Once upon a time, back in 1908, the Chicago Cubs faced the New York Giants in a decisive game for the National League pennant. During a dramatic play in the bottom of the ninth inning, the Giants’ substitute first baseman, a young, competent player, inadvertently failed to touch second base, which was duly protested and the game ordered replayed. The Cubs went on to win the ensuing one-game playoff for the pennant.
The young man’s name was Fred Merkle, but from that moment on until he died, he was haunted by a new name, “Bonehead” Merkle. Despite the daring and noble efforts that followed, he never shed his epithet.
Almost everybody today seems to know of Sigmund Freud, Freudian slips, and sexual symbols. Any educated person who denies knowing about Freud must be repressing it.
Thomas Robert Malthus never played baseball and never saw a psychoanalyst. Yet his name became as famous as Freud’s and his infamy as undeserved as Bonehead Merkle’s. Byron, who probably needed a psychoanalyst more than Malthus did, composed poetry about him, and children sang rhymes mocking him. Decades after his death, Marx viciously attacked him. A century after his death, Keynes glorified Malthus and predicted that on the bicentenary of his death, “We shall commemorate him with undiminished regard.” But undiminished compared with what?
What dastardly crime did Malthus perpetrate that led even Romantic poets like Coleridge to lament: “Behold this mighty nation, its rulers and its wise men listening . . . to Malthus! It is mournful, mournful”?
In 1798 Malthus robbed romantic dreams from people who looked to the nineteenth century with utopian faith. He was tried in newspapers and found guilty of predicting that overpopulation would produce a future not of rapture but of social ruptures and decay. On the eve of a new century, Malthus was the ultimate party pooper. Or at least his theory was.
Born February 13, 1766, in Surrey, England, at the Rookery, the country seat of his eccentric father, Daniel, Malthus at the age of only three weeks met his two “fairy godfathers,” David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Daniel Malthus worshipped. Robert, as the boy was called, flashed signs of high intelligence at an early age and soon received private tutoring. He grew to be tall and striking, and in 1784 entered Jesus College, Cambridge, where, while studying for the clergy, he also read mathematics and philosophy. Like Adam Smith, Malthus was impressed by Newton and read carefully his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. Despite his weighty intellectual interests and aspirations for holy orders, Malthus was a popular, witty Cambridge man, ready to put on a mocking comic expression or voice. Malthus wore his fair hair in curly ringlets down to his neck, while most others wore pigtails. He might have been a trendsetter, for ten years later, almost all undergraduates wore their hair in ringlets. More shocking, while most students powdered their hair white, Malthus sometimes used pink. A punker before his time, perhaps. Unfortunately, we do not have any paintings that display Malthus’s eye-catching looks, because Malthus refused to sit for a portrait. Despite his effervescent manner, he was embarrassed by a hereditary harelip and cleft palate. Perhaps he colored his hair to distract from his face. Not until a year before his death did Malthus finally agree to have his image memorialized, but the painter skillfully massaged the oils so that Malthus looks serious, conventional, and proud. Interestingly, he holds a book in his hands, and his index finger cleaves his book precisely in half.
Before graduating in 1788, the master of Jesus College warned Malthus that a speech defect resulting from the cleft palate would hurt his chances of rising within the Church. This despite Malthus’s winning prizes for Greek, Latin, and English orations at Cambridge! Malthus discarded the advice, took holy orders anyway, and briefly practiced at a church in Okewood, returning to Jesus College as a fellow in 1793. Although he never again committed himself full-time to the clergy, economists still refer to him as Parson Malthus, perhaps because the image of Puritanical pessimism fits his population theory better than that of a happy, humorous layman. Recall H. L. Mencken’s definition of a Puritan: one who has a haunting fear that someone, somewhere, at some time, may be having fun. Psychologically, perhaps we feel more comfortable dismissing Malthus and his warnings if we portray him as a Puritan.
The tides of revolution rolled high and rough when Malthus returned to Jesus College. In 1793, revolutionaries guillotined Louis XVI, and the French Republic declared war on England. Despite the harrowing times, some writers and preachers pronounced that high tides would eventually bring the calmest, most idyllic time man had known since Eden. Rousseau had earlier written utopian prose, suggesting that man was born happy and free yet corrupted by society. Voltaire quipped that Rousseau’s hypernaturalism aroused a yearning to walk on all fours while reading his work. In England, Wordsworth captured the rapture, writing, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven!”1 But Malthus resisted the vision of utopia. In particular, he rebelled against William Godwin, a minister, a pamphleteer, and the author in 1793 of An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. Godwin quite simply believed that “Man is perfectible, or in other words susceptible of perpetual improvement.” (His daughter, Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, might have disagreed!) And because “truth is omnipotent,” man could transform himself into a creature better suited for happiness and harmony with his neighbor: “Every man will seek, with affable ardour, the good for all.”2 Following Rousseau’s claim that the history of civil society was the history of human sickness, Godwin envisaged the abolition of government, courts, crime, war, melancholy, and anguish as man achieved perfection. Though he married one of history’s founding feminist philosophers, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Godwin thought that marriage itself was evil. Even death and sleep could be put to rest, in Godwin’s vision: “Generation will not succeed generation. . . . Before death can be banished, we must banish sleep, death’s image. Sleep is one of the most conspicuous infirmities of the human frame. It is . . . an irregular and distempered state of the faculty.”3 Similar visions of sugarplums danced in the head of Marquis de Condorcet, a French philosopher and mathematician, whose Sketch for a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind was published in 1794. Condorcet showed striking optimism for a fugitive from Robespierre soon to be caught and put to sleep permanently.
Most annoying to Malthus, Godwin and the Archdeacon William Paley argued that an increasing population was a good sign, for it meant more total happiness. Paley proclaimed that a decay of population was the greatest evil a state could suffer. As the eighteenth century ended, some scholars equipped with bits of discredited data estimated that population had grown very slowly during the past one hundred years, while others even contended that the population had plummeted. Since a strong labor force supported economic growth, Prime Minister William Pitt introduced a bill that increased poor relief payments for couples with children, a precursor of modern-day programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children (launched in 1935 during the Great Depression) and its successor, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families.
As expected, Daniel Malthus nodded in blissful agreement with the coalition of Godwin, Paley, and the posthumous Rousseau. But while father nodded, son shook his head. They talked and walked in the woods; each tried to persuade the other of the conclusion that reason required. Finally, Robert, frustrated with his misty-eyed, quixotic foe, dashed off in a fury An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of M. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. Father, now misty-eyed at his son’s intellectual prowess, arranged for the essay’s anonymous publication.
Few essays have ever been more shocking. Imagine the earth shrinking at a furious pace. Every twenty-five years it splits in half, one half remaining in orbit, the other spinning toward the sun, igniting, and exploding. People must scramble and trample toward the half that survives, carrying with them children, grandparents, and whatever sacred possessions they can carry. Even worse, they do not know which half of the earth will survive. Malthus’s prophecy is slightly different, yet only a bit less frightening. Instead of the globe cleaving and bursting, Malthus describes the population swelling and spreading at an explosive pace, while food supplies only inch along. Malthus assumed that farmers were currently planting, plowing, and harvesting from the most fertile fields. More population would force them to tame rockier, less fecund soils, yielding “diminishing returns.” Though Malthus lived long after the fourteenth-century black death, which wiped out one-third of Europe’s workers, lingering memories taught him that wages rose after the plague. With fewer workers, landowners needed to pay the survivors more. Better-paid peasants started demanding more protein, leading to a shift from growing crops to raising cattle and sheep for meat and also for the leather and wool trade. Though Henry VIII’s chancellor, Sir Thomas More, decried this trend and described “meek and tame” sheep devouring “men . . . whole fields, houses, and cities,” the shift to animal husbandry opened up new opportunities for women, allowing them to delay marriage and put off their own husbands. In a perverse way, the plague appeared to raise the standard of living! A man like Malthus, who could see the bright side of the black plague, could see the black side of bright things, too.4 Using contemporary data from the United States supplied by Benjamin Franklin, Malthus asserted that population tends to double every twenty-five years. Of course, it could double even faster. Actually, Malthus chose relatively conservative examples. Franklin reported that some villages double in only fifteen years! Though armed with no reliable data from Franklin on the food supply, Malthus concluded that output could never keep pace with population. Unchecked population grows at a geometric ratio, Malthus posited, whereas food increases at merely an arithmetic ratio.
What do these ratios mean? A geometric ratio (or exponential rate) means that a number continually multiplies itself by a constant—for example, a perpetual doubling. An arithmetic ratio simply adds a constant. Malthus provides a good example: If the present population is one billion, humans would increase by 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, while food would grow by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Whereas each person had one basket of food at the beginning, two hundred years later, 256 people would have to share nine baskets. Only one hundred years after that, 4,096 people would have to share thirteen baskets!
Geometric ratios can be extremely powerful, surprising, and misleading. A few examples might help. If Scott wants to borrow Dennis’s television to watch the Super Bowl on February 2 and promises to pay one penny on January 1 and double that each day until the football game begins, Scott had better be very rich or Dennis had better be foolish enough to accept Monopoly game money. Scott would owe Dennis $42,949,672.96 at kickoff time! Compound interest rates at banks also illustrate geometric ratios.5 Recall the story of the Dutch who bought Manhattan island from the Indians for about $24. If the Indians had placed the money in a compound interest account, their heirs could afford to buy back the island today, including the Empire State Building, Lincoln Center, the skating rink in Central Park, and all the “improvements” since the seventeenth century.
Compound interest can also mislead, as we can see in a more recent example. In 1981, Congress passed a bill permitting Individual Retirement Accounts, essentially allowing people to put away up to $2,000 per year in a fund that would not be taxed until retirement. Advertisements immediately appeared in newspapers proclaiming that a twenty-five-year-old could easily retire with more than $1 million just by saving $2,000 a year. Graphs showed dollar bills soaring into the stratosphere, launched by the magic of compound interest. But the very small print told the real story. The banks assumed an interest rate of 12 percent over the next forty years, but did not tell the reader that if interest rates averaged 12 percent for forty years, inflation would likely rage for forty years, wiping out most of the gain. Imagine the frugal yuppie, slumped over his desk for forty years with little contact with the outside world. In the year 2021, he finally retires. With the yellowed 1981 advertisement in trembling hand, he finds the last remaining coin-operated telephone and asks his banker to arrange for an armored car to pick up his treasure. The banker explains that nearly $10 million plus a blender await the yuppie. The yuppie weeps with joy, supporting himself on his pasta maker. He hears a click. The operator interrupts: “Please deposit four hundred thousand dollars for another minute.” In fact, the advertisements from the early 1980s were remarkably misleading; between 1981 and 2020, banks rewarded savers with an average annual return of about 4 percent, not 12 percent!
The conclusions of An Essay on the Principle of Population were not entirely new either to Malthus or to others, since Franklin and Sir James Steuart, a Scottish rival of Adam Smith’s, each had previously published foreboding essays. Malthus himself had put forth his fears two years earlier in an essay that searched without success for a publisher: “I cannot agree with Archdeacon Paley, who says, that the quantity of happiness in any country is best measured by the number of people. . . . The actual population may be only a sign of the happiness that is past.” Even if unoriginal, the Malthusian thesis, backed by pithy phrases and striking images, displayed a new virtuosity in the art of persuasion. Malthus captured the theory and with it the attention of Britain.
If the earth halved and halved again, we would see a frenzied rush. But what exactly happens when mouths exceed spoonsful? Long before geometric growth soars off the graphs, two kinds of obstacles block the advance: “positive” checks and “preventative” checks. By “positive,” Malthus clearly did not mean optimistic. He meant checks that raise the death rate. What are the positive forces that can “save” us from geometric ratios? War, famine, and plagues. The black death lurks in every alley ready to rescue us. Infant mortality liberates us from overpopulation. And famine haunts us always:
Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. 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. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and they often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemic, pestilence and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete; gigantic, inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world.6
Preventative checks, which lower the birthrate, seemed less severe, but also less likely. If only people would bridle their passion and delay marriage, they would be better off, Malthus suggested. After all, having children lowers a family’s standard of living. But Malthus saw little hope here, for he was preaching to the converted. The middle and upper classes who would read his essay would embrace his argument. But what chance did he have of persuading the lower classes, who always appear more fruitful and multiplicative, to forbear from marriage or childbirth, especially when the Poor Law encouraged couples to have children? Malthus portrayed a recurring cycle in which population growth controlled by grim natural checks would keep wages at only a bare subsistence level. If wages rose higher, workers would have more children, leading to food shortages and an inescapable decline in the standard of living.
In a splendid understatement, Malthus admits that his scenario has a “melancholy hue.” (Can one call black a hue?) Later, Malthus mourns that to “prevent the recurrence of misery, is, alas! beyond the power of men.” You can imagine the book of Genesis (3:17) ringing in the preacher’s ears: “Cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.” Nonetheless, Malthus tries to sustain a smile and his homiletic humor. Life is “a blessing independent of a future state . . . and we have every reason to think, that there is no more evil in the world than what is absolutely necessary.”7 God, not Malthus, presents the Malthusian trap, hoping mankind will show sympathy and virtue.
The force of the anonymous pamphlet was a plague on the houses of Paley and Godwin, decimating their followers and leaving their theories to look as though intellectual famine had struck utopia. Paley turned and followed his apostates. Godwin battled back, but on Malthus’s grounds, suspending his utopian mirages and arguing that moral restraint could forestall disaster. The vital victory for Malthus, however, was winning over Prime Minister Pitt. Though in 1796 Pitt had eloquently advocated for poor relief in Parliament, only four years later he adopted Malthus’s thesis and withdrew his support for a new bill. Pitt now argued Malthus’s position that since poor relief only encouraged the poor to have children, it brought closer the date for “positive checks” to ravage the populace. Erasing poor relief from the public ledger would actually be a “palliative,” by increasing work incentives and decreasing claims on the food supply. Likewise, Malthus was not enthusiastic about public vaccinations, even though he lived to see a country doctor named Edward Jenner successfully immunize his gardener’s son against deadly smallpox.
Malthus cannot be disparaged as a heartless hater of the poor, even though Charles Dickens would put Malthusian words into the mouth of Ebenezer Scrooge, who thunders that many of the poor should hurry and die to “decrease the surplus population.” In fact, An Essay rings with sympathetic statements that the poor suffer most when positive checks rage. As Keynes later insisted, a love of truth and a discerning public spirit drove Malthus to his conclusions. But how strong Pitt’s throat muscles must have been to swallow his own words from 1796: “Let us make relief a matter of right and honour. . . . This will make a large family a blessing and not a curse; and this will draw a proper line of distinction between those who are to provide for themselves by their labour, and those who, after enriching their country with a number of children, have a claim upon its assistance for their support.”8
Even with Pitt’s support, Malthus remained skeptical of the future. Handsome men, beautiful women, and wine irresistibly arouse people to venery. And as some preachers were well aware, words are often impotent when the listeners are not.
As the nation trumpeted his alarm, Malthus began to feel uneasy about the breezy scientific method he had used. After all, he had based his shattering, universal conclusions on scattered bits of information from a former colony. In addition, he felt uncomfortable with the nearly fatalistic pessimism of his books. A revised edition of An Essay seemed appropriate. Malthus began exhaustive research, traveling to Sweden, Norway, Finland, Russia, and even France and Switzerland during the 1802 peace with England. He studied civil records and laws, learning that Austria and Bavaria still upheld seventeenth- and eighteenth-century edicts prohibiting paupers from marrying. In 1801, Britain published its first comprehensive census, surprising Malthus, yet strengthening his argument. According to the study, during the late 1700s, population had advanced dramatically, whereas most had previously believed that the growth was very slow. About a hundred years earlier, in 1696, the pioneer statistician Gregory King had wrongly predicted that population would not double for six hundred years.
In 1803, Malthus presented a new edition, complete with new title: An Essay on the Principle of Population, or A View of Its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness, with an Inquiry into Our Prospects Respecting the Future Removal or Mitigation of the Evils Which It Occasions. Gone are Godwin and Condorcet from the marquee. Reduced are discussions of Utopian prophecy. Everything else in the book was expanded, if not in geometric ratio, at least in terms of length, depth, and weight. Malthus illustrated theoretical points with endless anecdotes and examples from Africa, Siberia, Turkey, Persia, Tibet, China, and again the United States, this time including American Indians. No one could attack him for not being empirical. In tone, the second edition sounds slightly less dire, offering hope that the working class might change their habits and show “moral restraint” before multiplying. Of course, altering attitudes takes time. The more temperate tone also affected discussion of the Poor Laws. Rather than scratching them forthwith, Malthus proposed “their gradual and very gradual abolition” so that no one presently alive or born within two years is injured (original emphasis).9 And relief would be withdrawn only from the able-bodied. To promote food supply, Malthus also urged restrictions on food imports and exports. Restrictions would boost the price in England and would therefore spur domestic production. Though generally a free trader, Malthus proposed an exception for food. We will examine his trade arguments when we discuss David Ricardo in the next chapter.
With the new edition, reputable writers and politicians again admitted the force of Malthus’s logic. Reviews from leading journals and magazines praised Malthus (whose name now appeared on the previously anonymous work) for his insight and diligence, if not for his brevity. His work was read from Turin to Tasmania, and a pirated copy showed up in the United States before the official printing arrived. Less than two years later, the Monthly Magazine announced the preparation of a third edition, which appeared in 1806, followed by a fourth edition the next year. No surprise, controversy erupted with each new edition. Intellectual enemies sniped even more wickedly and vulgarly at the second edition than they had at the first, since they now had a target (rather than an anonymous author) for their attacks. The poet Robert Southey wrote to a friend: “Malthus is as great a favourite with the British Critic as with the other voiders of menstrual pollution. I shall be very glad to lend a hand in some regular attack upon this mischievous booby. . . . We may in a few evenings effectually demolish him.”10 Hardly a sonnet. Southey’s blank verse venom even exceeded Coleridge’s, which merely called Malthus “monstrous.” Coleridge’s grudge against Malthus had festered from the time Malthus voted to expel Coleridge from Jesus College for leaving to join the army without permission. Despite the vitriol, Malthus earned points with economists and soon emerged as a leader of the profession. James Mill, David Ricardo, and later John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall accepted An Essay, though sometimes ignored its implications in their own writings.
Malthus’s work inspired and irked more than economists. Years later, he won points with an intrepid bug collector sailing to the Galápagos on the H.M.S. Beagle, namely, Charles Darwin. If Malthus’s cataclysm takes place, who exactly makes it out alive? The fittest, of course. Darwin, who was not so fit himself and often distracted by depression, listlessness, indigestion, and awful itches, wrote that while reading Malthus “for amusement,” he was “struck” by the idea that a struggle for existence would lead to “the formation of new species.” Meanwhile, Darwin’s rival, Alfred Russel Wallace, wrote in his autobiography that Malthus provided the “long-sought clue” to understanding evolution.11
Soon after Malthus’s second edition appeared, he put aside moral restraint and at the age of thirty-eight married Harriet Eckersall. Since marriage violated the tenets of a Jesus College fellowship, Malthus resigned and in 1805 accepted a post at Haileybury College, the training school for the East India Company, which administered India for the British government. Named professor of general history, politics, commerce, and finance, Malthus became the first professor of political economy in England. Thus, we may consider Malthus, despite his holy orders, the first professional economist. (Incidentally, disciples of Adam Smith assailed the East India Company as a pernicious monopoly, while followers of the utilitarian Jeremy Bentham defended the company, arguing that new British entrants into the business of India would exploit the natives.
At Haileybury, Malthus proved once again that the man who depicted miserable plagues and famines loved to have fun. A friend described his mood as habitually playful, as ready to engage in all innocent pursuits and pleasures of the young as to encourage them in their studies. Within three years Malthus had three young children of his own to play with. Critics loved to jeer at the multiplication of his own offspring, and although the Malthuses had only three, somehow the 1958 and 1967 Everyman’s Library editions of An Essay awarded him eight more—all girls!
Malthus spawned thousands of disciples, many of whom burst forth in the 1960s, 1970s, and 2000s, pleading for the modern-day relevance of their master’s prophesies. Before examining the recent literature, let us with hindsight assess Malthus’s predictions. Malthus was 99.99 percent correct—until approximately the time he lived. In other words, from approximately 300,000 B.C., when Homo sapiens figured how to walk upright, until the 1700s, when people created more babies and ran low on foodstuffs, and thereby suffered more misery. But starting around the time of his birth, Malthus’s predictions began to swerve off the rails. Population did not continue to expand geometrically. Food supplies did not creep along. Misery may have visited the poor, but not for Malthusian reasons. On the contrary, in Britain and on the Continent, where Malthus focused his attention, people ate better, lived longer, and exhibited more “restraint” than Malthus could ever have expected.
Malthus missed some of the most important trends in history, as well as some obvious statistical blips. On the trivial side, he forgot to ask Benjamin Franklin whether the rising population figures distinguished immigrants from natural-born Americans. In other words, by lumping Franklin’s data together, Malthus in effect assumed that mothers of English descent in remote villages were giving birth to Dutch children arriving in New York by boat. Since he saw rising numbers, he declared the English mothers extremely fertile—certainly a painless childbirth system, even if a flawed statistical method. More crucial, Malthus missed the advances in medicine, an agricultural revolution, and the start of an Industrial Revolution, all of which would twist his projections like taffy into novel geometric shapes, not steady geometric trends.
While Daniel Malthus took walks in the woods with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and contemplated man’s perfection, eighteenth-century farmers were perfecting powerful methods to expand output. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, European agricultural productivity was no higher than it was twenty centuries earlier. But from 1700 to 1800, output per worker doubled in England. In France, despite the effects of revolution and war, output grew by roughly 25 percent between the time of Malthus’s birth and the first edition of An Essay. Several innovations accounted for the leap, including crop rotation, seed selection, better tools, and the use of horses instead of oxen, reducing plowing time by nearly 50 percent. By 1750, rapid progress allowed England not only to feed her citizens but also to export an additional 13 percent in cereals and flour. If a country advances in agriculture, more citizens can work in urban or nonagricultural areas. Whereas 75 percent of Englishmen worked in agriculture in 1690, by 1840 only 25 percent did.12 In the United States today, only a tiny fraction of the population is needed to feed all of America and export millions of tons of corn, pork, wheat, and other foodstuffs abroad. In the past fifty years, the United States population has grown by 130 million, but its 331 million citizens can manage to eat only half as much soy as its farmers grow. That is a lot of edamame and soy milk to load onto ships. New forms of farming have emerged in recent years, and aquaculture—the farming of fish and shellfish—now yields more seafood than traditional wild fishing, whether done with hooks or nets. Far from limiting population growth, expanding food supplies permitted more parenthood. Further, they have expanded waist sizes, as the average adult weight has ballooned by more than twenty-five pounds.
Remarkably, though, a higher standard of living in Malthus’s time did not lead to a birth spiral. When looking at population statistics, Malthus did not see that an increase in population might stem from a decrease in the death rate. From 1740 onward, mortality rates declined in Europe as a result of the improved diet made possible by the agricultural revolution and better health and medical treatment. Until the eighteenth century, doctors probably killed more than they cured; an operation on a voodoo doll by a witch doctor was likely to be as effective as surgery by a scalpel-wielding “leech” doctor. In the 1700s, life expectancy at birth was approximately thirty years, rising to forty years in 1850, fifty years in 1900, and nearly eighty years today.13 Because of the agricultural revolution, large fluctuations in harvests diminished, and except for in Ireland in the 1840s, famines disappeared from western Europe. The last famine in Great Britain struck nearly a century before the appearance of An Essay.
But why did population not steadily soar? Economists point to four stages in the “demographic transition.” In preindustrial societies, high death rates balance high birthrates, ensuring steady population. In the second stage, early industrial development, better health lowers death rates, so birthrates appear excessive, and population spurts upward. Since Malthus collected his data in this era, he did not and probably could not have seen what would come next. In the third stage, urbanization and education persuade many to have fewer children. Thus, the death rate continues falling, but so does the birthrate, which flattens the population curve. Finally, in a mature society, with successful birth control and often both spouses working, couples seem to desire between one and three children, and the population stabilizes.
The role of children has changed through history. In peasant societies, more children were needed to work as field hands or to crawl into mines. Our great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents may have had six, seven, or more siblings. In peasant societies, the number of children was a sign of virility. Wealthier couples had more of them. In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (based on the nineteenth-century King Mongkut of Siam), the monarch boasted of 106 children, and Broadway audiences oohed as they scurried to the king’s feet and kowtowed to their father, who somehow seemed not weary. Today royal families may have just a few princes and princesses, though even a small number may be enough to stir trouble for the crown. Among upper- and middle-income families, rather than being a sign of virility, children may be seen more as accessories, like Chanel handbags or a new Tesla plugged into the socket.
I would posit the following rule of thumb: in modern times (following industrialization), if a nation exceeds a 2.5 percent annual average growth in GDP for two consecutive generations (twenty-five-year periods), the fertility rate will drop to just over the replacement level—that is, 2.5 children per female. If GDP continues to grow for a third consecutive generation, the fertility rate will tend to drop below 2.1, and the population will require immigration to maintain a stable size.
Karl Marx once said that whenever the train of history goes around a bend, all the intellectuals fall off. Malthus did not foresee stages three and four. When the figures fell off his plotted chart, Malthus fell off the train.
Can we blame him? After all, he had few hard facts to work with. Indeed, the Panglossian arguments he rebutted were so lofty and fanciful that his efforts appear painstakingly detailed in comparison. If we apply his own criteria, as later stated in his Principles of Political Economy, though, he is guilty: “The principal cause of error, and of differences which prevail at present among the scientific writers on political economy, appears to me to be a precipitate attempt to simplify and generalize . . . [and not to] sufficiently try their theories by a reference to that enlarged and comprehensive experience, which, on so complicated a subject, can alone establish their truth and utility.”14 Given his oversight of an agricultural revolution and too cursory analysis of why population figures rise, he simplified and generalized too much to escape a verdict of guilty.
The most important moral of Malthus’s errors is this: never, ever, extrapolate from past data without bold-faced, underlined, capitalized disclaimers and due modesty. If Aeschylus lived in the modern world, he would write a tragedy about a noble researcher smote by the gods for immodest extrapolation. If Aeschylus wanted modern protagonists, he could look to disciples of Malthus, who, like Cassandra, cried of doom to come (the difference being that Cassandra was right).
In fact, Aeschylus may have had a clue to the demographic transitions to come. My research on ancient Greece and ancient Rome shows that those rich and storied societies began to buck the Malthusian model as they gained wealth.15 The tale of three hundred Spartans fighting off thousands of Persian soldiers under Xerxes the Great in 480 B.C. has been told in books, films, and video games. In Sparta, soldiering began in the crib, in a survival-of-the-fittest manner. A public committee would inspect babies to determine which was hearty enough to deserve nourishment. At age seven, boys would be taken to camps to begin battle training, eating in mess halls and sleeping in barracks. As adults, adorned in red cloaks, protected by bronze shields, and swinging bronze spears, the Spartan phalanxes looked untouchable.
But where did all the mighty Spartans go? DNA tests do not identify for Spartans, and they did not leave much of a written record. We know a bit from Aristotle and a few other scribbler historians. In short, when the Spartans conquered others, for example, Laconia and Messenia, they dragged the vanquished back to Sparta to be slaves, who performed the farmwork for them. Meanwhile, with slaves at their disposal, Spartan women did not have to do housework and instead helped manage the family farms. Spartan law granted women the right to inherit property and to become educated, which was in some ways more progressive than the law in Athens. But with others to do the hard work, the Spartans chose to have fewer babies, which concentrated wealth and land into fewer heirs. Aristotle pointed out that the Spartan population began to shrink after its military victories: “Although the country is capable of supporting fifteen hundred cavalry and thirty thousand heavy-armed troopers, they number not even a thousand.”16 By the early fourth century, Sparta’s population had shrunk by 80 percent, and when the Thebans came marching toward them in 371 B.C., there were too few Spartan warriors to pick up the bronze spears locked in the armory.
Ancient Roman legislators also noticed a drop in Rome’s birthrate following conquests and bumper crops. Pliny the Elder complained that even one child was a heavy burden. The emperor Augustus became so worried that he prodded the Senate to pass laws penalizing the unmarried, the celibate, and the childless. One of the laws put a 50 percent inheritance tax on a man who did not have children (lex Papia Poppaea). It did little good, and so Rome had to enlist German tribesmen to man the army and navy, “barbarians” with little loyalty to the emperor.
Around this time, the geographer Strabo, who straddled Greek and Roman culture, noted that the ancient lands seemed to have more statues than people. The ratio of statues per baby is worth watching today, as the birthrate drops below the replacement rate in much of the industrialized world.
Spurred by concerns about pollution, population, and rising energy prices, some groups in the 1960s and 1970s tried to map the world’s future. Again, sad sooths were said: assuming current trends, resources would dwindle; industry would befoul those natural resources that did not dwindle; output would collapse; and population would streak past food supplies. Who said these sooths? Among others, in 1968 the Disney company released a ten-minute cartoon starring Donald Duck warning families that if they have more than a few children, the mothers will be “tired and cross, . . . the children will be sickly and unhappy,” and the family will not have enough food to feed their ox, leaving the dad to push a plow. Moreover, they won’t be able to afford “modern conveniences,” at which point the film shows a clunky radio.17 One of the most frightening studies was compiled by the Club of Rome, a group of European academics, and presented in a bestselling book, The Limits to Growth.18 Using advanced computer techniques, the Club of Rome extrapolated trends and predicted disaster within one hundred years unless preventatives more severe than Malthus suggested were taken. The preventatives: immediately stop economic growth, stop population expansion, and recycle resources. So shocking were the predictions that the club reevaluated them and shortly afterward issued a much happier study. An economist described the club as “the computer that cried wolf.” Nonetheless, the original report got the publicity. In 1973, Robert S. McNamara, then president of the World Bank, compared the “population explosion” to the threat of nuclear war. In 1974, Robert Heilbroner published An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, in which he displayed absolutely no hope for mankind in the modern world. Projecting industrial trends, he concluded that resources could not keep up with industrial demand. And even if they did, we would all burn up in a hotter atmosphere. Perhaps switching to a more monastic lifestyle would be prudent, he suggested. So far, most people have responded to the suggestion with the malapropic advice of movie mogul Samuel Goldwyn: “Include me out.”
In 1980, in response to an earlier request from President Jimmy Carter, the State Department and the Council on Environmental Quality released The Global 2000 Report to the President. Though much more rosy and reasonable than the Club of Rome study, the report proclaimed: “If present trends continue, the world in 2000 will be more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now. . . . Barring revolutionary advances in technology, life for most people on earth will be more precarious in 2000 than it is now . . . unless the nations of the world act decisively to alter current trends.”19 The Washington Post approved, writing that “the report’s projections clearly erred on the side of optimism.”
Still, most economists remain skeptical of these reports. Those who programmed the models installed the same kind of pessimistic and static assumptions that Malthus used. Some branded the models “PIPO”: pessimism in, pessimism out. One key assumption violated a central tenet of economics—namely, prices signal to economic agents when to conserve or economize. Recall our earlier discussion of Adam Smith and Hayek’s example of tin. If demand for tin grew, the price would rise, people would try to use less tin, and entrepreneurs would be spurred into looking for substitutes for tin or additional supplies of tin. Under the original Club of Rome report, if demand grew, nothing would happen except that the world would run out of tin. Yes, for some products there may be a fixed supply, no substitutes, and a rising demand unresponsive to higher prices. But these are surely exceptions. Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief studied the question for the United Nations in 1977 and reported: “Known world resources of metallic minerals and fossil fuels are generally sufficient to supply world requirements through the remaining decades of this century . . . to support world economic development at relatively high rates. But . . . these resources will most probably become more expensive.”20
In retrospect, even Leontief was too pessimistic. Starting in the 1980s, energy prices began a slow slide that would last through the end of the century (aside from a brief jump in 1990 when Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army invaded Kuwait). By the mid-1990s, oil prices were lower in inflation-adjusted terms than they had been in the early 1960s, long before the OPEC oil embargo of 1973. By 2020, inflation-adjusted oil prices were roughly equivalent to the prices that prevailed in the 1970s. Even the price of gold, which had leapt to $400 an ounce in the 1970s, drifted down to just under $300 in 1998 before climbing again in recent years. In 1980 an optimistic economist named Julian Simon challenged a pessimistic biologist named Paul Ehrlich, who had earned his academic credentials studying butterflies but reached worldwide fame through his books The Population Bomb and The End of Affluence. During the 1970s, Ehrlich had appeared twenty times on NBC’s Tonight Show and had forecast that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade unless the world immediately embraced “zero population growth.” Simon dared Ehrlich to choose any commodities, wagering that the prices would fall over time, not rise (showing that there was no shortage). Ehrlich purchased $1,000 worth of five metals. In 1990, they would check the prices. If they had gone up, Simon would pay Ehrlich the increase. If they had fallen, Ehrlich would pay Simon the difference. Sure enough, Ehrlich had to pay up, for resource prices dropped, even though the world economy and the world’s population expanded. Simon received a check for $576. Why did Simon win? First of all, the “oil scare” model did not imagine that entrepreneurs would pump vast sums of oil from the North Sea or from Mexico. Second, they, like Malthus, missed an agricultural revolution that showed farmers how to grow more with less. In the 1950s, a plant geneticist and pathologist named Norman Borlaug helped launch the Green Revolution by figuring out how to mate a sturdy-stalked dwarf wheat with a heavy-headed strain. His results yielded bumper golden harvests that have fed millions in India, Mexico, and Africa. Third, they underestimated the incentive to invent substitutes for scarce goods. Right now, aluminum, steel, and plastics companies vigorously compete to fight their way into new automobiles. In the 1967 movie The Graduate, a middle-aged character gives the young college grad played by Dustin Hoffman a hot investment tip, “plastic.” It turned out to be a smarter idea than most of those dispensed by “professional” Chicken Littles. The Stone Age didn’t end because we couldn’t find any more rocks. We won’t stop using fossil fuels because we’ve used up the last drop. We will stop because they have become relatively more expensive, either through cheaper alternatives or government regulation.
The doomsday models assume that technology cannot outpace resource demand. While technology may not be the dependable deus ex machina of Greek theater or the cavalry of Hollywood Westerns, we cannot be too disparaging, either. For example, the models condemn automobiles for pollution and portend an end to fossil fuels such as oil. According to the models, automobiles and oil, though crucial to modern society, are destructive. But what did these replace during the twentieth century? The horse for transportation and wood for energy. Near Central Park in New York, only a few dozen horse-drawn carriages operate today. Yet the smell can be pungent. Imagine the stench and disease spread a century ago in cities where horses reigned supreme for transport! Wood may be more renewable than oil, but fossil fuels have proved cheaper. The switch was promoted by prices, not by a foreboding model. The point is that long-term forecasts regarding economic resources and technology require divine gifts, not degrees in economics.
Does this mean that economists must wear silly smiles and let the invisible hand take care of pollution and starvation in less developed nations? No. We will discuss pollution more fully later, but for now, economists must admit that pollution often indicates a gap in the simple Adam Smith model. Think of pollution as a cost of doing business. But how does smoke differ from labor cost or machinery cost or rent? The corporation pays for these other costs. They are “internal” to its operation. But the corporation does not pay for the pollution. It is an “external” effect that society pays for by breathing dirty air. The result? The manufacturer produces more goods than it should, because the cost of producing seems cheaper than it really is. To get the ideal amount of production, the manufacturer should be forced to absorb the usual costs plus the cost of pollution to society. Taxes on pollution are frequently suggested by economists to achieve this.
The Malthusian trap seems more pertinent in less developed nations, where better health services reduce death rates, while birthrates continue at high levels. But despite pessimism, fertility figures in many poor countries have declined in the last twenty years as a result of educational campaigns, subsidized birth control, and the natural “demographic transition” that accompanies economic development. In Brazil, some social scientists credit the middle-class attitudes displayed on television for a stunning drop in the birthrate, which confounded forecasts of the 1970s. On the other hand, the effort to reduce birthrates is controversial in some societies. In China the government’s one-child policy, which reigned from 1979 to 2015, cut the birthrate dramatically, though it also may have contributed to female adoptions abroad, infanticide, and a mismatch in the ratio between young men and young women. Now that the Chinese government has lifted the restrictions, however, the birthrate has not significantly rebounded, suggesting that Chinese couples have voluntarily adopted a puny birthrate of roughly 1.6 children per couple. In other countries, birth control policies defy tradition and religious precepts. Nonetheless, dramatic declines have been registered in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and several Indian states. Between 1960 and 2000, fertility fell in 183 countries surveyed by the World Bank (and rose in only four: Chad, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and East Timor). Malthus’s suggestion that better education would help constrain the birthrate does seem reasonable, as literacy rates have risen dramatically. Has the birth dearth gone too far? We will discuss this in later chapters when we discuss retirement programs and government debts. For now, note that Singapore has seen the birthrate of Chinese ethnics plummet so fast that it worries about underpopulation. After twenty years of the slogan “Two is enough,” Singapore officials declared: “Have three—more if you can afford it!” To boost its birthrate, Russia has promised young couples free motel visits and even the chance to win a new refrigerator.
At the same time, poor countries are boosting their agricultural output. China and India constitute more than 40 percent of the world’s population and most of its poor people. Yet over the last twenty-five years, both these countries have become nearly self-sufficient in agriculture, and India is now an export powerhouse in wheat and rice. To battle terrible starvation and malnutrition, India imported eighteen thousand “miracle seeds” developed by Norman Borlaug in his Green Revolution. The seeds sprouted and grew, and within ten years India began conquering widespread starvation.21 In 1978, China began to restructure the agricultural sector, shifting from centrally controlled production units to decentralized market forces. Finally permitted to float, prices became signals to China’s economic actors, and output leaped forward.
African states have sometimes found success elusive in both slowing population and raising production. Although babies are born at a slower rate than in the 1950s, the overall population growth rate is higher because life expectancy has risen dramatically. Until recently, the ghost of Malthus seemed to frown upon countries such as Ethiopia, where drought and war act as positive checks. Nonetheless, such ravaged countries have the potential to feed their populations. Economists point to two primary problems. First, poor countries cannot afford to save and invest in new technology because incomes are low. And incomes are low because production techniques are inefficient. Thus they are caught in a vicious cycle, which foreign aid attempts to break. Second and much more important, many governments with unstable political roots placate urban consumers by keeping food prices low. But artificially low prices decrease investment by farmers and stunt further output. As a result, consumers happily see low price tags but sadly look up to see empty shelves.
Third World countries often compound the problem by propping up their currencies, which encourages imports and discourages exports. In recent years, many scholars have reexamined the basic question of whether population growth hurts Third World countries and concluded that for some countries, especially those with plenty of arable land, rapid population growth may not be destructive. A denser population may lower the costs of transporting goods to customers and stimulate domestic demand for goods. The World Bank suggests that most developing countries can absorb up to 2 percent growth without a decline in the standard of living.22 While African countries average annual increases of 3 percent, Asian and Latin American countries average about 2 percent. Certainly, there is reason for hope. But hope rests to a large extent on whether governments will enact productive economic policies that encourage trade among adults and education among children.
Since the first edition of this book, in 1989, a number of African nations have actually tossed aside the rigid, wrongheaded policies that condemned their populations to continuous famines. Ethiopia, once the poster country for drought and agricultural desperation, has made a remarkable turnaround in past years, doubling its grain output in the 1990s and more than quadrupling its per capita GDP since 2000. While the Marxist dictator Mengistu had forced farmers into cooperatives, and then paid them low prices, his successors since 1991 have permitted farmers to charge market prices, encouraging them to produce more grain and to take better care of their fields.23 Foreign investment has poured in, and Ethiopia has achieved one of the highest growth rates in the world. Fortunately, Ethiopia is not alone, as Ghana and Uganda have also declared war on starvation, rather than war on farmers. In recent decades, sub-Saharan African citizens have boosted their daily food consumption by one hundred calories, while life expectancy has climbed by about ten years.24 Alas, Zimbabwe, which was led by Robert Mugabe’s autocratic regime for four decades, has not joined in.
When Malthus warned that economic growth in Europe would spur overcrowding, his readers immediately came up with a nifty solution: ship the poor to the sparsely settled and sweeping plains of the New Worlds. Surely, North America and Australia offered an inexhaustible supply of soil for them to toil on. Malthus was skeptical. He figured that as soon as the Europeans boarded the crowded ships, a new generation of poor would simply rush into the towns and hamlets to take their places. Further, he surmised that settlers in North America would end up chopping down trees, poisoning the environment, and plundering native populations. He had previously condemned Spanish pioneers for wiping out many indigenous villages. Malthus was wistful about the idea of people leaving their homelands, stating that emigration “snaps the cords” of nature and that crossing the turbulent sea would be like the “separation of death from all their former connexions.”25 Eventually, over the course of new editions of his masterwork, Malthus softened his stand against emigration and eventually supported government plans to send poor Irish and Scottish peasants to America. He expressed sympathy for Celtic paupers and deemed their living conditions and government policies “degrading.” But Malthus added a proviso to his evolving emigration views: the government should raze the cottages of those who leave so that the newly poor did not refill them. It was better to hand over the land to woolly sheep and meaty cattle.
While in his day Malthus warned that the whole planet would get too crowded, many present-day protesters worry that their specific native countries are overflowing—with too many immigrants. In Italy, Sweden, and Germany, new political parties suggest throwing out the newcomers. In the post–World War II era, Germany opened its doors for 7 million foreigners, many of them Turkish and Arab guest workers. But lately they are viewed less like guests and more like unwanted squatters. Even in Australia, Anglos are protesting the influx of Asians. This in a country once populated by British prisoners!
The European dynamic has become more severe in the past few years, following German chancellor Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open the borders to one million refugees, primarily from Syria. Merkel and her economic advisers defended their decision on two grounds. First, they said that it was Germany’s and Europe’s moral obligation to help war refugees. Second, she and her economic advisers argued that Germany needed more workers because of its shrinking birthrate. But Germany had no organized method to deal with the influx. A government study showed that violent crime jumped by 10 percent within the first year, with 90 percent of the crime committed by young males.26 No doubt, the veritable stampede of refugees helped fuel the Brexit movement in the U.K., as many British voters perceived that their country had surrendered the right to control its own borders and to battle its own crime rate. Separate from the Syrian crisis, Italy has struggled to contain refugee flows from North Africa. Between 2016 and 2018, three hundred thousand arrived on leaky boats primarily through Sicily, severely straining public services and prompting citizen outrage. The harried escape from African ports and the fifteen thousand deaths during the Mediterranean transit (as reported by the United Nations) appeared to be a Malthusian nightmare. But keep in mind, the refugees were not fleeing from famine but from warfare, terrorism, and dismal economic prospects.
In America—a nation of immigrants—we sometimes hear people denounce newcomers, especially during periods of slower economic growth, when the jobless rate rises. Even a lenient abolitionist like Ben Franklin called Protestant German immigrants “Palantine Boors.” Few “nativists” (not to be confused with Native Americans) worry à la Malthus that immigrants will eat all their food. Instead, they claim that immigrants drive down the standard of living by taking jobs from those born in this country while undermining the “cultural integrity” of the United States. Of course, these arguments are not new. Between 1845 and 1855, more than a million Irish crossed the Atlantic, fleeing the blight of festering potatoes. They soon made up more than one-quarter of New York’s population, and they were not always welcomed warmly.27 Irish Americans bitterly tell of their great-grandfathers reading help-wanted ads that included the tag line “No Irish need apply.” As a character in the 1991 film The Commitments announces, “The Irish are the blacks of Europe. So say it loud—I’m black and I’m proud!” Yet through the eyes of today’s Mexican immigrant, Irish Americans look like they sailed over with Miles Standish on the Mayflower. A book called How the Irish Became White shows how the derided Irish claimed their place in America.28 The careers of outstanding, patriotic sons like George M. Cohan undoubtedly helped the immigrant cause. Cohan claimed that he was born on the Fourth of July, and even inserted that claim into his song “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” The grandson of slaves, Louis Armstrong later pulled the same patriotic stunt, though he was off by only one month.
But “this time it’s different,” nativists argue. First of all, immigrants in the past few decades have not assimilated as quickly as the millions who arrived in the great waves of European refugees at the turn of the twentieth century. Why not? Let’s consider three factors: cacophony, communication, and calluses.
The earlier waves fled from a polyglot of European countries and spoke a cacophony of different languages. In 1910 every immigrant language except English was a minority tongue. Germans made up a plurality, at 18 percent, but no group had a big enough “market share” to dominate or create a durable enclave. From 1915 to 1965, Europeans composed about 75 percent of 11 million newcomers. In contrast, nearly half the recent immigrants come from Latin America, mostly from Mexico (only about 15 percent come from Europe). Because there is strength in numbers, many families can live and work speaking in Spanish. Spanish-speaking cable and satellite television has been sweeping Florida, Texas, and California. The Spanish-language network Univision often beats out the English-language networks Fox, NBC, CBS, and ABC in prime-time viewing among eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds. Modern communication technologies help, since newcomers can easily telephone, text, email, or even fly to see their relatives back home. Long-distance telephone rates have plummeted from dollars per minute to a few cents, giving even minimum-wage workers the “luxury” of phoning home. In contrast, in 1912 the Hamburg Shipping Line carried mailbags from Germany, the only way for a fräulein to communicate with her frau back home. The “melting pot” metaphor has been locked in the cupboard, replaced by the “salad bowl,” suggesting that each ethnic group should maintain its identity and resist assimilation. While peer pressure used to prod immigrant children to learn English, even Chinese youths are quick to mock each other as “bananas” (yellow on the outside; white on the inside) if they take up American habits too quickly.
Economists care much more about the third factor. Are immigrants catching up to native incomes, as the Irish, German, Italians, Poles, and Jews eventually did, or are they slipping behind and leaning too much on public assistance programs? While most economists start out very sympathetic to lenient immigration rules, the latest data troubles them. Here’s the problem: the economy has grown so technologically advanced that unskilled laborers have little hope of jumping into the mainstream. In the 1880s, Isaac and Joseph Breakstone could start by selling dairy goods from a corner pushcart and eventually build a successful nationwide brand. But pushcart capitalism does not stand much of a chance today. During the earlier waves, immigrants had calluses on their hands. The country needed calluses in 1900, since 69 percent of the population worked on farms, in forests, in coal mines, or in factories.29 As soon as newcomers disembarked from boats, they learned to put their calluses to work, even if they faced discrimination. My grandfather, Sam Lewis, who arrived from London, told me that when boats from Ireland docked in Manhattan, male steerage passengers were offered a choice: “A hook or a club?”—meaning they could either haul crates as a longshoreman or wield a billy club as a policeman, since Irish bosses dominated both vocations.
In 1900, even a high school degree was rare, with fewer than 14 percent of Americans earning a diploma, and fewer than 3 percent going on to college. Today, can an immigrant who comes from a country that has not yet passed through the Industrial Revolution, much less the semiconductor, cloud, and artificial intelligence revolutions, stand a chance? Sure, numerous skilled Chinese and Indian immigrants have earned fortunes in Silicon Valley designing computer equipment, software, and new media, but these stories are certainly rare among the Mexican-born gardeners of Southern California. Whether explained by discrimination, family traditions, legal structures, or educational backgrounds, the data do reveal ethnic differences in outcomes. Recent migrants from Latin America start off earning about 30 percent less than natives, with halting progress from that point on. Guatemalans who arrived before 1980 were making 28 percent less by the 1990s. Even within Asia, however, there were differences. While the Chinese had on average fully caught up, Laotians stayed 22 percent behind.30 Furthermore, when unskilled immigrants come ashore, they may push down wages for unskilled natives, particularly urban blacks, by 2.5 to 5 percent, according to some researchers.
Of course, the data could change (and a revolution in our school systems would help!). Even so, because the data is aggregated, it tells us little about individual contributions by immigrants. What if Albert Einstein had stayed in Germany and been forced to help the Third Reich? Certainly his genius offset all the German immigrant rabble that angered anglos in the 1930s. Steve Jobs’s biological father fled Syria and managed a modest coffee shop in Sacramento, California. The immigrant’s son reinvented how we share our music and our stories. And in any case, the Statue of Liberty was not placed in New York Harbor as an economic symbol. Despite occasional backlashes, the United States has welcomed the huddled masses, who have longed to breathe free, and have made us richer in the process.
One more reason keeps economists hopeful: when millions of baby boomers retire over the next two decades, the United States will need more workers to support the pensioners. It will be a new opportunity for new members of the workforce. We will see whether they take advantage of it.
Mother Nature is fickle. The seas in which we now sail, swim, and jet-ski once boiled. Dinosaur fossils lie buried near traces of tropical ferns in Montana. In a real Jurassic Park, tropical ferns left coal deposits near the South Pole. Millions of years later, the Vikings hunted in a truly green Greenland, and Englishmen drank English wine amid flourishing vineyards in the Midlands. Later, in the time of the Renaissance, the Little Ice Age took hold. Bitter winters inspired the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder to create his seminal work, Hunters in the Snow, while Dutchmen enjoyed skating on canals, a rare treat today.31 Shortly before the Carter administration released Global Report 2000, which forecast environmental disaster and soaring energy prices, Congress held hearings on the climate. In particular, the 1960s and 1970s had been a chilly decade marked with blizzards, and some scientists warned of a new ice age, since temperatures had peaked in the 1940s. Computer models warned that the earth might have jumped onto a long-term track toward global cooling. After all, the last ice age had temperatures just 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than ours. Small shifts could lead glaciers to spread from the poles, covering New York in hundreds of feet of bluish ice, as it had been millions of years ago.
Almost immediately after these warnings, the weather turned warm again. By 1990 international scientists gathered under the United Nations’ auspices and predicted that the earth was warming dangerously fast and could send the thermometer up perhaps by 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100. Not only would more people sweat, but global warming would incite terrible floods as well as devastating droughts that would threaten food and water supplies. What would cause this calamity? Following the work of a Swedish scientist, Svante Arrhenius, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) theorized that fossil fuels build up carbon dioxide, creating an insulating layer that permits the sun’s hot rays to penetrate but doesn’t let warmth escape. Over a hundred-year period, as the number of automobiles throughout the world multiplies, so will CO2 levels. Already, the shrinking glaciers of northern Europe are revealing bones and fossils that date prior to the last ice age. A hotter climate would lift sea levels, disintegrate glaciers and polar ice sheets, and intensify storms. Many places would turn wetter, inciting tropical diseases such as malaria and devastating world agriculture.32 All in all, a bleak, Malthusian story of population growth destroying the ability of the world to sustain human life.
Could it be true? Perhaps. Skeptics cite a number of arguments against the doomsday scenario. For example, the earth’s temperature has crawled up by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit in the last century, and the data is awfully fuzzy (satellite readings show a smaller rise). Some scientists believe that the sun could have brightened up enough to explain that small rise. They also argue that the formation of clouds is still too tricky a process for computers to model. In addition, some glaciers around the world have actually started spreading rather than shrinking. Finally, skeptics argue that even if the climate perks up by 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (the IPCC’s midrange forecast), many parts of the world would benefit from a longer growing season and less brutal winters. A group of optimistic economists have dubbed their analysis the “Ricardian” approach, named after the hero of our next chapter.33 In the Ricardian analysis, farmers would take advantage of global warming by switching to warmer-weather crops; they would replace wheat fields with cotton, for example. Already, a wine-growing culture has sprung up in the English countryside, where it had died out seven hundred years ago. Of course, countries that are already terribly hot and wet would have few new choices. What’s good for the farmer in Kansas may be terrible for the man who tends the rice paddies in Vietnam when the monsoons hit.
Economists do point out, however, that a wealthier world can better afford to take more action and absorb geological threats. Early-warning systems for hurricanes save thousands of lives. In September 1900 a wicked storm smacked into Galveston, Texas, killing 8,000 unsuspecting souls. It is the most lethal natural disaster in U.S. history. Why were the victims unsuspecting? Because radar, radio, and satellites had not yet been invented. Death rates from droughts and extreme weather events have plunged by about 90 percent in the past one hundred years. Between 1982 and 2002, the United States suffered eighteen major earthquakes, claiming a total of 143 lives. India, with flimsier buildings, cruder sewage systems, and less effective firefighting forces, suffered only fourteen major earthquakes, but those disasters killed 32,117.34 A rising GDP will not tame the force of Indian earthquakes, but it will protect more people from rubble. As the world’s GDP rises, defensive options against climate change become more affordable. Miami Beach has literally lifted up roads and bridges to accommodate periodic flooding. As recently as 1990, one in three humans around the world lived in extreme poverty, according to the World Bank. That number has dropped by two-thirds. It is one of the most extraordinary achievements in human history and gives human beings the wherewithal to fight and endure the impact of climate change.
Many strategies to fight global warming include taxing carbon emissions, such as those outlined by Yale economist William Nordhaus, whose climate change model earned him a Nobel Prize in 2018. The idea of taxing pollution goes back to the English economist Arthur Cecil Pigou, who was born in the middle of the Victorian era and lived to see Queen Elizabeth II crowned in the 1950s. Pigou developed the idea of “externalities,” meaning that a company’s operations might have spillover effects on neighbors. Consider, if you sat next to Winston Churchill while he smoked a cigar, or lived next door to a Snoop Dogg concert venue, you might absorb some fumes. If a hot dog company smokes meat and emits vapors that make you choke, it is imposing a cost on its neighbors. Pigou pointed out that since the hot dog company does not pay the cost of this annoyance, it likely churns out more hot dogs than it would if it had to pay for its pollution. In sum, the world gets too many hot dogs and too much smoky air. Pigou argued that the market would be more efficient if a tax were levied on the factory to more closely align the total benefits and total costs of the factory’s work. Following this model, Harvard economist Greg Mankiw keeps track of leading economists and thinkers who support taxes on externalities, including carbon taxes, and collectively calls them the “Pigou Club.”
Global warming, by itself, does not prove Malthus right. The real test comes if humankind has to respond to a warmer, more threatening climate. Will they keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere until they either asphyxiate or destroy the vegetation? Or will he they find the technological tools to let the species survive? Our great-grandchildren might learn the answer.
Malthus would be surprised to learn that the world is in good enough shape to dispute his thesis more than 150 years after his demise.
Malthus spent the last thirty years of his life in Haileybury and London, hobnobbing with the greats and near greats. In Samuel Johnson’s term, he was “clubbable” and became a member of the King of Clubs (a dining society) and the Political Economy Club. In 1824, The Gentlemen’s Magazine of London reported that the Royal Society of Literature named both Malthus and his foe Coleridge “Royal Associates,” and each received a lifetime stipend for research and, presumably, bickering with each other.35 Malthus continued to publish books and pamphlets, most notably his Principles of Political Economy. More important, in friendly yet forceful tones he debated David Ricardo on trade policy and the question of economic depressions, which we will discuss later.
Even until his death of heart disease in 1834, Malthus felt obliged to deny that he was an enemy of mankind. He left behind a widow and two children, having buried a teenage daughter a decade earlier. Many lecturers and authors still portray him at best as a dour parson and at worst as a goblin well suited for Halloween. Yet his critics, he thought, donned the merry masks that marred their vision—preventing them from seeing that the light at the end of the tunnel was a train coming at them.