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. 

A Fourth of July Question: Can America Recapture Its Populist Soul?

Matt Stoller's take on the traditional July 4th US Independence Day oration in the year 2025. My abridged cut and paste follows. Read the whole thing at Stoller's substack Big: 

“Is there not growing up among us a class who have all the power without any of the virtues of an aristocracy? We have simple citizens who control thousands of miles of railroad, millions of acres of land … who choose the governors of sovereign states as they name their clerks … and whose will is as supreme with the legislatures as that of a French king sitting in bed of justice.” - Henry George, 1879

The most famous [July 4th] oration is one we know about today, it’s Frederick Douglass’ speech in 1852, asking “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” 

Douglass didn’t reject America, though his was a biting speech. He lauded the greatness of the American founders for their high ideals and accomplishments, while pointing out they were not extended to the large slave population. “The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me,” he said. “The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

In 1861, Lincoln offered the framework of economic equality in a speech about the Civil War, with a specific focus on the oligarchy of Southerners who thought the hired or enslaved worker was an inherent class, that capital came first, and it put people to work. That was not true, he argued. Capital deserved a fair return, but, he noted, “Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Lincoln’s political economy framework was populist, viewing the basis of American republicanism as the hired laborer turned small proprietor. “The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself,” he said, “then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This is the just and generous and prosperous system which opens the way to all, gives hope to all, and consequent energy and progress and improvement of condition to all.” 

The heir to the abolitionists in the late 19th century was another thinker and political actor - Henry George, who focused, as Douglass did, on land values. In his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, lauded by many former abolitionists and their children, George showed that urban land values drove inequality. Land, which cannot be created or destroyed, increased in worth not based on the effort of the owner, but based on whether there was social activity occurring around it. As such, an owner increased rents based on work he himself did not do, extracting unfairly from both labor and capital.

Georgists were pivotal in the Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson administrations, helping to structure the Federal Reserve and the national park system, as well as influencing a generation of politicians who made the New Deal. Georgeists ultimately won the debate [about political economy], created the New Deal in the 1930s, and the 20th century was a Georgist century.

Unlike the absurd libertarian view that government is an alien force, it’s right there in the Declaration [of Independence] that we establish a government to secure our rights.

In 1970, Milton Friedman, representing a new generation of would-be oligarchs presented a different set of values. He wrote an article in the New York Times preaching the shareholder theory of the firm, or absolute liberty for capitalist. “There is one and only one social responsibility of business,” he wrote, “to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” Friedman’s theory was ahistorical nonsense; Americans have used corporations in all sorts of ways, at its heart a firm is a state-chartered collective endeavor meant to help us mass people and capital to do something socially useful while offering a fair return on investment.

In America today, we have many of the same challenges faced in George’s day. There’s an out-of-control financial sector engaging in speculation over resources that should be managed for the public good, not just land, but things like data, natural resources, knowledge, and even low orbit space and the atmosphere. And there is an undercurrent of unsatisfied rage.  

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Love George. A real populist hero and seminal character in American history, and often mocked by mainstream economics as a one-issue crank and overlooked in the US history textbooks. 

George was calling out speculation and bankers in the Gilded Age; the original one, late 1800s. But if you do reduce him to his signature issue, ending land speculation, socializing private land holdings, and thereby ending private property as we know it, this one idea was comically out of step with the carrot Lincoln was dangling out there in his "free labor"/not slave labor, "free soilers" speech, quoted above. 

It's not just that the worker wants fair or living wages but believes, in Lincoln's classic telling, that they ought to get paid enough that if they work hard and they get the job done they ought to be able to save up a little and eventually own a home of their own or even go into business for themselves or strike out west for a piece of land of their own. Lincoln was translating the frontier spirit in American history into an expression of the American Dream for common labor or the common American worker. It's a crucial populist sentiment and was in the air that I breathed in the working class home I grew up in and I imagine is widespread in working class households, of any color or religious creed, going all the way back to Lincoln, or even Jefferson and Franklin. 

George thought, by contrast, everyone would be better off without private trading and speculation in land, and he might have been right, no question financial speculation has much to do with the crime of poverty, as he liked to call it, but so much for the republican experiment and the ownership society, still a big populist deal even today. People like the idea, the promise, that they can someday own their own little piece of the American dream.

Nonetheless, in actuality, Henry George was hardly a one-issue crank but a kind of dynamo for populist democratic uplift and opportunity. He is credited with almost single handedly instituting the use of secret ballots in elections, developing public utilities, and spreading the use of progressive taxes. He was the godfather of rent controls. He was a champion of the industrious little guy like few others in American history. It was said of his funeral procession in NYC, so grand was it, that in that time it was second only in size to Lincoln's. 

In his famous July 4th oration Douglass explains how the promise of equality is denied many Americans like him and then Lincoln explains how slavery undermines the rights of free labor. Many northerners still racist to the bone in the 1860s supported an end to slavery, or more specifically that it not be extended to new states and threaten the opportunities of "free soilers" spreading into the north and west. In other words, they were ready to fight a war to end slavery so as to protect the rights of free labor over race slavery or slave labor of any kind.

In the late 19th century, George, wrote and organized against the railroads and Robber Barons, urging governments, locally and nationally, to reform some of the worst abuses of private capital in the Gilded Age; abuses that were turning land rents and work into wage slavery. It's no wild claim to suggest George's efforts culminated in a farmer's populist movement and many Progressive Era reforms by the turn of the 20th century that protected workers and extended the rights of labor. 

Nor a stretch to suggest Stoller views America's "populist soul," in the 19th century anyway, as  embodied in the triumvirate of Douglass, Lincoln, and George. And now Stoller sees faint signs of real political rebellion, in the spirit of that triumvirate, brewing again; some populist George in democratic socialist NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Hope he's right.

"the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world," Thomas Hardy

Sue Bridehead in Jude The Obscure (1895):  

Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile. 

"We are rather a sad family, don't you think, Jude?" 

"She [their recently deceased aunt] said we made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we make unhappy ones. At all events, I do, for one!

Sue was silent. "Is it wrong, Jude," she said with a tentative tremor, "for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are unhappy in their marriage? If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent should be known-- which it seems to be-- why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops, that it grieves him or her?"

"I have said so, anyhow, to you."

The character of Sue Bridehead, her strength, her flashing brilliance, what Jude loves above all else, is the revelation here. Tess had her own mind but not like this. Otherwise, forgot how much I liked Hardy's doomed romanticism. His rural Wessex is indelible; my most lasting impression of the British Shire prior to the Lord of the Rings movies (yes I know they were really shot in New Zealand). Rolling hills with big territorial viewpoints, lush, green, a patchwork of woods and open fields and stone enclosures, a church steeple in the distance. Lots of walking, you can smell the wet grass and small peasant homesteads. Class divisions insult and demean in the towns but they are where all the work was. Hardy's characters, men, women, stoic, mysterious, or impulsive, all from the countryside, struggle with the ferocity of their emotions. There are two climactic romantic scenes that are as vivid and thrilling as your first or last kiss with someone you can't forget. Marriage, religion, and social conventions make people miserable in the Victorian 19th century. A longing and suffering for a love, something, unbounded by these conventions and strictures, and which always remains fleeting and beyond the grasp, if it does not lead in fact to self-destruction, suffuses all Hardy's novels, or the ones I've gotten to so far. Jude the Obscure is no exception and might be a peak. It was his last novel and he was hounded for it when it came out. For its disparaging depiction of marriage conventions and pompous religious piety. He vowed to never write another novel and only wrote poetry thereafter. 

The Revenge of Jim Jones

"Jim Jones," traditional song, 19th century; Jim Jones, found guilty by a jury in England, sent to Australia to toil in a penal colony at Botany Bay, vows revenge against the "tyrants" and "floggers" that put him in "chains." 

Now it's day and night and the irons clang
And like poor galley slaves
We toil and toil, and when we die
Must fill dishonored graves
And it's by and by I'll slip my chains
Well, into the bush I'll go
And I'll join the bravest rankers there
Jack Donohue and co
And some dark night, when everything
Is silent in the town
I'll shoot those tyrants one and all
I'll gun the floggers down
Oh, I'll give the land a little shock
Remember what I say
And they'll yet regret they've sent Jim Jones
In chains to Botany Bay

Bob Dylan "Jim Jones" (appears on Good as I Been to You, 1992)