Malthus was a chump

From "The Age of Global Warming," about Malthus's 1798 prediction that the human population would grow exponentially while the food supply would grow only arithmetically:
Plants and animals, including humans, convert carbohydrate to hydrocarbons (fatty acids) to store energy efficiently.  In using fossil fuels, mankind unlocked a store of energy used by plants and animal[s] [that had been accumulating for hundreds of millions of years] and, from the time of the Industrial Revolution, started to apply it on an industrial scale. 
By the end of the eighteenth century, Britain was becoming the world's first industrialised econom. The Promethean Revolution was underway. 
If Bacon was the prophet of man's material liberation through the advance of science and technology, Malthus was its Jeremiah--prophesying that mankind's future was to be trapped in an agrarian past which the Promethean Revolution was already making history. 
If ever there was an inflection point in the economic hisotry of mankind, this was it.  It was a spectacularly inapposite moment to the be writing a treatise on economic development and population based on the assumption of the static technological endowment of pre-industrial societies when industrialisation was taking mankind out of the Malthusian trap.
A little over 200 years later, it turns out that the food supply is capable of growing geometrically, while mankind with access to birth control nearly stops growing at all.

13 comments:

Grim said...

Well, not a chump exactly, just blind to technologies he had no reason to be able to imagine. It's a clever analysis, just one that happened to be totally wrong.

Grim said...

Marx is in the same category for me. His analysis is in depth, thorough and persuasive. It's just not right.

We benefit a great deal from such men if we approach them the right way. The value is in understanding why they weren't right. That helps us know how to hedge our analyses about the future today -- for example, today's very confident probability from Noam Chomsky that we are living at the end of human civilization. Probably, he says.

Ymar Sakar said...

Wrong premises. The limitation of micro for vacuum tubes was a Hard Limit. You couldn't get it down to a certain point, unless you used advanced magick tech like nano machines or the next step up from nano.

But conveniently, there was a way to do the same thing better via another path. Most people just get on the Wrong Path and think humanity is doomed. Humanity is only doomed because of how the Left kills off people on the right path, not because a bunch of people are on the wrong path.

Ymar Sakar said...

Chomsky is one of the Left's signature R/D gurus for developing mind control methods via linguistics. Watch him and you'll watch some of the Left's magick tricks in action.

End of civilization, perhaps, for Republicans and American patriots. That's an end all right. Utopia not = civilization

Texan99 said...

Yep, not a chump, just blind, unimaginative, clever, and completely wrong.

Ymar Sakar said...

These days, if someone is 100% right with their prediction or research, I would say that they had caused the problem to begin with.

In that sense, being wrong is actually better now.

Gringo said...

Texan99 said...
Yep, not a chump, just blind, unimaginative, clever, and completely wrong.

Recall what Yogi Berra said. "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future."

Mistaken prophets are a dime a dozen. Club of Rome on resource exhaustion. Paul Erlich on the Population Bomb, etc. Many of us who are of an age to remember Paul Erlich's missed predictions have taken them into consideration when evaluating the credibility of the AGW Goreacles.

Texan99 said...

It's tough, though, when your entire contribution to human civilization was a confident, even strident prediction.

Grim said...

Maybe so, but we're still better off with them than with nothing -- if only because we learn from the errors. Our best ways of thinking about the problem came from the guys responding to the guys who were wrong. Malthus himself provoked some good answers.

There's a kind of pro-market right-leaning thought that I don't respect much, even though it's based on a kind of right-leaning thought that I respect a great deal. This is the insight that conservatism works best when it is about not messing with what works, because we don't understand it all very well, so proven systems should be left alone.

But the thing about capitalism is that it's constantly changing things all the time. To view it in these terms is to commit to making constant un-examined changes in the name of not making changes.

So I appreciate economists who give it a good try, even though they get it wholly wrong. Even Keynesians, wihtout whom we might have had no Hayek. Even Marx, without whom we'd have had no Schumpeter.

Texan99 said...

Yes, thank Heaven for all the guys with the horrible ideas! They inspire everyone else to discredit them. But they're still chumps.

Joseph W. said...

Marx is in the same category for me. His analysis is in depth, thorough and persuasive. It's just not right.

No, it's worse than that because it is dishonest...when he used data from the British Blue Books, he distorted his presentation of the data. And having deceived his readers, he described his socialism as "scientific," using the word as a term of praise rather than committing himself to (at the very very least) tell the truth about his sources. Marx was the Michael Mann of economics.

Grim said...

Careful, or you'll end up in the dock with Steyn. Although I suppose Mann might consider it a compliment.

Ymar Sakar said...

Changing the World type science requires deception, unlike pure science that merely stimulates a genius' curiosity and drive.