Malthusian Catastrophe

World population keeps increasing and has recently reached 7 billion. According to United Nations this occured on 31st October 2011. Population started increasing very rapidly with the onset of The Anthropocene and the invention of the steam engine end of 19th century. Below Figure 1 shows human population growth since 1800s. It is clear that this growth keeps speeding up and is likely to keep increasing. Although this figure also shows some predictions by the United Nations of what will happen to our population in the future. There are currently three different predictions- that population will continue to grow limitlessly in the foreseable future, population growth will slow down and we will experience slow population growth and finally that population growth will slow down and population will actually start decreasing.

Figure 1.

Source: United Nations, 2014. Population growth 1800 onwards. 

The last prediction that population will actually start decreasing is the one we are going to explore further. In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus published the first edition of his “An Essay on the Principle of Population” which became so famous and known that Malthusian theory still exists to this day and hence why I am discussing it. His main argument of the whole book was that whilst population multiplies geometrically, food multiplies arithmetically thus the population will eventually outstrip the food supply and thus we are all doomed. When the population outstrips the food supply, the Malthusian catastrophe occurs. This is shown in Figure 2 below:

Figure 2.

Source. Malthusian Growth Model.

Malthus was actually a Reverend and also an English scholar living just post Enlightment. He specialized in politics, economics and demography. Born in 1766, he lived until the end of 1834. Between 1798 and 1826 he published six editions of “An Essay on the Principle of Population” updating each version with new material particularly answers to criticisms and adding his own opinions. Due to the doomly nature of his essay and the unwillingness of the public to accept this theory- there was a lot of criticism and hatred against Malthus and his work after his first essay. Malthus original essay argued that population cannot grow indefinitely thus sooner or later population will be checked or affected by a negative shock such as famine or disease thus leading to the catastrophe. However in the later editions he added such population control shocks that were economics based rather than miserable disasters. For example he said that population of working people would grow faster than production of food thus real wages would fall as the growing population causes the cost of living (the cost of food) to go up which means it would become difficult to afford to bring up a big family so people would start having less children. This in turn would cause the population to decrease again leading to higher real wages and thus controls the growth of population in this way.

Malthus basis his model on simple economic principle of Supply Demand model shown below in Figure 3 where it is thought that there is a demand curve and a supply curve that meet in the middle known as the equilibrium output which is when neither demand not supply sides are going to shift from this output unless something changes. If the population increases, the supply of goods also increases but Malthus argues that resources are limited so eventually the supply would not be able to keep up with the demand of food.

Figure 3.

Source. Supply-Demand Economics Model.

However there is one big but in Malthus’ growth model even in comparison to the simplest economics of today, his model does not include capital or technological change as late 18^th century economics did not allow for this. This means that the main argument against his model nowadays is that humanity will always come up with more efficient way to provide food and more advanced technologies that require less land to produce enough food to feed more people. Regardless of this, we can still use Malthus’ basic ideas about population growth outstripping the resources available to it.

Furthermore, although Malthus’ model talks about population outstripping food supply, we can also talk about population growth outstripping essential resources supply. Thus The Neo-Malthusian theory that exists today argues that overpopulation of today may increase resource depletion such as oil or cause environmental degradation to a degree that is no longer sustainable, no matter what technologies are invented, to the point of no return, with a potential of ecological collapse or other hazards- this would be our day Malthusian Catastrophe.

Neo-Malthusian economists argue that 2007 financial crisis potentially was a population check as it caused many to stop having children and some to die due to lack of financial support and money thus causing the population to decrease. The Economist also argues that the surge in commodity prices over the past decade is due to mankind’s insatiable demands that have the potential to exhaust the planet’s finite resources such as oil. However the question unanswered is: will human creativity and innovatively lead to the more efficient use of existing raw material and the discovery of new sources of energy supply such as nuclear and renewable etc.

In my opinion with the advanced technologies and so on that exist today, it is unlikely that Malthus’ predictions about humanity running out of food will come true however I do think it is possible that we shall run out of oil and other non-renewable resources that we use to generate energy and thus experience something similar to Malthusian Catastrophe as society today is probably as dependent on energy as it is on food.

Finally to finish off this blog post, I wanted to post a short relevant YouTube video which is about Malthusian catastrophe in relation to oil. The video says that we may all be collectively responsible for what may be the greatest preventable holocaust in history of planet earth- an industrial catastrophe when oil will become so expensive as there will be so little of it left that no one will be able to afford to buy it and everything will shut down (perhaps a little too pessimistic?!). It further mentions the financial crisis of 2007 as an example of a less major global collapse and goes on to discuss the fact that the world economics is a pyramid that is all inter linked and in the heart of it lies oil used in production of all generated energy such as electricity; direct fuels for the 1 billion internal combustion vehicles that we use as well as manufacturing a lot of goods that we can no longer imagine our life without thus if oil pipes were all to become cut off, it is not certain any economy would survive. It concludes rather miserably and pessimistically that we are all running in the same direction hoping someone else knows where we are going which I guess could be related to politicians hoping the scientists will figure something out- an assessable way to renewable or nuclear energy as a substitute for fossil fuels, whilst the scientists are urging the politicians to cut down on energy use all together. Whilst this debate is happening at higher levels, normal people like us are actually not doing anything and if we leave it like this, it might just be too late before we know it…

Reference:

Malthus, T.R. (1789) The Essay on the Principle of Population. Oxford University Press: Oxford.