On Limits: How Wrong Was Malthus?

"Democracy is at odds with capitalism, because capitalism's imperative to expand cannot be questioned. Capitalism's "pseudo-mastery" of nature can never be fulfilled, [Cornelius] Castoriadis* argues, pointing to the unintended consequences of technology. We thought we were mastering nature with fossil fuels, but climate change is the reckoning. This mastery is also "pseudo-rational" because its source is not rational. It stems from a theological duty to subdue nature, which evokes what we saw with Malthus." -Giorgos Kallis, Limits: Why Malthus was wrong and environmentalists should care (2019).

Thomas Malthus, English economist, hugely influential on the study of demography or population growth and so the development of the environmental sciences, emerges increasingly as a supervillain in the origins of modern free market economic fundamentalism. Or the myth of the free market: a religious faith in market growth, wealth accumulation, unimpeded by government regulations and taxes. 

Malthus thought that there will never be enough because of the limitless drive of humans to procreate, mostly because he was a 40-year old virgin himself. But, regardless, his thinly veiled contempt for the procreative vitality of the impoverished masses was immediately a very popular idea with the educated landholding elites in England in the dawn light of the Industrial Revolution's "Satanic Mills." 

Population growth will always push up against the limits of food production, Malthus contended. And so conditions of natural scarcity should rule economic production. 

The terrible implications for the welfare of communities in his teachings are hard to overstate. To Malthus "poor laws," British state welfare programs (mostly ran through churches), tax the productive to subsidize the unproductive. He articulated a creed of Social Darwinism before Darwin, arguing strenuously against English welfare programs as destructive to the natural order. He was a prophet of libertarianism, as a rationale for Christian nationalism and white supremacy and class privilege, and his ideas about scarcity were absolutely elemental to free market, Laissez-faire, neoliberal economic theory.   

Malthusian limits, or conditions of scarcity, are today a foundational principle of modern economics and environmental science. Industry produces goods and services with scarce resources, to maximize profits and minimize the costs of production. In environmental science when population growth exceeds the carrying capacity of a living environment, it generates the degrading conditions of overshoot and overpopulation. 

Malthus was one of the first scholars to raise the question of environmental limits, which it has turned out is a subject we now know should not be ignored, but was wrong in several important ways. 

Foremost, Malthus' conception of food production was too reliant on wheat or staple grain crops. He fails to anticipate the agricultural revolution that grew out of the industrial revolution he saw in its startup infancy: synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, new farm machinery, and bigger irrigation systems would change the game. He also couldn't imagine dietary variety beyond the grain based gruel 95% of the poor peasant populations of England and Europe had lived off for the previous millennia. 

But, let's remember, the industrial and technological development of the 19th century caught many off guard. In world history terms, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, compresses into a hundred or two hundred years, depending on how deep into it you want to go, radical changes in living the original Agricultural Revolution that began maybe twelve thousand years ago took thousands of years, millennia, to spread around the world. 

So the exponential population growth Malthus observed in the early 19th century was not perpetual but more a feature of the explosive industrial revolution going on in England at that time. As modernizing developments spread around the world after Malthus, women eventually gain individual rights, education, and access to safe forms of birth control and they on average don't start having children until they're a little older and rarely choose to have more than two children. This is known as the demographic transition model, and explains why population growth began to level off in developed countries by the last quarter of the 20th century. 

So Malthus wasn't a prophet but he was absolutely one of the chief architects of scarcity economics. Behind his number crunching graphs was his contemptuous class sympathies: the notion that productive capitalists, landholders, and English nobility, via "free markets" controlled by industrial and financial giants, should absolutely define the limits of the unproductive peasantry and non-Christian foreigners, who Malthus regards with uncomprehending disgust.  

My takeaway from this book by Kallis, who turns out is one of the founding "degrowth" people. I only stumbled onto the book in my Mr. Magoo investigation into books about Malthus. Anyway, Giorgos Kallis credits Malthus for being one of the first to study environmental limits but recognizes all the stupid classist bigotry in his arguments. But he also wants us to look at more than environmental "limits" and create visions of "abundant" environments. Ai yi yi, now I'm finding Abundance content everywhere! 

Kallis relies historically a lot on the gist of Marshall Sahlin's "The Original Affluent Society" (1974). In many primitive societies nature is viewed as abundant, not scarce; Sahlin estimates many groups lived happily working only 10-15 hours a week. These cultures are organized to achieve shared abundance; they adapt to their environmental limit conditions to generate shared abundance or enough for everybody. By contrast, in Malthusian terms, in capitalist societies capital attempts to monopolize scarce resources and profit growth (or abundance), sequestering itself safely away from the grubby rabble and nuisance laws, and imposing conditions of austerity limits on the rest of the economy. 

Anyway, Kallis is interesting. Out of grad school with degrees in Chemistry, and Environmental Engineering and an added Master's in Economics, he's an outsider with the mainstream macro financial economics academic crowd. He was first into the Coevolution thing, which I know very little about. I know Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), usually dismissed as anarchist rantings, is really about how coevolutionary patterns of mutual aid in animal species are more common and very likely more important than the conflict and violence that "survival of the fittest" free market Social Darwinists profess. And there is more recent environmental science about coevolution in forests, essential cooperation between trees and plants, that I picked up in Richard Power's novel The Overstory (2018). 

So I'm sympathetic to economic perspectives that emphasize cooperation over competition but what is this Degrowth economics, anyway? Kallis defines it as a process of change that reduces energy and resource consumption while improving the quality of life. I'm certainly open to critiques of economic growth statistics and the poverty they ignore or even stigmatize as criminal. But from what I got out of Wikipedia this sounds a little more like another small is beautiful fad as partisan politics. The real trick in bending the economy towards sustainability will be reducing the production and consumption of carbon energy while at the same time increasing job and living wage growth. Kallis, reportedly, supports Green New Deal legislation but insists it can't be successful without denouncing the tyranny of growth economics and embracing Degrowth, whatever that would exactly mean. It sounds like more "agony of the left" factional fighting over winning political sloganeering. Wears me out fast. 

Still, some Vaclav Smil book I read awhile back raised this interesting question (but didn't really answer it): Is Japan a positive model of a really existing Degrowth economy? I'd still like to know more about that. 

*Cornelius Castoriades, Greek-French philosopher I've never read. Wrote a book provocatively titled The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987), which makes me think of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983). In that book imagined communities are nationalism or the development of national feelings about geographic locations. What are the origins and what makes the nation operational and effective as a form of political organization? Maybe significant that Castoriadis uses the singular "institution," and might be curious how his "imagined society" compares with Anderson's plural "imagined communities." Anyway, Castoriades appears to be one of Kallis's key go-to intellectual guides.