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« Back to The Life and Times of Thomas Malthus main page    Transcript for: The Life and Times of Thomas Malthustranscript.625.html ANNOUNCER: Think Tank is made possible by AMGEN, recipient of thePresidential National Medal of Technology. AMGEN, helping cancer patients through cellular and molecular biology. Improving livestoday and bringing hope for tomorrow. Additional funding is providedby the John M. Olin Foundation, the Lilly Endowment, the Lynde andHarry Bradley Foundation, the United States-Japan Foundation, and theDonner Canadian Foundation. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. It was in June of1798 that the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus wrote his essay on ThePrinciple of Population arguing that human population grew withgeometric speed, and would eventually outrun food supply, bringing oncycles of famine, pestilence and death. Although his direpredictions have not been borne out, the ideas that Malthus put forthhave pervaded scientific and humanist thought encompassing topics asapparently diverse as food, disease, economics and the environment. For 200 years, the intellectual world has been divided betweenMalthusians and anti-Malthusians, with each side respectivelysaluting or scorning his ideas as we may see in the next half-hour. Joining us to wade through the conflict and consensus are demographerPaul Demeny, a distinguished scholar of the Population Council in NewYork and editor of the journal Population and Development Review; MaxSinger, co-founder of the Hudson Institute and co-author of RealWorld Order; and Walter Reid, vice president for programs at theWorld Resources Institute in Washington, and co-author of WorldResources 1998-1999. The topic before the house, was Malthus right? Population and resources, this week on Think Tank. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: The global environment is always a hot topic,will there be more people than we can feed? Will we have famines? Will our population wreak havoc with natural resources, or willpopulation decline? The evidence is mixed and hotly debated. Theglobal population does continue to grow, yet most U.N. projectionsshow a leveling off or a downward trend of population in the future. There have been occasional famines in Africa, but those havetypically been caused by political and military strife. Meanwhile,food is abundant in most parts of the world. Some say there isglobal warming, partially generated by too many people. Others saywarming is just part of a natural cycle. There has been over-fishingin our oceans, yet most fish are plentiful in the market. So whatdoes the future hold for planet Earth? Thomas Malthus asked justthat question 200 years ago. Welcome, all. Let me begin with PaulDemeny for a few minutes here and try to get a take on who ThomasRobert Malthus was and why he was important. Paul, why don't you tryto begin at the beginning and let's move through it quickly butthoroughly. MR. DEMENY: Well, he was an economist of the first rank, up inthe Pantheon with figures like Adam Smith or David Ricardo or JohnStewart Mill (sp) but controversial to a degree far more than any ofthose three. We are discussing a book that was published 200 yearsago. How many 18th Century books are still remembered today and amatter of controversy. This is a sign of how influential histhinking was, and how important the question -- the questions heraised turned out to be. And, of course, his questions focused onthe balance between population numbers and resources, and thewelfare, the human welfare, that those two components do influence. It was an enormously influential book, but I should say that when wediscuss Malthus, we should remember that there are two Malthuses. One is the economist Malthus, who had an intellectual history of itsown. His thinking evolved after the first pamph let published in1798. He went back to his books, he traveled, he thought about theissue, and had a second edition of the -- MR. WATTENBERG: Of the same book. MR. DEMENY: -- of the same book. Well, it was really a differentbook, but he kept the title. Some of the essential thinkingreflected in the original pamphlet remained, but it became a realcontribution to social science in the sense that he brought inobservations, statistics, the results of his extensive travel in Western Europe, Scandinavia, Switzerland, France, Russia too, andthere were substantial modifications of the original raw formulationof his theory. MR. WATTENBERG: Why don't you give us the original formulation,and then the amended formulation and, again, as briefly as -- MR. DEMENY: Well, if I may, I would like to briefly refer to thatsecond Malthus, and the second Malthus is Malthusianism as such. Hewas so important that he gave his name to a doctrine which had anindependent existence from his books, and became associated with aworld view that somehow, because of biological factors or factorsover which we have no control, mankind is headed to some sort of adoomsday situation. This is very far from what a properinterpretation of Malthus, particularly the mature Malthus, wouldjustify. MR. WATTENBERG: But it is what he wrote in his original essay,the one that launched Malthusianism. He says it very clearly thatthis is a dead-end game that is bound to end up in catastrophe. MR. DEMENY: Well, he pointed out that population and resourceshave to be in balance, and he added the proposition that resourcesare likely to grow much slower than population dynamics will increasehuman numbers. And, that something has to give in this race, and inthe original essay he saw that the equilibriating mechanism will beessentially mortality, vice, misery, pestilence. MR. WATTENBERG: Famine, and famine. MR. DEMENY: Famine, yes. Food was very important. Now, thisbalance of course is, by definition, true if you look at the animalworld, of course, the observation is obvious. In fact, one of theenormous influences of Malthus was indirect when some 40 years afterhe wrote his original contribution Darwin picked up the book and sawa mechanism for evolution in it. He gave credit to Malthus, andprobably the most influential book of the last 200 years was Darwin'sOrigin of Species which, in an indirect way, sprang from theMalthusian proposition that the composition for resources hasimportant influence on human history. MR. WATTENBERG: Walter Reid, tell me, was Malthus right when hepredicted that expanding population would lead to a depletion ofresources? MR. REID: Well, there's no question that he was right thatexpanding population would lead to a depletion of resources. But,what he was initially arguing was that it would outpace the abilityof various particularly agricultural resources to meet the needs ofthat expanding population. And that, in the aggregate, he has turnedout not to be right on that dimension. And, it's because of factorsthat he ended up including in his later treatments as I understand,and that is the ability of our technology to continue to produce moreand more food to outpace the growth of growing populations. So, inthe aggregate, he turned out to be wrong, but in particular regions,for example Africa, you do see a problem where currently populationis growing, the production of food per capita is declining, rates ofmalnutrition are growing. So, in some certain regions, you do seestill some Malthusian type interactions playing out. MR. WATTENBERG: Max, do you agree with that? MR. SINGER: No. MR. WATTENBERG: Surprise. MR. SINGER: It depends what you mean by depletion. If bydepletion you means you shake some iron out of the ground or somewheat out of the ground, thereby you must have not as much left, thenthere's been depletion. But if you mean by depletion more scarcity,then there's not been depletion. The world has gone from 1 billionto 6 billion, but the price of grain has gone down more than sixtimes. The price of iron has gone down. The price of all metalshave gone down. The price of almost everything we take from naturehas gone down, which is to say that all those things are less scarceas a result, or accompanying the multiplication of population. So, Idon't know what there's depletion of in this sense of not being asavailable as it used to be. MR. REID: The difference here is between an economic definitionand a physical definition of depletion, I think, where in the last100 years, we lost about half of the world's forest cover, about 60percent of the marine fish populations are now depleted in physicalterms. MR. WATTENBERG: What does depleted mean? I mean, there are fish,and if you go to a restaurant you can order fish. MR. REID: But you can't get the same take from a particularpopulation of fish. There's not as many fish to harvest from aneconomic standpoint, you can purchase fish still. You getsubstitutes. From the ones that have been depleted physically, youcan buy an alternative, or you can buy chicken, or something. MR. WATTENBERG: I mean, you can buy fish. You can buy fish. Youget an array. You go to a restaurant and at moderate prices you getan array of fish, I mean, as long as your arm. MR. REID: Sure, but it's not the same fish that you would havebeen able to get 100 years ago. Certain fish stocks, physically, areno longer there. And, instead we have alternative substitutes. So,from an economic standpoint, you can say, well, there's a substitute. But from a physical standpoint, there has been a loss of aparticular resource. Another example would be coral reefs that thepressure of humans on coral reefs and mangrove ecosystems hasphysically depleted those resources. Coral reefs are not asproductive, as abundant as they used to be. Mangroves have been cutby an estimated half. And yet, at the same time, if you look at itfrom an economic standpoint, are you able to get the services thatmangroves provided? Well, we lost shrimp productivity in mangroves,but now we can -- MR. WATTENBERG: Wait, what are mangroves? Let's determine what. MR. REID: Mangroves are a type of coastal wetland that basicallyinvolves tree-like plants that are found throughout the tropics, andthey're the site where a lot of shrimp productivity, for example,takes place. So, you can deplete the physical resource, but thencreate aqua-culture systems to provide shrimp. So, from thatstandpoint, shrimp are not any more scarce than they were, but thatphysical resource has been depleted because of population expansion. MR. WATTENBERG: Paul, let me bring you into this now. We've hadyour historical insights, now you're welcome to your opinions. MR. DEMENY: Well, Malthus did focus on food as necessary forsurvival, and in a basic biological sense, he pointed out that theremust be a balance. There can be no larger population than can besupported. But, in the modified, sort of broadened view that Malthusput forward in later editions, he understood that what peopleconsider as necessities, subsistence, is a socially determinedelement. That it's not just food, one doesn't live on food alone, but there are other requirements, and these requirements reflect avalue judgment for a socially developed standard of expectedaffluence. And, in this sense, the preventive check now operates notbecause food is scarce, but because people judge that they have tolimit their family size in order to bring up their children accordingto standards that they consider minimal. So, in this sense, anAmerican family that decides that it's absolutely necessary that twochildren go to college might decide that they cannot afford a thirdchild. So, there is an equilibrium of really a Malthusian sense, buton a much wider, much more subtle and broader interpretation of whathuman subsistence is. MR. SINGER: The striking thing about Malthus is that he wrotejust at the time world history changed, the human life changed. Whenhe wrote, people lived essentially as they had for thousands ofyears. Most people living in villages, most people aren't educated,most people dying young, relatively few people in the world. Sincethat time, in the last 200 years, we've had the first half of aprocess which is changing human life, multiplying the number ofpeople, multiplying the humanity in which we live, that is peopleinstead of living by the sweat of the brow and being afraid ofnature, people live with their minds and their fingers and not theirshoulders if they work physically. Their health is better, morepeople, they're educated, they have more choices. All this changedin the world, and it has been only in the last 200 years. MR. REID: I mean, let's look also at other issues related, say,just to the growth of urban areas, and the current dramatic growth,particularly in developing countries, that's simply outpacing theability to provide infrastructure in those urban areas, where youhave still a growing number of people in poverty. We still haveabout 1.3 billion people in poverty. MR. WATTENBERG: But, a diminishing rate of people in poverty. MR. REID: A slight diminishing rate, that's right. But, absolutenumbers are growing. Certain regions of the world, such as Africa,for whatever reason, whether it's political or not, you do have aproblem with growing numbers of malnourished people, and within a lotof urban areas, just providing clean water and sanitation to thosepopulations is an enormous challenge. MR. WATTENBERG: Why would -- if life in the cities was soterrible, why would human beings, who we know vote with their feet,move from rural to urban areas? MR. REID: This is not -- MR. WATTENBERG: Aren't they upgrading their existence? MR. REID: It's sort of looking at the population resource issuein absolutes, rather than saying that there are rates of growth ofnumbers, that are perhaps faster than we can be providing theservices to meet, that it would be helpful to countries if, in fact,those rates were a little bit lower. In the next even sort of thelower median projections, in the next 50 years, we will add as manypeople to the world as it took roughly up until the year 1970 to add. So that's a huge number. That's several China's worth of people tobe added, and can we provide the services quickly enough. And anargument could be made that in the long-run, okay, fair enough, we'llkeep up with that, but in the short-run -- MR. SINGER: How can there be any precedent in history? MR. REID: But, in the short-run, that does present some very realhuman challenges to meet those needs. MR. WATTENBERG: But, Paul, Thomas Malthus had it exactly rightwhen he talked about positive population growth, the positivepopulation movement, but that's all he talked about. He did not takeinto consideration the phenomena we have witnessed in the lastquarter of a century, around the world, including in many lessdeveloped countries, that human beings in a modern circumstance, willreproduce at a negative rate. You say we're going to grow this muchmore and that much more. I look at those U.N. figures, it looks asif we're going to go from about 6 billion to between 8 and 9 billion,and then head south. And this -- Malthus did not -- did he write aword about this.? MR. DEMENY: Yes, he did. MR. WATTENBERG: What did he say? MR. DEMENY: He was a classical economist, he was intensely awareof the crucial role human institutions, legal arrangements, propertyrights, play in how people behave. And he didn't have thissimplistic notion that it's population growth, biologicallydetermined, food growing slowly, catastrophe is impending, butemphasized that human responses to growth can differ. You asked, hashe ever written about negative population growth. In the secondedition of the essay he has a fascinating chapter where he discussesrural depopulation, negative population growth, in the Ottomanempire, and in Persia, in the Turkish dominions. And -- MR. SINGER: But Malthus had never seen -- he had human history upto then, and he had never seen, because there never was a populationwhere wealth grew on a sustained basis. Per capita income at histime was under $1000 and that was as high as it had ever been inhistory, anywhere. MR. WATTENBERG: And what is it now, on the same basis? MR. SINGER: Now, in the United States it's over $25,000. He hadnever seen -- there had never been before Malthus' time what we haveseen almost everywhere in the world since then, which is continuedgrowth of per capita wealth, because people learn how to produce moreefficiently. MR. REID: But, you know, the real issue here, I think we'remissing, and it's in what you said, that you sort of gave yourprojection of population would get up to 6 or 7 to 9 billion. MR. WATTENBERG: Eight to nine billion. MR. REID: Eight to nine billion, that one billion alone is anenormous difference. If we keep it at eight rather than nine, that'sthe equivalent of one China's worth of population less on the Earth. And that's the real policy issue that we face now. Are thereopportunities to play out lower population projections, because thoselower projections will make real differences, in terms of our abilityto provide services to those growing populations, and in terms of theimpact of those populations on the environment. MR. WATTENBERG: The environmental community today makes the case,and I've read it again and again, that it is the threat to globalenvironment comes from the wealthy nations, that they consume somuch. And yet, the record is that it is only in affluent countriesthat you can afford the kinds of environmental regulations andcontrols that diminish the affects of harsh consumption. MR. REID: Actually the link between economic activity andenvironment is a little more complex than that. But, for certainpressures on the environment that's right, that as you have higherper capita income, countries are able to invest more in regulatoryframeworks, or infrastructure to deal with providing clean water andthe like. But, for others, and climate change is the classicexample, as per capita income has gone up, so has energy use, whichhas increased the rate at which CO2 is being emitted into theatmosphere. So in that case it's clear that there's no sort ofpositive feedback in the sense of increasing per capita income,decreasing pressure on the environment. The other sort of twists -- MR. WATTENBERG: Except, that's been decoupled now, the rate of -- MR. REID: Starting to be decoupled. MR. WATTENBERG: Starting to be decoupled. MR. REID: So the trend in -- MR. SINGER: The Communists didn't pollute because they were poor,they polluted because it was the government making decisions, insteadof democracy and free markets. MR. REID: Exactly. That's exactly it. So you can't draw that --this nice link between per capita income and environmental standards. It's just -- it's a little more complex than that. MR. SINGER: But, you certainly can't draw it between profitseeking behavior and environmental destruction, because where there'sprofit seeking behavior is just where the environment has beenimproving. And where the government was running things, is justwhere you had environmental destruction on a massive scale. MR. REID: Well, that's where my point is, again, that it sort ofdepends on the environmental issue. That those countries with thehighest rate of economic growth are no question the countries thatare contributing the most right now to the potential threat ofclimate change. So it depends on the -- MR. SINGER: First of all, it isn't clear that there is going tobe the climate change, and second, it isn't clear that the climatechange, if it happened, would be harmful. MR. WATTENBERG: What I'd like to close on, maybe we can just havea brief conversation on it, is what did Malthus, and Malthusianismbring to the table of sort of intellectual life, beside this notparochial, but somewhat limited argument about population andresources. Didn't he sort of have a -- cast a broader net just on -- MR. REID: In my view it was, he forced people to start thinking alittle further ahead, in terms of what was going to be needed toprovide for growing populations. And when you look in the '60s atthe response of the agricultural community to recognition of growthof population, so heavy investment in agricultural research, thatsort of more forward looking attitude was just essential for societyto keep up with population. And I my view, he was one of the firstpeople that really did sort of look that far forward, and forcepeople to look at those scenarios. MR. SINGER: I think people acted, and the real changes in theworld, and positive changes, did not come from people listening tointellectuals worry about 100 years from now, they came from peopletrying to earn a little bit better living for their families. It wasnot the cries of doom that produced the agricultural revolution, byand large. I mean, Lester Brown switched, he started out being anenthusiastic, and then turned against it. But, mostly theMalthusians, in the political sense, have been against agriculturalresearch and, in fact, agricultural research budgets have beenslashed, because they said, we have to reduce populations. We, theintellectuals and the governments know what people should do. Andthey've been universally wrong, they've been wrong in theirpredictions about oil, they've been wrong in their predictions aboutforests. It's true that there's some decline in fish, but that'sbeen over estimated, typically. They've been wrong about almosteverything, and it's people doing things, and living their lives thathave produced the changes, and have been useful. MR. WATTENBERG: Paul, you're a philosopher king. Did he cast abroader net? I'm thinking particularly about the whole idea of apessimistic view of human nature, and humanity, going beyond justthis particular population/resource equation? MR. DEMENY: Well, Ben, when you see his criticisms, say, ofCondorcet and ask who was right, I think the last 200 years, andparticularly the 20th Century, and all the totalitarian experimentstrying to perfect human society, indicate that Malthus' darkerpicture was far closer to the truth than the starry-eyed predictionsof Condorcet. So I think I would side with Malthus in taking acautious view of where we are. MR. WATTENBERG: Of human nature? MR. DEMENY: Yes. MR. WATTENBERG: Thank you very much, Paul Demeny, Max Singer, andWalter Reid. And thank you, for Think Tank, I'm Ben Wattenberg. 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