Malthus is back in vogue. (Or, Why I prefer to stick to the fannish stuff on my LJ.)

[the_grynne]

Bee Wilson in The New Yorker:
'In his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” of 1798, the English parson Thomas Malthus insisted that human populations would always be “checked” (a polite word for mass starvation) by the failure of food supplies to keep pace with population growth. For a long time, it looked as if what Malthus called the “dark

Comments

[trailer_spot]

Will you be mentioning one of the truly brilliant achievements of the Western world of our time, of using food to make filling up our gas tank cheaper? A process which is at the same time heavily subsidised by tax payers' money as well as used to trick people into thinking they are doing something good for the environment. :)

Good luck! :)

[the_grynne]

Our first speaker is going to bring it up, I do believe. ;)

Love your icon.

[trailer_spot]

Thanks! Dirk Nowitzki obviously doesn't understand the politics of food either. ;)

[the_grynne]

Malthus was one of the most influential (or at least the most provocative) of the early classical political economists - a contemporary of David Ricardo. He's most famous for his theory of population growth - a very pessimistic one, hence the negative connotation of "Malthusian".

There are a lot of books about the topic nowadays, I think. The article is a review of Paul Roberts' "The End of Food".

[the_grynne]

I remember the discussions about the scarcity of water being the cause of the next World War, and then, of course, oil.

Why not everything at once? It is all connected, after all. Agriculture is where the vast majority of our fresh water goes towards.

Oil, well, haven't we been fighting over that for decades already now?

[vaznetti]

Granted that I am not an economic historian, but I am not sure that this qualifies as a Malthusian Crisis in any technical sense -- at least, the problem doesn't seem to be the relationship between population growth and food production.

[the_grynne]

It depends on who you ask. Orthodox economics don't like to talk about "overpopulation", because it leads to ideas of social programs that are Nnot governed purely by market incentives, but some sub-disciplines (especially ones influenced by biology and ecology) will often make the point that it's a vicious cycle - unsustainable growth and production practices allow our population to grow unconstrained for a short-term, but then the constraints are felt as food shortages