An old misconception

The preoccupations of an age are often given away by its choice of prophet. In the 90s, Karl Marx came back into vogue, not as the John the Baptist of the class struggle, but as a reliable guide to globalisation and its discontents. Old Whiskers was even the subject of a long New Yorker essay, which argued that Wall Street types had nothing to lose by reading him. Over the last couple of years, it has been Thomas Malthus’s turn in the spotlight. The spectre of “Pop” Malthus, as students referred to his work on population growth, has hovered over the recent arguments about record food and fuel prices. His warnings about how growing populations would outstrip food supply are often echoed by greens and on blogs. And today the British Medical Journal weighs in, with an online opinion piece that is essentially Malthus-lite.


The problem that the BMJ authors and others highlight is real; the solution they give, however, is plain wrong. True, a shortage of food is only heightened by a rising population; the same goes for tackling climate change. The statistic one often hears from the population-control lobby is that the world will have 9.2bn people by 2050. Someone born in 1950 who lives to be 100 will see the global population grow well over threefold. That may sound scary, but it does not prove a direct causal link between commodity supply or greenhouse gases, and population growth. The proper link is between consumption and commodities, and between emissions and climate change. Anything else is a side issue.

Guardian