There is a tendency to dismiss Malthus with a fervor. See forbes' '7 bil reason why Malthus is wrong'. While I dont share his doom and gloom the world would have been better off with increased technology and less population. I dont think he was too off the mark with his link between population and resource utilization.
Am I wrong here?
If you're wrong, Mises is wrong with you:
The Malthusian law of population is one of the great achievements of thought. Together with the principle of the division of labor it provided the foundations for modern biology and for the theory of evolution; the importance of these two fundamental theorems for the sciences of human action is second only to the discovery of the regularity in the intertwinement and sequence of market phenomena and their inevitable determination by the market data. The objections raised against the Malthusian law as well as against the law of returns are vain and trivial. Both laws are indisputable. But the role to be assigned to them within the body of the sciences of human action is different from that which Malthus attributed to them. (HA, Chapter XXIV, 2).
Yes, you're wrong. Partly because you're forgetting the fact that "increased technology" comes about essentially because of increased population. You're falling into the common trap of assuming every human being is just a mouth to feed, a drain on resources...as opposed to a contributing resource in himself.
Don't forget, increased productivity (and by extension, increased standards of living) come about through capital accumulation and division of labor. Lessor populations just don't have the capital — and they certainly can't divide up labor — as much as greator ones...
As for Mises, I see nothing in that passage that even implies he shared Malthus' doomsday views that "human population growth would outpace food production—and fast—which would lead to societal ruin." In fact the last line of your quote states: "the role to be assigned to them within the body of the sciences of human action is different from that which Malthus attributed to them"...showing Mises did not agree with the way Malthus applied his model.
Those comments of Mises are made about Malthus' law of population...not his prophesied catastrophe. The law, to my understanding is simply "an approximate physical law as it is generally acknowledged that nothing can grow at a constant rate indefinitely." And as Wikipedia points out, Joel E. Cohen has stated that the simplicity of the model makes it useful for very short-term predictions and of not much use for predictions beyond 10 or 20 years.[4]
I really doubt that more population means more innovation. China and India are not booming with technology.
The process for innovation probably has more to do with the right tools such as capital and infrastructure and not necessarily with the number of heads around us.
Malthus is one of the best classical economists imho.
But I think I'm in the minority here since I don't despise neither Marx nor Keynes :)
Matt Riddley is a cool dude.
you12:I really doubt that more population means more innovation. China and India are not booming with technology.
Yeah. I really doubt that more advanced health care technology and greater access to it means improved health conditions. The United States certainly isn't ranking at the top of any longevity lists.
you12:The process for innovation probably has more to do with the right tools such as capital and infrastructure and not necessarily with the number of heads around us.
a) India, China, Singapore, and Hong Kong were ranked 89th, 44th, 3rd, and 1st in the world respectively, in terms of infrastructure a year ago.
b) human beings are capital.
Are you starting to see your problem yet? You're not factoring in some very important variables.
If you really want to argue this, let's put your position to a test. We'll move everyone out of Denmark, so its top notch infrastructure is there just for you, and no one else will be there to screw it up or get in your way. I'll take a team of 100 milion people, in a geographic area with no infrastructure...and you take your family to Copenhagen, and we'll see which team produces more innovation. Fair enough?
Is every human a resource? India and China are full of people who are rural , uneducated and are a drag on their respective economies. In places like Mexico they move to the US. The undocumented workers. So it allows mexico to lower its drag.
Existance alone is not success. While you are right that people are the most important resource it is also prudent to not overstate that case. The fundamental difference is that you see people as an end in themselves but I don't buy that people alone will suffice.
Sure we might feed them but what about the quality of life. Will they be able to afford the suburban lifestyle of the USA?
you12: I really doubt that more population means more innovation. China and India are not booming with technology.
a) There is such a thing as over- and under-population:
b) Human brains are what create innovations. There is a particular kind of brain which we call a "genius" that seems particularly adept at this. The genius brain does not always derive de novo inventions so much as combine the existing ones out there to create something completely new. By the laws of arithmetic, more people means more brains, means more geniuses.
c) If anything, we probably have too few people:
d) India and China are, in fact, playing a crucial role in human advancement and welfare. Both countries are massively productive and make more or less efficient use of the division-of-labor (compared to, say, a Papua New Guinean jungle tribe...) Perhaps the geniuses aren't living in India and China today (though there are doubtless more of them there than we realize), but they're making the things that will be used by the geniuses elsewhere... cheaper. Which is just as important as being the genius, in terms of contribution to human advancement.
Clayton -
you12:Is every human a resource?
Is every road a resource?
India and China are full of people who are rural , uneducated and are a drag on their respective economies.
If they are rural, and presumably live off their own labor...how exactly are they a "drag" on the economy?
In places like Mexico they move to the US. The undocumented workers. So it allows mexico to lower its drag.
How do workers leaving one country to go work in another "lower the economic drag" in the first country? Sounds to me like they lower the number of workers available.
Wanna try out that experiment now?
Existance alone is not success.
Apparently "success" is a pretty fuzzy term. But if you mean to say "existence alone does not mean progress"...I think you might actually be getting it!
No one ever said it was. I implied that existence is a necessary condition for progress. Not a sufficient one.
you12:While you are right that people are the most important resource...
...Oh so you agree with me now? Cuz I would swear just a post or so ago you said "The process for innovation probably has more to do with the right tools such as capital and infrastructure and not necessarily with the number of heads around us."
The fundamental difference is that you see people as an end in themselves
Where in the hell did you get that idea? We're talking about technology and standards of living. That doesn't even make sense.
If you're simply saying I see people —including their potential for performing labor, as well as their "stock of competencies, knowledge, social and personality attributes, including creativity"—as resources which play an instrumental role in economic progress, then yes, guilty as charged.
you12:Sure we might feed them but what about the quality of life. Will they be able to afford the suburban lifestyle of the USA?
Who?
And what in the hell makes you think the "suburban lifestyle of the USA" would be possible without whomever you're talking about?
Places like Mexico can't utilize them properly. If it weren't for the green revolution these places would be suffering famines. They get paid more in USA. And in India these people need 'investments' in education and healthcare and god knows what. Surely that is not optmial but that is the reality. India has a horrid scheme. NREGA where rural employment is guarenteed. Its a horrid program and only manual labor is allowed. Dig a hole bury a hole and you get two dollars a day for 100 days a year. It has wrecked havoc with rural economy. Noone wants to work and there is no need to acquire a skill. But they give you votes. See where I am going with the drag thing? I am not agreeing with any of these policies but they exist and a libertarian utopia is not possible for a forseeable future so lets argue from reality.
Again number of people existing is not success. They need more. Now how many are too much and how many are too little?
The question seems to be, what's the right population necessary in order to make government work? Well, you're on a forum primarily dedicated to the principle that it doesn't, and not at any number. This after framing the premise that logic MUST be rejected, and nullification/ignoring the policies causing the damage be stricken from the debate.
I mean, supposing you have a nail in your head, without removing the nail from your head, what's the best way to go about not having a nail in your head?
you12:Places like Mexico can't utilize them properly. If it weren't for the green revolution these places would be suffering famines.
It's comments like this that this image was made for.
They get paid more in USA. And in India these people need 'investments' in education and healthcare and god knows what. Surely that is not optmial but that is the reality. India has a horrid scheme. NREGA where rural employment is guarenteed. Its a horrid program and only manual labor is allowed. Dig a hole bury a hole and you get two dollars a day for 100 days a year. It has wrecked havoc with rural economy. Noone wants to work and there is no need to acquire a skill. But they give you votes. See where I am going with the drag thing? I am not agreeing with any of these policies but they exist and a libertarian utopia is not possible for a forseeable future so lets argue from reality. They need more. Now how many are too much and how many are too little?
I seriously can't tell if you honestly don't get it, or if you're just a troll. I would insist you were trolling, but unfortunately I actually have dealt with people genuinely this dense. So I tend to give the benefit of the doubt. But you're pushing it. You're not even making an argument...
you12: Existance alone is not success.
John James: No one ever said it was. I implied that existence is a necessary condition for progress. Not a sufficient one.
you12: Again number of people existing is not success.
Malthus' views on population are a very good example of the dangers of applying a priori models to the real world. So long as
A. Individuals need to consume some amount of a resource to survive
B. This resource is scarce and produced using scarce materials
Then after SOME point of population growth there will no longer be enough of this resource to support the entire population. What this will be is unknown to us a priori. The problem that Malthus ran into was to assume the nature of population growth and the speed at which food could be grown. At the time it would have been hard to definitively declare that Malthus was wrong since the fact was that human population had traditionally grown at approximately the exponential rate that Malthus predicted. Malthus also drastically undermined the speed with which human productivity increased. Once again, the speed with which the ability of humans to produce what was necessary to even sustain themselves had never grown with the speed that would have been necessary in Malthus' time.
So ultimately the matter of whether Malthus was wrong comes down to the speed with which individuals procreate and the speed with which they reproduce (sustainably). If population grew like Malthus thought it would then you bet that overpopulation would be a problem at our current production capabilities. So at the time Mathus was writing it would have been hard to argue that he was really wrong since his assumptions weren't outlandish at the time. It was clear even to Malthus that his model wasn't necessarily true and in the test of time he has been proven absolutely false, but nonetheless he should never be written off as a crank who had no point. There is much which can be learned from Malthusianism as a model, even though it has been (but maybe not forever) false.
It turns out that man is more ingenuous and more immoral/respectable in his actions, and god kinder in his choice of scientific law and natural resources than Reverend Malthus anticipated.
Neodoxy:Malthus also drastically undermined the speed with which human productivity increased.
That's the end I'm less familiar with. Did Malthus even try to account for exponential technological innovation? I suppose I could understand if he didn't, given the relative ignorance of human knowledge during his time period, and the possible lack of foresight into technology advancement...but even still, it would be quite ironic and comical if he made this prediction based on his revolutionary model of exponential growth...but failed to apply it to the very thing that has been most predictably exponential in its progression.
Malthus acknowledged the ability of technology to expand the ability of humans to better sustain themselves and help to reverse overpopulation trends, but he never even conceived of the idea of technological capabilities increasing exponentially. He was much more concerned with the physical ability of humans to grow food given specific amounts of technology and the effect of the law of diminishing returns (I believe he was the first person to formalize that law). This is entirely understandable since first of all it is impossible to actually predict the number of technological advances that will be made in the future and there had never been anything like it in human history at the time Malthus was alive.
For Malthus to predict a sudden exponential rise in technological trends would have been almost as ridiculous as if someone today predicted a sudden massive slowing down in technological innovation. It was historically baseless and it was something that couldn't be predicted in the past and indeed cannot be predicted in the future. Based upon speculation and previous trends we can determine the nature of future trends in human discovery, but it could theoretically be the case that humans have reached the highest technological point it's possible to reach. This is something of a reversal than what Malthus might have faced at the time.
And yes, the irony that Malthus viewed population growth as being exponential while production possibilities as being relatively arithmetical while the reverse has historically been true is noted by many authors.
Hoppe completely clarifies the matter in the above video, he discusses the Law of Returns in its connection to population: ceteris paribus, there is at every point in time some "ideal population" level. The natural unit of population control, Hoppe explains, is the family itself. This leads to fortuitous outcomes and does not require intervention by a central planner due to the much-feared "concupisence" of Malthus.
I've always had reservations to the concept of the "ideal level" of population. The concept seems vague to me, and it suffers from the major flaw that not all levels of population are equal since the humans we produce and raise are of differing attributes and of a differing quality. Therefore to some extent it must matter who you are and what your occupation is when you're talking about the optimal level of population unless you're looking soley at the production of one good, or some measure like gdp per capita.
Neodoxy:he never even conceived of the idea of technological capabilities increasing exponentially. This is entirely understandable
like I said...
it could theoretically be the case that humans have reached the highest technological point it's possible to reach.
Considering a name change to "Duell", are we?
@Neo: "ceteris paribus" condition includes the population make-up, i.e. the percentage of smart-people, stupid-people. etc.
My argument is that there can be such a thing as overpopulation.
@Clayton,
Aaah gotchya. It still depends upon who you are to some extent, however.
@you
I'd be shocked if anyone was arguing against that.
you12: My argument is that there can be such a thing as overpopulation.
How so? If there are too many people relative to the resources they need to reach their ends (eat, live, prosper), then there will be less people. If not, there will be more people. Either way, neither you nor Malthus needn't worry your (big?) brains over it.
you12:My argument is that there can be such a thing as overpopulation.
When in the world did you ever make that argument?
"If there are too many people relative to the resources they need to reach their ends (eat, live, prosper), then there will be less people. If not, there will be more people."
Is this state of affairs somehow different from a world which is overpopulated that leads to a decrease in the population through starvation?
How did the "green revolution" - whatever that is - prevent a famine in Mexico?
Now you are just pulling my leg.
"Is this state of affairs somehow different from a world which is overpopulated that leads to a decrease in the population through starvation?"
Why/how would the world become overpopulated if there was not enough food? Are you assuming a scenario by which food immediately disappears and this catches everyone off guard?
you12:Now you are just pulling my leg.
Aaand we're there.
"Why/how would the world become overpopulated if there was not enough food? Are you assuming a scenario by which food immediately disappears and this catches everyone off guard?"
If individuals have children when they cannot afford enough food to properly sustain the child, or if there is any sort of fluctuation in the income of these people/the price of food then for a short time the world would be overpopulated. More over a world which was that close towards starvation may in and of itself be considered overpopulated.
@John James Stop the abuse please.
You show up out of nowhere after a 2 year absence just to claim my calling out trollish behavior as "abuse"? Should I be honored? Or suspicious? Both?
Neodoxy: If individuals have children when they cannot afford enough food to properly sustain the child, or if there is any sort of fluctuation in the income of these people/the price of food then for a short time the world would be overpopulated. More over a world which was that close towards starvation may in and of itself be considered overpopulated.
How long could this state of "overpopulation" conceivably last? How likely is it that the barely alive children of their barely alive parents will produce an even larger batch of barely alive children?
How about amused? It's pretty silly.
"How long could this state of "overpopulation" conceivably last? How likely is it that the barely alive children of their barely alive parents will produce an even larger batch of barely alive children?"
Well that's the state in which most of humanity classically lived and which many people currently live in in underdeveloped countries.
Stop the abuse please.
Yeah, JJ.
Yeah that's me. Mr. Abuse.
But don't you just love my nipple ring?
JJ, you heartless pig, how could you slap Bella??? You know Edward is going to hunt you down and suck your blood, now...