Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Malthus and the three card trick

By Mark O'Connor - posted Monday, 21 November 2011


There has been a view, much put about by rightwing pro-business think-tanks, that Malthus was a gloomy pessimist from whose story we should learn not to listen to "pessimists". This view is now looking very shaky as famine stalks more and more countries. Journalistic articles are beginning to appear that use as their opening "peg" the remark that Malthus may not have been such a false prophet as we all assume (e.g. "Gloomy Malthus provides food for thought as world's appetite builds").

In fact scholars and reputable encyclopedias never did so assume - that claim may be wishful thinking by those with their own reasons for wanting to believe population growth is not a problem.

Yet scholarship is of limited value in dealing with representatives of the growth lobby. Overall, their argument that today's population campaigners are wrong because they are "followers" of Malthus can fairly be called a three-card trick. (A matter of standing on edge three flimsy cards of assertion so that they seem to support each other, and pretending that you have built a solid house of proof.) Here's how it goes:

Advertisement

1. Thomas Malthus was the first or at least the greatest thinker to argue that population growth tends to outgrow food and resources. (Largely true).

2. Malthus was a pessimistic false prophet who prophesied a gigantic famine the British Isles never experienced. (Grossly unfair. If that was all he was, he would not be the most famous thinker on the subject, and the three-card trick would collapse at this point. In fact Malthus did not claim to know the future, and he did not so much predict a future famine as provide an intelligent account of existing famines - and of reasons they were likely to recur.)

3. Therefore all later such warnings, no matter how eminent the experts who make them, will not come true and should be ignored.

Note that even if the first two cards were valid, the conclusion would still be faulty. One might as well say, "Eminent seismologists have warned of tsunamis that did not occur; therefore no one should heed such warnings". The logic resembles the invalid syllogism: "My horse is grey. Therefore all horses are grey."

Yet from this supposedly universal disproof of Malthusianism a cornucopian extremist may soar to O'Neil's claim that:

Population scaremongering springs from a fundamentally warped view of human beings as simply consumers, simply the users of resources, simply the destroyers of things, as a kind of 'plague' on poor Mother Nature, when in fact human beings are first and foremost producers, the discoverers and creators of resources, the makers of things and the makers of history.
Advertisement

-a version of the late Julian Simon's logic-chopping claims that humans can't run out of resources because they are "themselves a resource"; or that because it is supposedly impossible to define the limits to the planet's resources, therefore there are no limits.

Of course the smarter growth lobbyists realize that if they present their argument as a syllogism, its logical flaw will be noted. Their skill is to disguise the logic, and make a great parade of talking about the need to respect historical facts, what we can learn from the story of Malthus, etc.

In replying to the three-card argument, I always point out the main logical error first. Then I go on to point out a second logical flaw: If in fact Malthus is simply a man who made a spectacular mistake, why are you buttering him up, representing him as pre-eminent in the field, and implying that he is more likely to be right than the modern experts you seek to discredit? Have demographers and agricultural experts learnt nothing since his day? And have there been no improvements in our ability to gather data and to observe global patterns? Would you argue "The founders of modern medicine used to deny the heart pumped blood, so why should I believe my cardiologist?"

Also, did Malthus in fact prophesy, or merely warn? (In which case the second card is even falser.) And then, how specific were his predictions of human numbers exceeding food supply, and how often has what he warned about in fact occurred? (It's said that 300 million people have died of hunger or related causes since 1967.) Would you refuse to believe eye-witness accounts of famines on the grounds that someone once predicted a famine or famines that didn't occur?

By the time I've run though these points, and then suggested the opposition should apologise for using this misleading argument, they tend to look "tolerably foolish". But note that it is important to start with the two good-as-gold logical points: that one prophet being wrong doesn't mean all prophets are wrong, and that if Malthus was simply the false prophet they claim, he would not deserve the pre-eminence they have pretended to give him.

If you start instead with the last point, and defend Malthus by saying that he wasn't necessarily prophesying and wasn't necessarily wrong, it will sound like you are defending a weak point in your own position. They will then contest your defence of Malthus, and you may find yourself in the glue-pot, since the more you defend Malthus the more you will seem to be conceding their basic (and illogical) contention, that unless Malthus can be exonerated, no subsequent prophesy or even observation of famine should be believed. Target that absurdity first, and they can be left to argue their rather jaundiced view of Malthus, if they insist, against that of the encyclopaedias and the scholarly articles.

And don't forget to make the most obvious point of all: that the three-card trick is a distraction from today's far more advanced debates. Most agricultural experts say that Australia's food security cannot be guaranteed if we head for "big Australia". Those who think they can prove them wrong should not be seeking to detour via what Malthus thought two hundred years ago. They should look rather at whether they can answer the detailed arguments advanced in Michael Lardelli's Online Opinion piece Can we feed a 'Big Australia'? Or in the ABC Landline program The Future of Food, 26 June 2011. Or in the recent report to the Department of Immigration on the Long-term physical implications of Net Overseas Migration (e.g. p. 109)

Incidentally, the main reason Malthus's expectation of continuing famines in the UK (as future population outstripped future food supply) did not come true, is that during and after the Napoleonic wars Britain and France emerged as pre-eminent colonial powers, and proceeded to bleed each other white of young men. They did this via a long series of land battles and sea battles, not to mention the practices of sending troops and bureaucrats to tropical colonies where they often died like flies. Since in those days single women tended not to have babies, population growth was much reduced. As well, relations with the United States improved, so that even though the US was lost as a colony, it obligingly took off a substantial proportion of the UK's population (including the Irish who continued to flee their country for decades after the Potato Famine).

Further Britain happened to emerge as the dominant colonial power, with complete control of the seas, and so could afford to import food from other countries - which to this day is the only thing that keeps its bloated population from starving. It was not improvements in C19th agriculture that kept up with population growth and prevented the Malthusian famines occurring; it was the combination of death in war, death from colonial diseases, and massive emigration to North America. This unlikely combination of factors was not inevitable, and could not in Malthus's day have been given a high probability of coming true.

Not that Malthus denied a country could reduce its population by emigration, or by war. His rather general prophesies were confined to countries where population did outgrow food supply. Malthus's view was that if none of the other horsemen of the apocalypse, like War or Plague, then got in first, it was likely that Famine would.

But don't waste your breath explaining all this to those who don't want to know.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

43 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Mark O'Connor is the author of This Tired Brown Land, and co-author of Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, by Mark O’Connor and William Lines. He blogs at He blogs at http://markoconnor-australianpoet.blogspot.com/.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Mark O'Connor

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Article Tools
Comment 43 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy