Download Austerity. Poverty. Food scarcity. Thomas Malthus, the great

Austerity. Poverty.
Food scarcity.
Thomas Malthus,
the great population
theorist, is being
reinvented for
our times.
W O R D S B E C K Y A L L E N P H OTO G R A P H Y M A U R I Z I O D ’ I O R I O
N
ewtonian, Darwinian, Keynesian:
when thinkers’ names become
adjectives, it’s a sign that their
ideas are likely to outlive them.
And so it is with Thomas Robert Malthus:
English cleric, Fellow of Jesus College,
and author of one of the most famous
books ever written on population.
Published in 1798, the first edition of his
Essay on the Principle of Population provoked
passionate debate. It was “one of the great
scientific and literary controversies of
modern times” as Professor Emma
Rothschild, Director of the Joint Centre
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for History and Economics and Fellow
of Magdalene, points out.
William Cobbett labelled Malthus a
“monster”. Samuel Taylor Coleridge called
him “stupid and ignorant”. William Hazlitt’s
response ran to an astonishing 400 pages.
Conversely, Charles Darwin and Alfred
Russel Wallace credited Malthus with
kindling their ideas on natural selection,
in a way “analogous”, wrote Wallace, “to that
of friction upon the specifically prepared
match, producing that flash of insight”.
And so it continues. Next year, the Essay
will be 220 years old. People continue to love ›
Could Malthus help us
address the challenges
of the Anthropocene age
– an epoch of climate
change, food insecurity,
austerity and inequality?
to hate Malthus, despite – or perhaps because
of – the fact that time has eroded his text into
a gloomy central tenet. Today, it would seem
that everyone knows what Malthus brings
to the table: a simple argument that
overpopulation is a bad thing. But is that
really how we should understand his work
and the controversy surrounding it? Or could
his ideas help us address the challenges of the
Anthropocene – an epoch of climate change,
food insecurity, austerity and inequality?
Malthus’s Essay spanned several editions
and several hundred pages, evolving from
a primarily philosophical work into works
of demography. In it, he presented evidence
for a natural law that population increases
faster (geometrically) than food supply
(arithmetically), a system acted upon by
‘positive’ and ‘preventive’ checks including
famine, disease and birth control.
Alison Bashford – Vere Harmsworth
Professor of Imperial and Naval History
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and Fellow of Jesus (whose recent book,
co-authored with Joyce Chaplin, radically
recasts the Eurocentric view of Malthus) –
admits she’s fascinated by him.
“Fascinated because his Essay was so
much larger, and so different to the usual
assessment,” she says. “Malthus argued that
population and food supply were always in
direct relation, oscillating in relation to one
another over time. It was not a thesis simply
about ‘bad’ population growth, as people
simplify it.”
The Essay of 1798 was a direct response
to perceptions of the French Revolution,
and to William Godwin and the Marquis
de Condorcet’s ideas about the perfectibility
of human society. Condorcet believed in
making people secure in old age via
government-supported insurance. However,
Malthus disagreed, arguing that inequality
was a spur to improvement – a spur that
welfare blunted.
“In his own time, the controversy
was theological and doctrinal, as much as
anything else,” explains Bashford. “Malthus
seemed to suggest that on one hand, God
would not provide, and on the other, that
going forth and multiplying was not always
a sensible thing to do. Later, the controversy
was more political, related to his objections
to the Poor Law and the state’s maintenance
of the poor. This is the origin of the
‘unfeeling’ Malthus.”
As a strong defender of the economic
benefits of inequality and a critic of poor
relief, Malthus seems ever present in debates
about the welfare state. “For much of the
19th and 20th centuries the adjective
‘Malthusian’ basically meant contraception,
and the word ‘Malthus’ has come to indicate
a way of speaking about deep fears of other
people,” says Rothschild. “[But] one of
the contemporary issues that was very
important when Malthus was writing –
and that is very relevant now – concerns
what would now be called social security.”
Today at Jesus, Dr David Nally and Dr
Duncan Kelly both hear echoes of Malthus
in their own research. Kelly is writing a book
on the Great War and the origins of modern
politics, an attempt to take seriously John
Maynard Keynes’ belief that ideas are what
change the world – and Keynes has led Kelly
straight to Malthus.
Keynes’s Malthus was first and foremost
an economist, says Kelly. He responded to
the Napoleonic wars and crises of corn
production, post-war debt, and the
relationship between wages, profit and land
use. “If you fast forward 100 years, Keynes
is trying to understand the relationship
between debt, finance, and the production
and consumption of food during and after
the First World War, so it’s not surprising
that in 1912 and 1914 Keynes turns back
to Malthus,” he explains.
On the other side of Jesus’s Second
Court, Nally – a human geographer and
19th-centuryist interested in subsistence
crises – also finds Malthus relevant to his
research on the Great Irish Famine.
Many people who intervened in the
political debate before, during and after
the famine use Malthus as a way to explain
what occurred: that a population boom and
not enough land coupled with an ecological
crisis and repeated failures of the potato
harvest caused mass starvation.
“I was interested in complicating
that picture,” says Nally, “seeing it less
as a story of aggregate numbers of people
and absolute scarcity, and more about the
conditions that underwrote population
growth, the landholding situation and
thinking more carefully about relative
scarcity. That’s not to minimise the
catastrophic nature of the destruction
of the potato harvest – but not a single
landlord died during the famine.”
Nally likes to remind his students that
the world produces more than enough food
to feed the population. “It’s clearly not just
a question of population,” he says. “But
what is true – and perhaps is Malthus’s
unique contribution – is seeing population
as a unique actor in its own right. That’s very
powerful because it lets you see largescale problems and phenomena. In social
science, as we move into big data, that’s
very appealing.”
However, his desire to complicate can
sometimes frustrate others in the Cambridge
Global Food Security Initiative. “My plant
science colleagues want to create new tools,
but tools are embedded in a social context,”
he says. “Plant scientists always tell me
that social scientists have a problem for
every solution!”
THE CAMBRIDGE GLOBAL
FOOD SECURITY INITIATIVE
With global population set to reach
nine billion by 2050, food security
is one of this century’s greatest
challenges. But what does an ideal
food system look like? It’s a question
that Cambridge is determined to
address. The Cambridge Global
Food Security Initiative, chaired by
Professor Chris Gilligan and Professor
Howard Griffiths, is a virtual network
of researchers focusing on sustainable
production, resilient and efficient
processing, distribution and supply
and ethical and healthy consumption.
Together, Cambridge crop scientists,
engineers, economists, policy and
public health experts are working to
deepen our understanding so that the
world can develop better solutions.
The other side of the equation – our
consumption – matters too. “We need to look
at our own appetite for food: how much we
need and what kind of food,” says Nally,
“particularly in the West, as we consume
more and more meat and adopt diets that
place further burdens on global agriculture.”
The same can be said of climate change,
which, in altering growing conditions in
places already struggling with poverty, will
hamper people’s ability to subsist and create
potentially explosive social conditions.
“I feel a sense of déjà vu here. Malthus is
writing in 1798. There are revolutions and
rebellions in the 1830s and 1840s,” says
Nally. “Today, people are talking about the
same things, except climate change is the
underlying factor, coupled with the amount
of people who now need to subsist.”
Could it be, then, that the relevance of
Malthus’s ideas ebb and flow according to
the fall and rise of crises? According to Kelly:
“Malthus talked about these cycles,
especially in relation to famine, poverty and
population. He’s not gone out of
fashion because he fixed our attention
on a problem that obviously pre-dated him
– but which shows no signs of going away.”
And as the daily gloomy global news
highlights radical divisions between rich and
poor, Malthus gives us something to work
with. “He gives us a perspective from which
to explain some of these major global flows
– migration, population, food production and
distribution. He was – and remains –
important for economists interested in
tracing these flows across the world,”
Kelly concludes. “He gives us a perspective
on these problems. He doesn’t give us
solutions – but then who does?”
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