Malthus Was Not a Malthusian.

• Author: Hammond, J. Daniel
• Position: Thomas Robert Malthus' "Essay on Population" - Critical essay

Why would anyone today recommend reading Thomas Robert Malthus's two-centuries-old Essay on Population (1798)? My gosh, we're in the twenty-first century. The population crisis that Malthus predicted did not happen, thanks to human ingenuity providing scientific, technological, and moral progress. Malthus famously claimed that human population grows geometrically and food production grows arithmetically. Therefore, at some point population overtakes food production.

The Malthusian warning was and still is for disciples such as Paul Ehrlich that unless we take steps to control population, we will find ourselves in a crisis with mass starvation. But history reveals that Malthus and his followers were wrong. Malthus had a nice little model for the preindustrial and pre-electronic world in which he lived, but we have abundant food and, thanks to readily available artificial birth control, below-replacement fertility rates. Even in the poorest areas of the globe, rates of undernourishment and deaths from famine are historically low. Caloric intake, not population, is growing exponentially around the world. The United States is in a crisis of obesity', not hunger! Only someone whose view is blinkered by ideology could remain a Malthusian today.

Despite the fact that technological progress has provided abundant, low-cost food, declines in undernourishment and growth of overnourishment, as well as below-replacement fertility, all of which undercut Malthusian gloom, I argue that Malthus's Essay on Population is essential reading for 2020. Why? The short answer is that Malthus was not a Malthusian. He did not predict a population crisis unless population control was put into place. He did not even advocate artificial birth control. His Essay on Population has been badly misinterpreted by disciples and critics alike. (1) Read in the appropriate context, it is as important today at it was at the turn of the nineteenth century. Perhaps it is even more important. Malthus was prophetic in warning of dangers ahead. But the dangers were not of population overrunning capacity to produce food and other essentials. He warned against destruction of social institutions to make way for utopian schemes inspired by the ideas behind the French Revolution.

We must begin with what Malthus wrote in the Essay and why he wrote it. The what and why cannot be separated, for why he wrote is essential for knowledge of what he wrote. This is the problem of reading in the writer's context. Having the text and context in view, we will be able to see that the message in the Essay is as important today as it was at the turn of the nineteenth century. Malthus may best be labeled a conservative who warned of the dangers of antinomian social theories associated wit h the French Revolution. He is better paired with Edmund Burke than with Paul Ehrlich, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or the Soros-funded Open Society Institute.

Malthus (1766-1834) actually tells us in his title why he wrote the essay. The full title is 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. The question that prompted the Essay was prospects for future improvement in society, not prospects for a population crisis. He wrote in reply to recent publications by his fellow Englishman William Godwin (1756-1836) and Frenchman Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-94). The origin of the Essay was a conversation with his father, Daniel Malthus, on "the general question of the future improvement of society" after reading Godwin's essay "Of Avarice and Profusion" (1797). Malthus responded in detail not to this short commentary on avarice and profusion but to Godwin's longer work, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793). He devoted six of nineteen chapters in the Essay to Godwin and one to Condorcet's Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795). The key questions for Godwin and Condorcet, and thus for Malthus, were whether man and society are perfectible and whether social institutions are the sources of defects in man and society. Having adopted the antinomian egalitarian spirit of the French Revolution, Godwin and Condorcet answered "yes" to both questions. Humans and society are perfectible. That they are not yet perfect is because of inequalities created and sustained by social institutions.

Malthus referred to the French Revolution as a "blazing comet" that "seems destined either to inspire with fresh life and vigour, or to scorch up and destroy the shrinking inhabitants of the earth" (1798, 7). Addressing Godwin, he compared the revolution to a botanist who attempts to perfect a plant without regard for its organic unity in design:

By endeavouring to improve one quality, he may impair the beauty of another. The richer mould which he would employ to increase the size of...