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Some of the most spectacularly wrong predictions in history have been made by those who claim that overpopulation is going to swamp the planet. Thomas Malthus,

• toomuchtodo 9y ago
  I think the problem is, no one predicted that educated women, the accessibility of family planning aids, and economies developing [1] would be so effective at reducing fertility rates (with that said, it would've been convenient if this occurred earlier in the 20th century; we're going to hit 11 billion people before the population decline is in full swing, and that's going to challenge the carrying capacity of the planet). Were these unintended consequences? In most countries, yes. Humanity keeps turning up lucky in this regard (the above mentioned outcome, solar and wind becoming cheap enough we might be able to go carbon neutral for energy consumption, etc). [1] PDF: http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/ecoch10.pdf http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/book_files/ecoch1...
  • danbruc 9y ago
    I admittedly did not read »An Essay on the Principle of Population« in its entirety, but that may actually be the point where he was the most wrong. He could not imagine the fertility rate to fall as much as it eventually did and therefore did not really expect that disaster could be avoided. But I still think it is rather misleading to turn this lack of imagination on his side for the evolution of this - of course extremely important - one factor into calling his work wrong and disproven.
    • toomuchtodo 9y ago
      I don't believe his work was wrong. He made the best prediction possible with the data available at the time.
      • danbruc 9y ago
        I did not want to imply that you called him wrong, this was still aimed at the often repeated narrative that history has proven him wrong.
      • skgoa 9y ago
        But his conclusions turn out to be flat-out wrong.
        • toomuchtodo 9y ago
          Forecasting is not always accurate.
  • fjsolwmv 9y ago
    Economies can also undevelop, leading to inceased fertility rates.
    • rsynnott 9y ago
      There’s less evidence for this; once fertility rates drop, they mostly seem to stay dropped. A notable example is the former Soviet Union.
• jccooper 9y ago
  Because he believed that population would be limited only by resources, and that fertility rate was nearly invariant. These have both proved to be wrong. The popular imagination of the Mathusian prediction of inevitable mass starvation (which is not really that mis-characterized) was also wrong. So classifying him as wrong seems fair.
  • danbruc 9y ago
    Well, he got wrong how the fertility rate would evolve, but that does not invalidate the model he developed. And he would probably have been pretty spot on with his predictions if the fertility rate had not drastically decreased.
    • igravious 9y ago
      > And he would probably have been pretty spot on with his predictions if the fertility rate had not drastically decreased. If I went around saying, "well, I would have been right if that one part of my theory hadn't become invalidated by events on the ground" people would think me impossible to reason with.
      • jobigoud 9y ago
        Not if your theory became a meme that influenced people's behavior. Consider if we were to somehow diffuse the climate change bomb thanks to policies put in place based on current models. Our collective behavior would influence the outcome, but it doesn't invalidate the predictions.
      • rsynnott 9y ago
        In fairness, it would have been very hard for him to predict the decrease in fertility; it relies on both technological (birth control) and social (womens’ rights, pensions systems, and various others) innovations that would not have been reasonably predictable at the time.
  • ScottBurson 9y ago
    And yet, the specter of a possible Malthusian catastrophe may have helped motivate us to prevent it. I don't really call that being wrong.
• rojobuffalo 9y ago
  ~9 generations hence it's hardly safe to say those predictions are bunk. We may have found some short-term patches, but conventional food production today is deleterious to soil stocks. We're hardly secure from the possibility of famine this century.
• EtDybNuvCu 9y ago
  People are uncomfortable with Malthusian conclusions when applying his model to other systems. Malthus highlighted a tension between the relative sizes of populations in certain resource-allocation games wherein a population both wants more members but also wants more resources per member.
• hprotagonist 9y ago
  Nature abhors a true exponential nearly as much as it abhors a vacuum. All the world's a sigmoid.
• rz2k 9y ago
  I think he was simply bad at functional analysis compared to current understandings. The output of growth functions with multiple inputs tends to look like a logistic function when inputs change and the output shifts to a new equilibrium. The front part of a logistic function looks like an exponential function. World population is probably ten times what it was at the time his growth model was proposed 220 years ago. That is so far below the rate that humans could multiply their numbers, that it doesn't make any sense that people have argued that we were saved by technological advances. Technology seems to change carrying capacity, then human population approaches that carrying capacity rather than catastrophically hitting a barrier and suffering famines.
• cryptonector 9y ago
  Because he was wrong. It's true that if human population on Earth grew to the point where there was no room for one more human on Earth, then we'd have huge problems. But this is a) very bloody obvious, b) exceedingly simplified, and c) misses the whole point of what actually happened and what others predicted would happen: that population would stabilize (and even fall, perhaps dramatically) long before we might starve from lack of room to make food in. First of all, there have been huge advancements in food production technology in all the years since Malthus. Second of all, there are huge advancements in the pipeline (basically indoors vegetables growing with minimal food waste and extreme space-efficiency, and lab printing of meat). Third, we clearly want fewer children when infant mortality is low and life expectancy high. Malthus could not have foreseen all of this, but he certainly lacked imagination, and worse: malthusians in the last 100+ years really didn't need that imagination, just normal powers of observation, and STILL they have all missed how wrong malthusianism was. "But still, he was right!" No, he wasn't. We could grow and grow and grow if we get off the Earth -- hard to imagine that at this time, but maybe not in a few hundred years. "But we could run out of habitable planets in the Milky Way!" Well, yes, we sure could, but I think that's just not something we should worry about today and for thousands of years yet. Q: Why are there any malthusians? A1: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist. A2: Because humans appear to be wired to be pessimistic and alarmist, which means that cynical people / psychopaths can take advantage of the rest of us. Doesn't make Malthus right.
  • thaumasiotes 9y ago
    > First of all, there have been huge advancements in food production technology in all the years since Malthus. Second of all, there are huge advancements in the pipeline (basically indoors vegetables growing with minimal food waste and extreme space-efficiency, and lab printing of meat). These are not good counter-Malthusian points. There were huge advancements in food production technology all throughout history (ploughs / iron ploughs / crop rotation / plants from the new world... the list really is endless), but things were in a much more Malthusian state. The non-Malthusian state of affairs we enjoy today is entirely a function of people choosing not to have children, not a function of better technology. People who were so inclined could easily wipe out (per capita) the gains from productivity, by increasing the number of capita.
• newyankee 9y ago
  Only people in first world countries who have not experienced difficulties due to overpopulation , poverty etc. claim that Malthus is wrong, everything would improve etc. Having been brought up in an average Indian family and looking at the future where we have a population which is sky high and even though the fertility rate is significantly lower today, you can see the problems first hand. There are no easy solutions now, that time is gone. Only crazy future looking practical things like what the Chinese did with 1 child policy when it was needed long time back would've had helped. People should get out of their Western bubble, live in overpopulated cities in Bangladesh/India, travel in their public transit, try to find a job as a local without connections and then report back whether overpopulation is not an issue.
  • astrodust 9y ago
    European cities in the 1600s were massively over-populated for much of the same reasons non-Western cities are massively over-populated now: The rise of industrialization, a lack of available housing, poor infrastructure, and massive population growth coupled with rapid urbanization of a traditionally agricultural workforce. London, as just one example, was an ugly, disgusting, miserable place until the mid 20th century, so it takes time to sort these things out. Cities in India might be a mess today but once their population growth simmers down and the cities can get better organized they'll be much less crowded. As filthy and disgusting as the slums of some cities in India are, London was worse. The Thames was so polluted with sewage that paddle boats would churn it into this vile froth, like bath bubbles from hell. People who fell overboard from boats would drown because they couldn't be seen through all the foam. Even though the Parliament buildings are right on the river, and the smell in the summer was absolutely unbearable, it took decades for a proper sanitation system to be built because of a lack of political will. Better infrastructure means you can even out the population density better. India, like many other industrializing countries, is way behind the curve. China is one of the few that's been building infrastructure like its going out of style. It's not the one child policy, but aggressive city engineering that's keeping a lid on the problem.
• philwelch 9y ago
  > As the article admits, exponential population growth can never be finally solved by technology. Only in the sense that maintaining a population in the first place can never be finally solved by technology. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the universe has more than enough energy and matter to support as many meatbags as we could ever want.