The ghost of Malthus will continue to haunt us, despite the constant invalidations of his premises. The world can sustain more people, with longer lifespans and higher standards of living.
Looking back, though, it's kind of surprising how many times we seem to have narrowly dodged the Malthusian bullet. Famine was coming... and then the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process was invented. Famine was coming... and then new crops like dwarf wheat came along just in the nick of time. Most recently, we're seeing a remarkable leveling off of the world population, without needing any sort of coercive population controls.
Sometimes, the world really does work out surprisingly well. (This makes sense, of course. If the world was always worse than we expected, without any surprisingly good luck, we would just become more pessimistic until the world started pleasantly surprising us again. Still, hooray.)
Yup, quite remarkable. Remarkable that people are willing to dedicate vast amounts of efforts and resources toward projects which are hugely beneficial.
As ever, I will point out that Malthus was right. It's a deductive argument - unless people exercise restraint, horrible things will happen. We call this restraint the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition .
The transition is a weird phenomenon historically, and in the very long run, like Einstein's cosmological constant, Malthus's mistake (in being pessimistic that people will exercise restraint) may yet be vindicated.
It's not about restraint, Malthus believed people were beyond stupid, that they'd continue to make children in the face of a dwindling food supply. It makes sense to have a lot of children in a scenario where most of them will die of disease before adulthood, or if not, soon afterwards. But in a hunger scenario, having one extra child may mean they all starve, so it's not a good idea.
In a subsistence world, each child will become economically valuable within 12-14 years and soon after that they can support their parents. In this world, children are capital investments. (Since money-capital can't form due to theft or war, people-capital is the only thing that gets created).
We are seeing that as people pull themselves out of poverty (as they are allowed to accumulate capital), they have fewer children.
In fact, it's not certain that we have ever seen a true Malthusian collapse in our human history. Starvation, when it happens, usually has a political cause behind it.
> It's not about restraint, Malthus believed people were beyond stupid, that they'd continue to make children in the face of a dwindling food supply. It makes sense to have a lot of children in a scenario where most of them will die of disease before adulthood, or if not, soon afterwards. But in a hunger scenario, having one extra child may mean they all starve, so it's not a good idea.
Aw, good grief. Have you even read Malthus? His point is simple, that the food supply can increase substantially (in classical economics, through capital investments like clearing land for farming or constructing/repairing boats for fishing) while the population multiplies, and that people will continue to reproduce so long as their kids will at least enjoy the minimal standard of living.
Hunger scenario? Dwindling food supply? Kids as capital investments? Whatever.
