Thomas Malthus: A Pessimistic View of Population Control

by Evan G.

The world’s rising human population isn’t the most pressing modern issue. It will nonetheless be a more discussed and debated topic in the near future. But is it really a major cause of concern to us? Thomas Malthus, author most famously of the Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), would probably be less concerned than others, as he thought that population problems were normally resolved on their own. He believed that nature provided necessary checks on the population to rebalance it after it became inflated. When the population was too large, disease and famine were among some of the inevitable outcomes. From his perspective, nature was eliminating a fragment of the population for the whole benefit of society. An example that relates to this concept is after the ‘Black Death’, when the massive population loss led to an overall improvement in life for those who had survived. This was primarily because there was more open land to cultivate and thus more food. Prior to the spreading of the virus, hunger and poverty were widespread throughout Europe. Population growth had begun to outweigh the rate of agricultural production. Based on Malthus’ thinking, the Black Death could therefore be seen as nature’s check on the overcrowded population. Malthus also had an unsympathetic attitude towards poverty, believing that welfare was essentially wasteful because the poor were actually hurting society by draining its resources. There’s certainly some sort of logic to the idea that overpopulation can lead to famine and disease and that welfare is costly, but Malthus’ overall thinking is too cynical and unscientific. There is no known force in nature that governs population control and the poor aren’t unfit to reproduce or undeserving of welfare.

Life expectancy has risen drastically throughout the world over the past hundred years. The earth is more overcrowded with humans now than it has ever been. Hunger still affects millions of people throughout the world, but it is far less prevalent today, especially in advanced industrial nations such as the U.S. Population growth hasn’t outweighed our means to obtain food. One of America’s largest recent issues has been the obesity rate, which is in part due to an endless supply of unhealthy and high-calorie food options. We can feed millions of people today with ease, while for centuries it was a complicated task to provide food for even a relatively small and controllable population. Despite the fact that the world’s population is steadily increasing, we don’t see many of these ‘checks’ from nature that Malthus envisioned. It seems more likely that we as a society are learning how to better handle and manage large populations. These checks from nature such as famine and hunger are actually signs of society’s failure to properly manage its population. Some could take Malthus’ ideas further by interpreting a natural disaster such as an earthquake, tornado, or hurricane as nature’s way of rebalancing the population. But this is more like the ideology of a religious extremist than that of a rational scientist. Nature doesn’t intend to eliminate certain humans for the benefit of other humans. This is the type of thinking that separates man from himself and nature.