Why is reliance on Malthus's overpopulation theory still a shaky basis for policymaking?/Michael Shermer
The article is published with the approval of Scientific American Israel and the Ort Israel Network
I will have to quickly prepare a list of the most influential ideas in the history of science, good or bad, there is no doubt that among the top ten I will include the essay "Essay on the Principle of Population" by the British political economist Thomas Robert Malthus from 1798. On the plus side, the essay inspired Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to explore the mathematics of natural selection. They did this under the influence of Malthus's observation that populations tend to grow in a geometric column (2, 4, 8, 16...) while food reserves grow in an arithmetic column (2, 3, 4, 5...), which leads to a lack of resources and differences in reproductive success, which The engine for evolution.
On the negative side, the idea drove a policy based on the belief that a Malthusian collapse of the population was inevitable. "The power of [increasing] the population is so much stronger than the power of the earth to support human existence, that it is inevitable that premature death will befall the human race in some way," Malthus Kadornit predicted. His scenario influenced policy makers to adopt ideas of social Darwinism and racial improvement (eugenics), which led to the use of draconian measures to limit birth in certain populations, which included, among other things, forced sterilization.
Evolutionary biologist and journalist Matt Ridley summarizes this approach succinctly in his book The Evolution of Everything (Harper Press, 2015): "You have to be cruel to be kind." The belief that "those in power know better what is good for the vulnerable and the weak" led directly to legal actions based on dubious Malthusian science. For example, the Poor Law enacted by Queen Elizabeth I in 1601, which was intended to provide food for the poor, was sharply cut in an amendment introduced in 1834, based on Malthusian reasoning according to which helping the poor would only encourage them to have more children and thus increase their poverty. The British government instituted a similar Malthusian approach during the Irish potato famine of the 40s, Ridley writes. The reasoning for this was, as British Deputy Finance Minister Charles Trevillian put it, that the famine serves as "an effective mechanism to reduce the excess population." A few decades later, Francis Gulton recommended marriage between suitable individuals only ("What nature does blindly, slowly and mercilessly, men may do with foresight, quickly and mercifully"). He was followed by several prominent British socialists, such as Sidney and Beatrice Bebe, George Bernard Shaw, Block Ellis and H. J. Wells, who publicly supported eugenics as a tool for social engineering.
Eugenics and forced sterilization sometimes seem to us to be part of a right-wing Nazi program implemented in Germany in the 30s. But as economist Thomas Leonard of Princeton University reminded us in his book "Liberal Reforms" (Princeton Press, 2016) and former New York Times editor Adam Cohen in his book "Imbeciles" (Penguin Press, 2016), eugenics swept America in the early 20th century, reaching its peak In 1927, in the Buck v. Bell ruling of the US Supreme Court, in which the justices legally allowed the sterilization of "undesirable" citizens. Prominent progressive judges such as Louis Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sat on the jury, who established the famous ruling: "Three generations of retards is more than enough." And the result: sterilization of about 70,000 Americans.
Science writer Ronald Bailey follows neo-Malthusian approaches in his book "The End of Doom" (St. Martins Press, 2015). He attributes the rise of these attitudes to Paul Ehrlich's 1968 best-selling book The Population Bomb, which argued that "the campaign to feed all mankind is over." Many other black seers followed in his footsteps. For example, Lester Brown, founder of Worldwatch, declared in 1995: "Soon, humanity's greatest challenge will be getting to the next harvest season." In the title of his article in Scientific American in 2009, he repeated and confirmed his rhetorical question: "Will food shortages collapse humanity?" And at a conference held in 2013 at the University of Vermont, Ehrlich estimated that the chance of avoiding the collapse of human culture is only about 10%.
The problem with Malthusians, Bailey writes, is that they are "unable to free themselves from the simple, and patently false, idea that when it comes to reproduction, humans are no different from a herd of deer." But humans are thinking animals. We find solutions. Think of Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. The result is the opposite of what Malthus predicted: in the richest nations, where food security is the highest, birth rates are the lowest. And on the contrary, in the countries where the food is least secured, the birth rates are the highest.
The solution to overpopulation is not to force people to have fewer children. China's one-child policy demonstrated how unsuccessful this experiment was. The solution is to rescue the poor countries from poverty through democratic governance, free trade, access to contraceptives and education for the economic empowerment of women.
Michael Shermer is the publisher of Skeptic magazine, his new book: "The Moral Noah's Ark" was recently published. Follow him on Twitter: @michaelshermer
More of the topic in Hayadan:
10 תגובות
A rather confused article that jumps to conclusions.
Methlus' book contains several claims.
Some of them are correct (without any other changes, there is a connection between the size of the population and hunger, it is impossible to increase agricultural productivity further and further - there is a limit to this),
Some of them are wrong (there is no way to reduce fertility other than abstinence - Malthus did not think of contraceptives), some of them were insights that led the decision makers to take steps that reduced the risks (such as conducting a population census at the beginning of the 19th century, government investment in plant fertility during the century -20), there is a connection between the growth of the population and the size of the population and poverty (a complicated relationship that has been studied to date - depends on many factors including, for example, the size of the population in relation to the amount of natural capital and the ability to harness depletable resources to increase agricultural productivity)
It is not necessary to come from the concern of Methlos (who was quite conservative and supported the landowners against two new forces - the workers on the one hand and the capitalists on the other) directly to eugenics or social Darwinism. Most people today actually reach access to contraceptives and women's education - but these things require a lot more additional discounts.
It is easy to see that if the population continues to grow at an exponential rate, there is no practical or even theoretical solution that makes it possible to sustain the entire population - with a constant growth of 1.1 percent per year, within 3000 years the entire planet will be covered with 10 people per square meter, including the entire area of the oceans. Other solutions don't help either - the Dyson ball, for example, fills up in a few thousand more years, in 11 thousand years (not a long time from an evolutionary point of view) - we get to the point that the mass of humanity reaches the mass of the observable universe (that is, even before the food problem we have to travel at a speed higher than the speed of light, and convert the entire mass of all the suns from hydrogen atoms to hydrogen atoms)
The challenge of feeding about 10 billion people is still ahead of us - because not only will the population grow (until it stabilizes), in order to do this today we maintain unsustainable agriculture that consumes depleting resources (such as mines with a high concentration of phosphorus and potash) and causes pollution (disruption of the phosphorus cycle , extinction of insects due to pesticides) and leads to damage to lands and forests.
A shaky basis for policy making? Michael Shermer, back in the coop.
Anyone who denies Malthus' idea is either a liar or a fool.
Adam_Adom's words about women's literacy surprised me, but they seem to be extremely true.
The woman, as the one who gives birth and takes care of the newborn, cares much more than the man. Only an ignorant woman will accept the multiple pregnancies as fate, like a common wind and rain from the sky. But with a little education she will understand her control over her destiny and the destiny of her family and the enormous benefit of investing in contraceptives. And indeed, there is a very clear statistical connection between a woman's education and the minority of her children.
The rich and secular nations do not multiply,
The Arabs and the ultra-orthodox, who believe in demons, for example Jehovah, will never stop multiplying and will return us to the stone age.
Very nice article
There will always be the oil on duty, in our case - Nostradamus, who will push the left-right on every issue.
What has been discovered in recent years is that the key factor in lowering birth rates in negative world countries is a fairly simple factor: women's literacy, that is, giving women an education makes them better understand the world they are in and consciously and deliberately reduces the number of children they bring into the world.
We have seen this since the beginning of the century in many third world countries that the proportion of women who went to school there jumped. Mainly, by the way, in the Arab countries, where there is a collapse in birth rates in a way that has not been seen on such a scale in the history of mankind and now the UN is changing the forecasts of the world's population growth, against this background, to much more moderate numbers.
Sorry, but the one child experiment in China was not a failure but a huge success. This was one of the ways the Chinese Party took in order to overcome the terrible poverty and massive hunger that existed in the vast rural areas of China. True, it was combined with industrial revolutions and with grandiose agricultural revolutions, but combined it rescued China from a situation where millions would have died a year from starvation. India, which 50 years ago was a country similar to China in many ways did not follow this policy and in India millions are still dying of hunger there.
DA Even today the leftists all over the world, including Israel, are the biggest anti-Semites
The Nazis were left-wing and not right-wing, and all birth control programs, including coercive policies, almost always come from the crazy left and its policy of social engineering experiments. Such as multiculturalism, increasing the birth rate, immigration...