For
people living in advanced Western cultures, it’s easy to forget how recently we lived in a world of limited resources, where for most people the top priority
and the focus of nearly every day’s activity was to meet the essential needs of
survival.
Even
as recently as the 1800s, most people depended on agriculture and lived in
rural areas, where obtaining the necessary supplies for survival was difficult,
owing to poor roads and arduous travel.
It
was in this atmosphere of deprivation, beginning in the 18th century, that
intellectual visionaries considered the future. The world’s population was
rising. But at the same time, they saw a world in which resources were finite,
based on an agrarian economic model that had been in place for millennia. The
conclusion seemed obvious: The population would grow so large that we would inevitably run out of resources plunging the
world into famine.
The
most famous of these thinkers was Thomas Malthus, who published An Essay on
the Principle of Population1 in six editions between 1798 and 1826. In it he wrote:
“The
power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce
subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the
human race.”
He
went on to predict, “sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague… in
terrific array,” along with “gigantic inevitable famine.”
This
vision had an immediate, seductive effect on a wide variety of minds. There
was a kind of irresistible dramatic quality to it — a Biblical intensity — that
swept up thinkers from diverse disciplines, including Charles Darwin. The only
trouble with this theory was that it was completely wrong.
It
failed to take into account the way that technological advances would transform
industry and agriculture. It also failed to take into account that more
people meant more productivity. An economist named Henry George put it
this way: “Both the jayhawk and the man eat chickens; but the more jayhawks,
the fewer chickens, while the more men, the more chickens.”
The
result has been a steady increase in food production that has been sufficient
to feed the growing world population. However,...
