Malthusian Catastrophe - Criticism

Criticism

Ester Boserup wrote in her book The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure, that population levels determine agricultural methods, rather than agricultural methods determining population (via food supply). A major point of her book is that "necessity is the mother of invention." Julian Simon was one of many economists who challenged the Malthusian catastrophe, citing (1) the existence of new knowledge, and educated people to take advantage of it, and (2) "economic freedom", that is, the ability of the world to increase production when there is a profitable opportunity to do so.

The economist Henry George argued that Malthus didn't provide any evidence of a natural tendency for a population to overwhelm its ability to provide for itself. George wrote that even the main body of Malthus' work refuted this theory; that examples given show social causes for misery, such as "ignorance and greed... bad government, unjust laws, or war," rather than insufficient food production.

Friedrich Engels also criticizes the Malthusian catastrophe because Malthus failed to see that surplus population is connected to surplus wealth, surplus capital, and surplus landed property. Population is large where the overall productive power is large. Engels also states that the calculation that Malthus made with the difference in population and productive power is incorrect because Malthus does not take into consideration a third element, science. Scientific “progress is as unlimited and at least as rapid as that of population”. On the other hand, Joseph Tainter points out that also science has diminishing marginal returns and scientific progress is becoming more difficult, harder to achieve and costlier. The single gentleman scientist of the past covering several disciplines has turned into research groups with a special focus.

Read more about this topic:  Malthusian Catastrophe

Famous quotes containing the word criticism:

    Like speaks to like only; labor to labor, philosophy to philosophy, criticism to criticism, poetry to poetry. Literature speaks how much still to the past, how little to the future, how much to the East, how little to the West.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.
    Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)

    However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)