The Malthusian Muddle

In these times of climate change, the world needs fresh ideas to get out of the logjam over whether population is a curse or a resource

- Rakesh Kalshian

IN 1968, a young American butterfly expert named Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb in which he made the controversial claim that “the battle to feed humanity is over”, and that hundreds of millions will “starve to death” in the following two decades. He also prophesied that should we fail to contain the population juggernaut, not to mention our obsession with economic growth, Earth itself would go into terminal decline.

His “bomb”, however, turned out to be a damp squib, as he underestimated the power of human ingenuity (read modern science)—the Green Revolution managed to produce enough food to save the surging millions from the jaws of the proverbial wolf.

It is 50 years since the book came out, but despite being proven wrong, the septuagenarian, who was once slurred as “worse than Hitler” for advocating forced sterilisation, is crying wolf again. He recently told The Guardian “the collapse of civilisation is a near certainty within decades…as long as perpetual growth of the human enterprise remains the goal of economic and political systems.”

Ehrlich is the poster boy for the neo-Malthusians who have revived the debate about the catastrophic consequences of run away population growth first articulaed by an English Reverand T R Malthus in his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus, appealing to the powerful metaphor of an inexorable machine, essentially argued that the progress of population tends to be geometric (that is, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64…), while available food, even if we account for the extra impetus of more farms hands, increases at most by arithmetic amounts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8…). Anyone, even those unschooled in basic arithmetic, can figure out the eventual, albeit fallacious, outcome of this discrepancy.