Thomas Malthus and His Enduring Legacy¹

Have you ever heard of Thomas Malthus? Maybe not, given the state of modern American education; but a case can be made that he is one of the most influential men in YOUR life today, whether you realize it or not.

Malthus was a late 18th century cleric, demographer and economist who wrote the book “An Essay on the Principles of Population” in 1798. In this book, he looked at the rate at which food production increased and compared it to the way that population increased. His conclusion was that the number of people being born would always exceed the amount of food that was able to be produced; therefore famine and disaster were only a generation or two away. While later on he revised his disaster scenario downwards, Malthus significantly influenced both Darwin and Marx when they were developing their own theories.

But I said that Malthus was influential in YOUR life didn’t I? Well, since the 1950’s the “neo-Malthusians” have dominated both the popular press, and various academic disciplines. The word is “over-crowded” we are told, on the brink of “environmental disaster” because there are “too many people” and “not enough resources.” All of these doom and gloom scenarios are used to manipulate YOU, the average person, into adopting their solutions; solutions which usually mean a socialized economy, oppressive taxation, and a restriction on family size. Most Americans have adopted some form of Malthusian ethic whether they realize it or not; through later marriages, contraception, limited family size and abortion, population growth rates have been reduced to below the replacement rate. You see, many educated Americans are scared of “overpopulation,” there are already “too many” people in the world and a “responsible” person ought to self-consciously restrict their family size. When this “respectability” of having fewer children is added to American self-indulgence (fewer children means more resources to spend on one’s self), Americans are in danger of becoming an endangered species.

As a family with six children (in my mind a SMALL family) we have often received hostile glances, intrusive questions and nasty comments about the size of our family. How dare we be so selfish to bring so many children into the world when “everyone knows” the dangers of “overpopulation! ”

Perhaps though, it is time to re-examine the conventional wisdom of “overpopulation.” Are there REALLY too many people in the world and are we REALLY on the edge of ecological disaster, economic destruction and international warfare over scarce resources as Malthus and his descendents claim?

First, old Thomas was wrong in his original calculations. He argued that food grew by arithmetic progression (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) while population grew by geometric progression (2, 4, 8, 16 etc.). There is simply no evidence for this relationship. To the contrary, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, food production far outstripped population growth. Malthus, misled by his own calculations, never seemed to appreciate that the very term “overpopulation” is relative; a given area of land is “overpopulated” when the number of people exceeds the ability to produce food. Two men on a desert island with one coconut palm tree COULD be over-populated if there were not enough coconuts to go around. But if those two men can INCREASE the amount of food being produced, then “overpopulation” never becomes a problem. In his defense; in the 18th century the farmer had few technological tools available to him; it took a certain number of farmers, with a certain amount of horses (or oxen) to plough a specified number of fields for harvesting. Clearly, once the optimum number of farmers, horses and fields are reached, you cannot add more; in fact it actually becomes counter-productive after a certain point. Hence there is an upper limit on how much food each farmer can provide.

Living as he did as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Malthus never saw that technology would break the “log-jam” by DECREASING the number of farmers while at the same time INCREASING the productivity of the fields. He also never saw that new fertilizers would be developed that increased the yield of various fields, or the ability of men to find ways to turn even barren land into productive farmland. A few years back we lived in the San Joachim valley in Central California; an arid, barren desert during most of the State’s history but now the most productive farmland in the world. The transformation was made possible by irrigation and wise farming methods that turned deserts into gardens.

And of course, Malthus could not foresee that new hybrid crops would be developed that would further increase harvest. Fields that once only produced a limited crop can now be tens or hundreds or even THOUSANDS of times more productive because of new and improved seeds.

But if technology has proven old Malthus wrong, why are there so many famines even in the modern world? Well, the lowly sanitation engineer who helped modern nations keep their sewage separate from their water supply helped many babies survive typhoid and other diseases; thus increasing the population. Then screen doors, DDT and other insect control technologies (for a while at least) kept many diseases at bay which also contributed to rapid population growth. So surely, once all these new people began crowding into one another, competing for scarce resources, poverty, famine and starvation is inevitable, right? I mean it’s just LOGICAL!

However, the picture is a bit more complex. Remember “overpopulation” is not an absolute but relative. When Europeans first came to America in the 16th century, the continent was “overpopulated” because the indigenous peoples often exceeded the available food supply. There is a definite limit of the amount of food that can be produced in hunter-gather societies. Research has shown that far from being the “noble savage” living in “harmony” with “Nature,” American Indians lived a life of constant warfare, poverty, on the verge of starvation and suffering from diseases that come from a poor diet. Yet today, that same continent feeds almost 300 million people. How could that be?

The early settlers in America brought with them a technology and a worldview that allowed them to increase the amount of food produced on a given piece of land. Thus Europeans thrived, where “Native” Americans barely subsisted. Western civilization exported this technology (and the Christian worldview necessary to make it work) throughout the world.

However, since the beginning of the 20th century, we have only to look to our good “friends” the socialists for the reason why nations starve. Socialism is the natural outgrowth of an anti-God theology that believes Man has no higher authority than himself. Therefore, the State is given ultimate and final power over every aspect of life. Nation after nation has been enticed into adopting some form of socialist thought on the promise that “Heaven on Earth” is possible, if only men will surrender their liberty and productivity to the State.

It is significant that no Western, capitalist state has experienced famine, while socialist nations suffer regular crop failures. The Soviet Empire containing some of the richest agricultural land in the world was a constant importer of food. Even today, it is poverty stricken and dependant on Western investment just to survive. People it seems are just not as hard working or as productive under a socialist system as people are under capitalism (just ask the West Germans what they think of their East German cousins now that the two nations have been reunited). The socialist farmer has no incentive to be productive because the state comes and takes all the “fruit” of his hard work away. Socialism by nature ALWAYS penalizes the most productive members of a society to support the LEAST productive members of society.

Furthermore, Marxist and Socialist nations have their power bases in the cities. They DEMAND cheap food to keep their supporters happy and therefore make the farmer pay the price for their remaining in power. Over time, the farmer wakes up to the fact that he cannot make a living on his small piece of land (even less likely if the land has been “collectivized”) and moves to the city as soon as possible where he can reap the “benefits” of cheap food without the back-breaking labor involved in even modern technological farming. Over time, farms become less and less productive, with less and less people working to produce food. The poorer a people become, the less they can afford the complex technological infrastructure necessary to optimize food production. This cycle continues until a drought, monsoon, or general economic collapse occurs, which then throws the entire nation into famine.

Most people do not realize that India and the former European colonies in Africa were food EXPORTING nations until they achieved independence. But usually, with that independence came some sort of socialist or Marxist economic philosophy. Now, they teeter on the verge of starvation not because there is not enough potential food to go around, but because government policy actually inhibits food production.

Furthermore, food production is also an inevitable consequence of a nation’s underlying religious beliefs. In India, there are “sacred cows” that either eat or destroy a significant percentage of their agricultural produce. If India converted to Christianity and turned these “sacred cows” into “holy hamburger” they could feed their entire population easily. At the same time, since Hinduism believes in reincarnation, they really do not want to deal with rats; after all that might be YOUR grandmother in that trap! Again, if India simply took appropriate actions against vermin, they could become a food EXPORTING nation with their surpluses! By the way, just for the record, England has a higher population density than India; yet no one thinks of England as “overpopulated.”

What many Christians do not seem to understand, because they have been indoctrinated with the Malthusian myth of overpopulation is that God says that bringing new people into the world is a BLESSING! Despite the gloom and doom sayers, God specifically promises in Deuteronomy 28 that if His people live faithfully before Him, He will bless not only their wombs with many children, but also their land to FEED their children. They will become SO wealthy, they will be able to LEND money (or export food) to the pagan nations around them!

Every covenant child that we bring into the world is another worker for the Kingdom, another warrior for righteousness, and over time, the principle of compound interest means that if we remain faithful, we will grow as a people, until we fill the earth, exercising dominion over it for the glory of God (Genesis 1:28ff). This is what God did for Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. It is what He did for the people in bondage in Egypt and in Babylon. It is what He did for us in Imperial Rome (the church grew as much through having large families and adopting exposed babies as it did by evangelism in the first three centuries of the Christian Church). Over time, He blessed us in Europe as the pagan nations became “civilized” submitted to King Jesus and He grew their populations.

And the opposite is true as well. As European nations have abandoned the gospel, they are also suffering from falling birthrates. What the Muslims were unable to accomplish with their armies in the past, they will soon be able to do through their fecundity in the near future. America may one day soon wake up to find that certain immigrant groups that do not accept our “enlightened” views on birth-control, abortion and small family size are now in the majority.

But, “what they hey!” that’s all in the future right? What has that got to do with me? More kids means less money for MY interests, my hobbies and MY self-indulgence. If I have a large family, I have to feed and clothe and educate the little brats who will just stick me in some nursing home anyway when I am old, right? Why should I care about what happens a hundred years from now? Surely the Lord is going to come back before then anyway, so why bother?

Well friend, just keep thinking that way; and I am sure that God will have some interesting things to say to you when He does return. He may want to know why you didn’t “fill the earth and subdue it” as He commanded. He might want to ask you about how aggressively you evangelized those immigrants with the gospel you deem so precious and necessary. He will probably demand an explanation of why something He said was a “blessing” (i.e., a large family- c.f. Psa 127:1ff) you considered a “curse.” And though He is sovereign, and His providence governs every area of life, He just might hold YOU accountable if the last vestiges of Christendom are allowed to fall because you were too lazy, too selfish or just too short-sighted to DO something when he gave you every incentive and resource needed to stop a coming disaster. But don’t worry too much, His will, will be done. Christians who DO accept His blessings and remain faithful to His covenant will increase until THEY fill the earth; they just won’t be YOUR children!

For you see, if we buy into the myth of “overpopulation” either because we never had an opportunity to think through it before, or because it was useful in justifying a self-indulgent lifestyle, our nation will lose its Christian heritage. And as people become consistent with their new religions, whether some version of Humanistic socialism or some variation of Eastern pantheism or even Islam, they will build here the very same kind of nations they fled from in the first place; nations that are poverty stricken, oppressed by tyrannical dictators, living on the verge of starvation.

And then there WILL be “overpopulation” because technology is no substitute for theology. God’s blessings in history are not random or chaotic but according to His revealed will. And one day, when you are standing by the Great White Throne awaiting your judgment, your children, and grandchildren (that is, if you HAVE any) just might have a few questions for you of their own…

[1] I am heavily indebted to Dr. Gary North’s “The Demographics of Decline” in appendix B of “Moses and Pharaoh,” ICE, Tyler Texas, 1985 for his discussion on the significance of Malthus. I trust the good doctor will not mind terribly the direction I took with his analysis.