark raving mad lunatic and yet this mindset governs all economic principles that we have.  

Whatever happened to the common good in America?  What happened to the notions of accountability and responsibility? Where did our sense for this inter-generational assistance to the next generation stop?  Why are we a shopping culture?  Why is it that we are bent on immediate self-gratification? Why is it that shopping at a mall is now a form of recreation?  If we search for the canyons of consumerism, I think we will find them in our frightful addiction to economic growth.   

So here we are two hundred years later.  Does this message have any relevance?  Are we exempt from the laws of nature that Darwin and Malthus came upon?  Are we exempt from these laws that say there will be an excess of reproduction and then something else sets in. By the way, from the Malthusian perspective that something else is called misery and vice.  That is the population check that he identified ö misery and vice.  Vice is a form of human intervention that brings population back into check.  Vice, by Malthusian terms, is war, infanticide, human intervention.  Misery on the other hand is non-human intervention ö famine, pestilence.  Misery and vice... those are the two phrases. That is his "and then what?" if I can borrow a phrase from Garrett Hardin.   

So, as we are poised at the threshold of this bicentennial debate and as we inaugurate this debate at this setting here in Washington DC, it is important for us to ask whether this human experiment of ours is such a finely crafted and finely tuned experiment that we just soar high above the laws of nature.  Should we rely upon the physical limits of this planet to make our decisions for us?  Or do we take some control ourselves?  Are we exempt from the laws of nature?  That's how we might define the debate at this bicentennial.  And by the way this is a debate that I hope to lose.  Nothing would please me more than to go home to my thirteen year old son at the end of this bicentennial and in his vernacular say, "You know Karl, we're just too cool, we are too awesome, we are the Îspiffy species.'  These laws don't apply to us.  This human experiment is such a finely crafted tool that you've got nothing to worry about."   

So once again, as we inaugurate the bicentennial debate:  Are we exempt?