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Why Aren’t We All Starving?
Why Malthus was wrong, and what it may tell us about the future
In 1798, Thomas Malthus made one of the most famous incorrect predictions in history.
You see, Malthus was living at a time of exploding population growth in England, and he worried that this increase would lead to disaster. He noted that the population of the British Isles was rising at a “geometrical ratio,” while its food supply was going up “arithmetically” — that is, the population was doubling every so often (1, 2, 4, 8, 16) while the food supply was increasing more slowly (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Malthus was sure that famine and pestilence were on the horizon, that people — especially the poor — would suffer terribly. This was, after all, the law of nature. When population outstrips food supply, awful things happen.
He was very wrong. When Malthus wrote his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” there were about one billion people on the planet. Over the next century, humanity doubled its population. In the next hundred years, we’ve added six billion more. And the percentage of people who are hungry — even in developing countries — has shrunk.
How could Malthus have gotten things so wrong?
What’s fascinating about his prediction is that he was mostly correct in describing the world around him based on past trends. The human population was growing quickly, and his predictions were in line with the iron laws that had governed agriculture for thousands of years. Based on what he knew about the world, his conclusions were understandable.
Malthus wasn’t incorrect in his observations about the world as it was, but he was wrong when he assumed that the world wouldn’t or couldn’t change. He failed to anticipate several developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that would transform the world into a place very different from the one he was living in.
Malthus’ first mistake was his failure to imagine a world in which food could be produced much more efficiently than it was in his day. British farmers in 1798 were slightly more…
