Too Many People?

If we believe the author, slowing population growth and cutting consumption are like the miracle elixirs peddled at old-time medicine shows—they will cure everything that ails us. She writes: “Success in these twin endeavors will crack our most pressing global issues: climate change, food scarcity, water supplies, immigration, health care, biodiversity loss, even war.”²

Such arguments have long been the standard fare of reactionaries, who use “overpopulation” as justification for cutting off aid to poor countries, eliminating welfare, and blocking immigration from the third world to wealthy countries.

But we should not assume that everyone who holds such views is a reactionary. Overpopulation is also a staple of liberal thinking about the environment. For example, the Sierra Club, the largest environmental organization in the United States, is sponsoring a program called “Population Justice” that promotes birth control in the third world as a way to fight climate change.

And beyond the organized groups, populationist views are very common among well-meaning, honest people who really want to stop climate change and save the planet. So socialists need to have answers to their questions and concerns.

Let’s take a look at the man who is usually credited with founding populationist theory two hundred years ago, to see where these ideas came from and what social purpose they served. As you’ll see, his views are often misrepresented.

The Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus was not the first person to attribute poverty to population growth, but he was definitely the most effective. His two Essays on the Principle of Population, published in 1798 and 1803, were among the most influential political statements of the 1800s.

But despite his long-continuing influence, Malthus’s views are today quite consistently misrepresented. If he is mentioned in an article or book, nine times out of ten the author will say that Malthus predicted that one day the human population would outgrow the world’s ability to sustain us. His timing was off, but he warned that if population growth isn’t stopped, there will eventually be too many people and everyone will starve. These comments on Malthus are typical:

• Lester Brown, Worldwatch Institute: “Malthus foresaw massive food shortages and famine as an inevitable consequence of population growth. Critics of Malthus point out that his pessimistic scenario never unfolded. His supporters believe he was simply ahead of his time.”³

• Andrew Ferguson, Optimum Population Trust: “There was an inescapable truth in the logic of what Malthus said, namely that unchecked population growth would outstrip increase in food supply. How world population would change without severe restrictions on growth was clear to Malthus, and became empirically demonstrated around 1950.”⁴

• Jill Curnow, Sustainable Population Australia: “Malthus has always been right. All species, including humans, tend to out-breed their means of subsistence . . . In the long term the planet can support only few humans at a high standard of living.”⁵

That’s the common view of Malthus—and it is wrong. Malthus did not predict what’s been called the population explosion, and he didn’t believe that it was desirable or even possible to slow population growth.

In fact, he explicitly said the idea that population growth would run up against an absolute limit on our ability to produce more was a “total misconception.” In the second edition of his Essay, he wrote:

Poverty, and not absolute famine, is the specific effect of the principle of population . . . even if we were arrived at the absolute limit to all further increase of produce, a point which we shall certainly never reach.⁶ (emphasis added)

Elsewhere he wrote:

The power of the earth to produce subsistence is certainly not unlimited, but it is strictly speaking indefinite; that is, its limits are not defined, and the time will probably never arrive when we shall be able to say, that no farther labour or ingenuity of man could make further additions to it.⁷

In short, Malthus believed it would always be possible to increase production, and he didn’t believe population growth would lead to “absolute famine”—that is, to what some modern populationists call a die-off, a radical reduction in the human population.

Malthus’s theory, which he called the “Principle of Population,” can be summarized in three sentences.

So Malthus did not say that someday the world will be overpopulated. He said population is always at the limit or rising to a new limit. As Frederick Engels pointed out, taken logically his theory implied that the world was already overpopulated when there was only one human being on earth.

Contrary to the attempts of modern writers to claim him as some kind of pioneer ecologist, Malthus had no interest in protecting the environment from human overpopulation or protecting people from starvation. His goal was very different: to prove that most people will always be poor and that no social or political change could ever alter that. Nearly two hundred years before Margaret Thatcher declared that there is no alternative to capitalism, Malthus won the British ruling class to that very idea.

In 1798, the year in which Malthus’s first Essay on the Principle of Population was published, the self-confidence of the English ruling class was at a low ebb. Just fifteen years earlier, Britain’s rulers had been profoundly shaken by the loss of the thirteen colonies in the American Revolution, a defeat that left them with a much-reduced empire and a public debt so large that many, including the economist Adam Smith, believed England was on the verge of bankruptcy.

In 1793, England and other countries had launched a war against France, aiming to overthrow the revolutionary government and restore the monarchy, but the war went badly. By 1798, Britain’s allies had abandoned the fight, and the French army had captured Egypt, a move the English feared was a prelude to an assault on British-controlled India. The war, which was supposed to produce quick victory for England and its allies, lasted more than two decades.

Even more shocking to the British government in the 1790s, many people at home opposed the war—and many were inspired by the French Revolution to demand similar changes in Britain. The reform movement began with middle-class petitions for moderate reforms but quickly led to unprecedented mass working-class political activity and demands for comprehensive democratic change as a step toward radical social reforms. Millions of people in England and elsewhere believed that political change would transform their lives, ending poverty and inequality forever.

Malthus’s goal was to refute that dangerous idea. The full title of his book shows his purpose clearly: An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers.

As that title shows, Malthus’s essay was not fundamentally a scientific study of population: it was a political polemic against social improvement, and in particular against William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet, both authors of popular books that said society could improve, that everyone could live in comfort, that an egalitarian society was possible.

In later editions of his book, Malthus replaced the criticisms of Condorcet and Godwin with attacks on the radical democrat Tom Paine and on the utopian socialist Robert Owen.

As we’ve seen, Malthus didn’t predict an “overpopulation crisis.” What’s more, he didn’t think there was any way to prevent the constant pressure of population on subsistence. He had two reasons.

First, he argued that the “passion between the sexes” is so strong that people are unable to resist it, so they will always have as many babies as possible.

Second, he believed that birth control, including all forms of nonreproductive sex, was so sinful that it was worse than having too many children. Malthus was so horrified by nonreproductive sex that he couldn’t bring himself to discuss it directly, referring only to “improper arts” and to “vicious customs with respect to women.”

In the second edition of his Essay, published in 1803, Malthus said that people could avoid having large families by “moral restraint,” by which he meant not marrying until they had sufficient wealth to support children and remaining celibate until that time. He believed, however, that most of the poor didn’t have the self-control required. As he had written in the First Essay, that was why they were poor:

The laboring poor . . . seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention, and they seldom think of the future. Even when they have an opportunity of saving, they seldom exercise it, but all that is beyond their present necessities goes, generally speaking, to the ale house.⁸

Malthus’s success as a polemicist came not from facts or logic—there was little of either to be found in his Essay—but in the political conclusions he drew from his “principle of population.”

If Malthus was right, then all attempts to build a better society are doomed. Prior to Malthus, Edmund Burke had issued a sweeping denunciation of all proposals to improve society, but Burke’s attack was crudely reactionary: the old ways were better, all change is bad.

Burke said equality was a bad idea. Malthus said it would be wonderful, but it is impossible; the population principle won’t allow it. “From the inevitable laws of our nature,” he wrote, “some human beings must suffer from want.”⁹

What Malthus did—and this was really his most important contribution to capitalist ideology—was to replace a moral argument against social change with a natural law argument, that human problems are caused by biology, by the laws of nature. He wrote:

In every society that has advanced beyond the savage state, a class of proprietors and a class of laborers must necessarily exist.¹⁰

And later:

No improved form of government, no plans of emigration, no benevolent institutions, and no degree or direction of national industry, can prevent the continued action of a great check to population in some form or other; it follows that we must submit to it as an inevitable law of nature.¹¹

Malthus didn’t just say that society couldn’t get better, he argued that trying to ease the suffering of the poor actually made things worse. The Poor Laws, which since 1500 had required communities to provide food and other help to the destitute, just enabled the poor to have more babies and so increased poverty. The parts of his essay arguing for abolition of the Poor Laws have a very modern feel: they are virtually identical to the arguments we hear today against welfare.

This illustrates the central danger of all populationist theories. They are not and have never been politically neutral. No policy based on such views has ever involved reducing the number of rich people. Again and again, for over two centuries, the “too many people” argument has meant “too many poor people”—and most often it has meant “too many poor nonwhite people.”

As the noted Marxist geographer David Harvey writes: “Whenever a theory of overpopulation seizes hold in a society dominated by an elite, then the non-elite invariably experience some form of political, economic, and social repression.”¹²

Malthus, as we have seen, was opposed to the use of “improper arts,” by which he meant birth control. In addition to his moral objection, he argued that if the poor could avoid having babies by artificial means, they would not have the stimulus of poverty to make them work hard, and that of course would harm the rich.

Modern populationist thought, by contrast, argues that the world would be a better place if smart rich people could convince the ignorant poor to stop overbreeding by using birth control.

That shift was initiated in the 1820s by Francis Place, who really deserves to be considered the father of modern populationism. Place had been a radical working-class organizer, but at some point he concluded that organizing unions would always fail so long as the number of workers exceeded the number of jobs available. Anyone who truly wants to raise living standards, he concluded, should educate the poor in the importance of restricting their numbers by using birth control.

This view, often called neo-Malthusianism, was widely considered outrageous and immoral when Place proposed it, but it gained adherents, and today it is universally accepted by populationists.

However, both classical Malthusianism and neo-Malthusianism went into decline by the early twentieth century, for two closely related reasons.

First, working people in many countries were able, through organization and struggle, to win real long-term gains in their standard of living. They provided a practical refutation of Malthus’s assertion that the “principle of population” made subsistence-level poverty inevitable.

Second, the birth rate in some European countries started to fall. In France, for example, the birth rate in 1913 was half of what it was in 1800. The causes of the change are complex and not well understood, but it is clear that women were finding ways to control their own fecundity, as part of their broader struggle against economic and social oppression. In so doing, they proved conclusively that biology is not destiny.

The decline in birth rates that began in Europe in the 1800s was interrupted by the postwar “baby boom,” but what is now called the “demographic transition” resumed in the 1970s, and it has spread to most of the world. The rate of population increase peaked in the late 1960s. Today the world’s total population continues to grow, but at a substantially reduced rate. Most demographers believe the total world population will peak in this century.

For our purposes, there are two key points to note.

The first point is that the demographic transition directly contradicts Malthus. He said the birth rate would go up if the poor had enough to eat—in fact it has fallen fastest and farthest in rich countries.

The second point is that the demographic transition undermines a common assumption made by populationists—that high birth rates are the result of ignorant poor people not knowing about birth control. Birth rates started falling dramatically in Europe before modern birth control devices were available, even in countries where any form of birth control was illegal.

Obviously, as socialists and humanists, we are in favor of making all forms of birth control and maternal health services available to women everywhere. But we also need to beware of the racism, conscious and unconscious, that is embedded in the assumption that poor women in the third world have large families because they don’t know any better.

Peasants in Africa today are not more ignorant of their bodies than the peasants of France and Italy before World War II. They continue to have large families because children are essential to personal and social survival. Subsistence farming requires many workers, and the absence of anything resembling a social safety net means that aging parents need the economic and social support of their children. Birth rates in those countries will undoubtedly stabilize when working people win secure and adequate living standards.

In short, high birth rates aren’t the cause of third world poverty—they are an effect of poverty, and building birth control clinics, however important that is for other reasons, won’t eliminate the underlying causes.

For anyone who really wants to understand the causes of environmental destruction, Marxism offers vastly more insight than populationism.

Today, Marxism is fighting an uphill battle. But in this battle for the minds of green activists, we have one great weapon on our side: an explanation that actually explains. As John Bellamy Foster wrote:

Where threats to the integrity of the biosphere as we know it are concerned, it is well to remember that it is not the areas of the world that have the highest rate of population growth but the areas of the world that have the highest accumulation of capital, and where economic and ecological waste has become a way of life, that constitute the greatest danger.¹³