There are some in the environmental alarmist camp that hold that it is unethical to have children. We are already putting so much stress on the planet, that more people will only add to the problem. This reasoning echoes the early Christian millenarian thinking which concluded that bringing children into a dying world full of suffering was sinful. The religious beliefs of the environmental fundamentalists are at their core a variant of the Malthusian Thesis.
Robbie Malthus is famous for his late-18th century thesis that unless draconian population controls were soon enforced and charity to the poor outlawed, the population will outgrow its ability to produce food, causing mass starvation, disease and conflict. Malthus was not the first to make this kind of argument and he certainly wasn't the last. Over the centuries many apocalyptic predictions about running out of food, or oil or some other resource have been made.
Ricardo, the Austrian school and even Marx criticised these types of arguments both on the grounds that they are wrong conceptually and theoretically and also that they simply have never panned out. Interestingly, Keynes does seem to share a Maltusian worldview in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, adding to the many ways that Keynes was dead wrong.
Malthus was also wrong, every Malthusian thesis is wrong and to call something "Malthusian" is to imply that it is wrong. Not only did world population continue to grow in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that growth rapidly accelerated to level that would have been beyond Malthus' comprehension. And not only did we not starve, we thrived, with food production growing even more rapidly than population and world hunger continually falling the whole time. Indeed today we have the largest population in history and the lowest levels of starvation in history and also the lowest percentage of people employed in food production in history.
Despite the obvious failure of the thesis, it has been resurrected time and time again. The environmental fundamentalists proselytise about our impending doom and stress the impact of human population. The belief that the human population is growing unsustainably is alive and well and very widespread. Demographers, at least, have largely agreed (97% or them?) that the world's population will peak out at around 11 billion in the near future. So mankind's population will have gone from a low plateau to a high plateau and reach a new equilibrium for a while.
But that is not why the Malthusians are wrong! Malthus was wrong not because the population didn't keep on increasing (it did), he was wrong because we didn't starve. He was wrong because he, like the fundamentalist environmentalists and prevailing public opinion misunderstand resources. The thing is that before humans, there were no resources. Crude oil existed before humans, and even when humans came into contact with it before the 20th century, it wasn't a resource. The material world only turns into resources through man's intervention. Indeed there is more oil now than ever before. There is more coal, more gas, even more trees under cultivation.
What the thesis' narrow viewpoint misses is that while we might be able to imagine ever increasing demands on the resources we have, it is harder to anticipate the effect of other factors on the resources we will have in the future. Innovation might make more resources available by making it profitable to extract them where once it wasn't. A substitute might be discovered that is cheaper or superior in some other way. New ways of saving resources or reusing them might be discovered. History is replete with examples of ways that humans have adapted to the world and the material we find in it.
All of this innovation, substitution, investment, allocation, rationing and other resource management strategies are regulated. Not by government (thankfully), but by the price system. As supplies of a given resource dwindle or demand for it increases, its price increases. This sends a message to investors to lend their capital to the production of that resource, to the scientists to find new ways of improving our consumption of it, to the inventors to come up with alternatives and of course to the consumers to reconsider our priorities.
Let us imagine that we didn't find massive new reserves of crude oil and that the fracking and coal liquefaction techniques were never developed and that the oil reserves we had in the 90s (when I was warned that we would run out of oil by 2010) were all we were ever going to have. The price of oil would be in the stratosphere by now. There would still be oil, but its high cost would ensure that it was allocated only to the uses that were most necessary. In the meantime, the ever increasing price might have incentivised all sorts of innovations in mobility, energy and chemistry.
This would not be a good thing in of itself. The time, effort and capital employed in discovering, perfecting and creating alternatives and innovations will not have been spent on something else. However, the point is that mankind will still thrive, just like we did before oil became a resource.
This also highlights the danger and inherent clumsiness of government intervention in the price system. Subsidies can cause a resource to be over-utilised and taxation can cause under-utilisation. If, for example, government requires all schoolwork to be done in pencil or subsidises pencils in schools, this would artificially increase the demand for pencils. This will lead to more demand for wood, graphite and rubber. In turn, the price mechanism will transmit this into more production of the resource, less production of alternatives and a re-allocation of priorities not for the efficient fulfillment of our desires, but for the fulfillment of some self-important bureaucrat's expression of power.
St' Paul's Bay, October 10th 2019
TLDR: our children will be fine as long as they are free
Robbie Malthus is famous for his late-18th century thesis that unless draconian population controls were soon enforced and charity to the poor outlawed, the population will outgrow its ability to produce food, causing mass starvation, disease and conflict. Malthus was not the first to make this kind of argument and he certainly wasn't the last. Over the centuries many apocalyptic predictions about running out of food, or oil or some other resource have been made.
Ricardo, the Austrian school and even Marx criticised these types of arguments both on the grounds that they are wrong conceptually and theoretically and also that they simply have never panned out. Interestingly, Keynes does seem to share a Maltusian worldview in his Economic Consequences of the Peace, adding to the many ways that Keynes was dead wrong.
Malthus was also wrong, every Malthusian thesis is wrong and to call something "Malthusian" is to imply that it is wrong. Not only did world population continue to grow in the 19th and 20th centuries, but that growth rapidly accelerated to level that would have been beyond Malthus' comprehension. And not only did we not starve, we thrived, with food production growing even more rapidly than population and world hunger continually falling the whole time. Indeed today we have the largest population in history and the lowest levels of starvation in history and also the lowest percentage of people employed in food production in history.
Despite the obvious failure of the thesis, it has been resurrected time and time again. The environmental fundamentalists proselytise about our impending doom and stress the impact of human population. The belief that the human population is growing unsustainably is alive and well and very widespread. Demographers, at least, have largely agreed (97% or them?) that the world's population will peak out at around 11 billion in the near future. So mankind's population will have gone from a low plateau to a high plateau and reach a new equilibrium for a while.
But that is not why the Malthusians are wrong! Malthus was wrong not because the population didn't keep on increasing (it did), he was wrong because we didn't starve. He was wrong because he, like the fundamentalist environmentalists and prevailing public opinion misunderstand resources. The thing is that before humans, there were no resources. Crude oil existed before humans, and even when humans came into contact with it before the 20th century, it wasn't a resource. The material world only turns into resources through man's intervention. Indeed there is more oil now than ever before. There is more coal, more gas, even more trees under cultivation.
What the thesis' narrow viewpoint misses is that while we might be able to imagine ever increasing demands on the resources we have, it is harder to anticipate the effect of other factors on the resources we will have in the future. Innovation might make more resources available by making it profitable to extract them where once it wasn't. A substitute might be discovered that is cheaper or superior in some other way. New ways of saving resources or reusing them might be discovered. History is replete with examples of ways that humans have adapted to the world and the material we find in it.
All of this innovation, substitution, investment, allocation, rationing and other resource management strategies are regulated. Not by government (thankfully), but by the price system. As supplies of a given resource dwindle or demand for it increases, its price increases. This sends a message to investors to lend their capital to the production of that resource, to the scientists to find new ways of improving our consumption of it, to the inventors to come up with alternatives and of course to the consumers to reconsider our priorities.
Let us imagine that we didn't find massive new reserves of crude oil and that the fracking and coal liquefaction techniques were never developed and that the oil reserves we had in the 90s (when I was warned that we would run out of oil by 2010) were all we were ever going to have. The price of oil would be in the stratosphere by now. There would still be oil, but its high cost would ensure that it was allocated only to the uses that were most necessary. In the meantime, the ever increasing price might have incentivised all sorts of innovations in mobility, energy and chemistry.
This would not be a good thing in of itself. The time, effort and capital employed in discovering, perfecting and creating alternatives and innovations will not have been spent on something else. However, the point is that mankind will still thrive, just like we did before oil became a resource.
This also highlights the danger and inherent clumsiness of government intervention in the price system. Subsidies can cause a resource to be over-utilised and taxation can cause under-utilisation. If, for example, government requires all schoolwork to be done in pencil or subsidises pencils in schools, this would artificially increase the demand for pencils. This will lead to more demand for wood, graphite and rubber. In turn, the price mechanism will transmit this into more production of the resource, less production of alternatives and a re-allocation of priorities not for the efficient fulfillment of our desires, but for the fulfillment of some self-important bureaucrat's expression of power.
St' Paul's Bay, October 10th 2019
TLDR: our children will be fine as long as they are free
