This makes me think that "soft skills" while denigrated and seen as "soft" in a Malthusian world, are adaptions and needed for survival in a hyper-modern world. Essentially, if you are around a lot of people all the time, and it's benefical to have lots more people, you need ot learn to live with them. Generosity, kindness, civility and related qualities makes things a lot easier in this sense.
I'm skeptical this has anything to do with Malthusian thinking. It's explained simply by a few facts:
1) People often fear change and they move to the kind of place they want to live. Worse, it's easy to appreciate what might be lost and hard to imagine what might be gained.
2) People tend to be relatively selfish. They might give all sorts of justifications but there is a overall pressure to pick the view which makes them feel comfortable.
3) The economic arguments are sufficiently complex and detailed that they don't slap you in the face with the fact that your anti-growth position is hurting people.
As evidence for this I cite the fact that when you ask people about the national level they are rarely anti-growth (except for a few far left environmentalists). It's usually just that there is some reason growth shouldn't happen where they are.
Malthusian instincts may not be very irrational when it comes to transport (at least in large cities). Transport, and not housing, can frequently be the bottleneck for city populations. Updating an existing transport network or building new ones in an area already densely populated is significantly harder than building new homes/commercial areas (welcome an interjection from anyone with numbers on this or have knowledge of relevant laws), and population spikes could cause transport networks to fail.
Speaking anecdotally, in London, where I live, subway trains are mostly saturated, or close to saturated (coming in every 2/3 minutes), and during peak hours it is common to be unable to board carriages because they're too full. Even pedestrian areas aren't spared - walking through chinatown on a weekend, you'd have a whole 3 square feet to yourself. Jakarta, where I grew up, is a similar story - the roads barely move in peak hours.
I guess the point is that there are critical parts of a city, transport networks chief among them, that are not labour limited (as opposed to, as you say, commerce and healthcare). For these cases, population spikes from removing zoning laws could genuinely make people's lives worse, even if the cities become more economically prosperous on paper.
Your comment regarding toll roads brings to mine those which have been constructed in my living area. I see them utilized so sparingly that I cannot believe they will ever pay for their construction. They were supposed to be a means to alieve congestion but they have not done so. Specifically I'm speaking of those around Atlanta Georgia and Jacksonville Florida. Do you know of anything that suggests that this intervention has been successful?
I find it somewhat fitting, somewhat ironic that the more we make farming output a function of the built environment (think equipment and fertilizer manufacturing, irrigation and water management systems, and maybe increasingly indoor agriculture) rather than land, the more the same kinds of restrictions that make population growth less beneficial in cities today could end up inhibiting growth in food production itself, too.
What with Christmas dinner on many people’s minds, I don’t think I have seen a comment on the humble potato yet. Far from just being a great way to convey butter and gravy from fork to mouth, or deep-fried and dipped in ketchup, the introduction of the potato to the Old World did a lot to improve living conditions. I somehow stumbled across all this in research for another project, and, the whole idea that we might not have had the Industrial Revolution without potatoes is something to contemplate.
Potatoes are an easy to grow staple crop that provide far more nutrition than grains. They were something of the world’s first “superfood.” They stored well, and could provide a complete diet when supplemented with dairy and a green vegetable like cabbage. Unless the crop was destroyed by a blight (we all know what happened to Ireland) it helped a lot more people have more kids who lived to grow up, so they didn’t need “all hands on deck” (or, rather, farm) and could send some to work in factories and mills. And thus a way of life was born and Malthus probably had to re-think some things. (Also, the quintessential British dish of fish and chips was the OG value meal for the urban poor who didn’t have stoves or fireplaces in their tenements and flophouses. Fish and potatoes were more nourishing than bread and dripping.)
How the potato ushered in an era of peace: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/how-the-potato-ushered-in-an-era-of-peace (Basically, you didn’t need as much land to grow potatoes, so far fewer small-scale wars over land. And potatoes were harder to steal; you could pillage what you found in a storehouse, but marauding armies are not going to stop and dig around in the fields to find potatoes, nor can they burn the crops, because, again, underground.)
How the potato reversed demographic decline in Europe: https://qz.com/quartzy/1148452/potato2 (Scurvy, for instance was common in 17th century Europe, but potatoes are rich in vitamin C, so that was that. You could feed a lot more people a lot better with a lot less land, and now peasants had an easy and nutritious source of animal fodder as well (potatoes could feed pigs and other livestock very well) and so more people had meat in their diet. And so we have a healthier population who had more surviving children, and went to work in those dark satanic mills, and the rest is history. (And an interesting aside from Adam Smith on how Irish women were, so to speak, spud muffins, being the most beautiful women in Britain because they ate potatoes.)
Think about this the next time you pass the mashed potatoes!
Good post. And it is not just about immigration. Malthusian intuitions are incredibly widespread and seriously undermine our ability to understand modern society. There is a great book -- "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling that opened my eyes on this.
This is by far my most rightist take, so I apologize, but I am becoming convinced that we, as humans, have forgotten that it takes 3 children per couple, or we will all die as a species. I get that for most of human history this wasn't an issue, and for some places it still isn't, but it seems like the general goal of civilization is to make those places wealthy enough eventually to be like us. Not to sound all alarmist, but when you do population decline studies in test animals, sometimes those species just undergo population collapse, and they don't recover even if, after a big die off, access to space and food resources dramatically increase. No, it's like they are psychically damaged by the whole process and let themselves die. Birth rates seem only to be falling in the developed world. The reason why this is my most rightist take, is that feminism, as it currently manifests, is one of the culprits, but there is plenty of blame to go around. The irony is that women bare all of the burden of those 3 required child births, so in many ways as a man, there isn't that much I personally can do about it. Pro growth policies seem like the bare minimum of effort to help with this.
I think that part of the problem is that children are a *societal* good once they become productive adults, but *raising them to that point* is mostly the parents’ very expensive and time-consuming responsibility. Yes, we have public education and so on, but so much in the way of time, effort, and money (oh, the money) falls on the individual parents. And when what is called “intensive parenting” is THE way to raise a kid…Sure, a lot of people get joy and satisfaction from that parenting experience! But 1) many others don’t, and 2) since “the parenting experience” has replaced “more hands on the farm” as a reason to have kids, then you can get that experience (and love and joy and whatever else) from having just one or two kids. You can also have two kids and be almost guaranteed both will be alive 20 years later.
Asking people to sacrifice lots of time, energy and money in the name of “future taxpayers” is… complicated. I do think we need to make it easier to have and raise kids, especially in the early years when it’s more a slog. But even Scandinavian countries which heavily subsidize children (child care, baby boxes, home visitors, etc.) are still seeing declines in family size.
For a long time, immigration - all the tax paying adults without the bother of raising them! - filled the gap. But now, sending countries have lower birth rates too. How to get people to believe that putting in at least 18 and now more like 25 years of hard work and lots of money is worth it is one of the big questions of our time.
Anti-Malthusian pieces are my favorite pieces. I like when Matt writes them. I like when Brad DeLong writes them. I like when Noah Smith writes them. Being able to escape Malthusian limits, understanding HOW we did it, with the ethics to continue it sustainably is truly incredible. Humans from the past could perceive us as gods yet wonder why we're so disgruntled (though I suppose most gods of antiquity were often pretty mad).
You argue that everyone is better off with increasing population, but that is only true *on average*. So of course you're going to get resistance from those who are worse off, which often outweighs the support of those who are better off (perhaps because of loss aversion). But economics knows how to fix this---transfer payments to move value from those who benefit to those who lose. Why isn't this broadly used to encourage housing? The losers are generally the people closest to the new construction, so why not pay them off with cash or with lower property taxes, paid for by the property taxes on the new construction? Couldn't this turn them into supporters?
One thing is Malthusian logic was always a choice not a necessity even prior to Adam Smith. The reason China was poor was not technological but because of bad governance/institutions. The problem is that the Malthusian instinct and aversion to trade and profit is incredibly deeply rooted.
As far as I can tell, Malthusian political leadership may return the economy to those zero-sum dynamics. In Putin’s Russia and many other nations, gangsterism reigns supreme, and those parties who create wealth thru innovation generally get robbed by the gangsters, if they even bother. While benefits come from tech innovation developed elsewhere, wealth does not. So those economies are generally purely about capturing resources and tolling
Sociologist Kamil Galeev has an excellent concept of violent entrepreneurs vs non-violent entrepreneurs. He calls the latter “hot house flowers” only flourishing when the violent entrepreneur are continually uprooted.
It legit frightens me what American dictatorship could do to our economy. How much innovation might move elsewhere? Or never arrive in the first place.
Whenever Matt goes after Malthusian intuitions, my tech-questioning intuition keeps asking why do we have to keep taking away jobs by automating everything? Perhaps industry's hatred of paying real people living wages is deeply incompatible with a growing population.
mostly agree, but "Between 1798 and 1898, technology advanced a lot, to the point where living standards genuinely rose. And in modern countries, this is what drives prosperity: the pace of technological innovation, but also the speed at which those innovations can be deployed."
yeah, obv innovation increased. BUT the demographic transition as the real kicker. malthus did not anticipate that ppl would have smaller families. we could be in a malthusian world right now even with our fertilizer; ppl could choose to have massive families and push themselves back to subsistence.
i mean, almost all of it. that's why the population didn't grow
my only point is malthus is right that agricultural output would grow geometrically. he was wrong about how long exponential growth would happen. he didn't realize the demographic transition was a thing (though it was starting in france in a small way already)
In some history book or another, I read that London’s population only grew due to immigration right up to the mid 19th century or thereabouts. Child mortality was so high due to crowded, unsanitary conditions, (and syphilis!) that it was not uncommon for every single child in a family to die before age 5.
Yep, not just London. Cities the world over were population sinks possibly since the very beginning. Pre-industrial Europe may have been particularly bad because very few agricultural and medicinal inventions had occurred yet, but nearly all the major pathogenic killers (measles, smallpox, TB, etc..) had occurred.
Somewhat, yes. But he also didn't anticipate how much technological progress we can make and part of the reason we have so much is we _have_ a lot of people who can be employed making that progress.
I won't deny that there must be limits at some point without _major_ technological change (moving everyone to Mars/moon/w/e), but one difference is that the existence _of_ those more people pushes the line back farther as well through innovation at scale.
Occurs to me that MAGA and nationalist attitudes in general seem to rely on this zero sum thinking, especially among rural/farming communities that are especially sensitive to population influx. There’s only so much to go around, so goes the mentality, especially as it concerns government spending and public resources. The thinking fails to consider increases to tax base and long term benefits of population growth.
It occurs to me also that much anti-immigrant status is really just coded racism. Or perhaps to be more generous, fear of cultural change due to influx of foreign cultures.
You know who are experiencing Malthusian and worse pressures from human population growth? Our plant and animal friends... at least those that don't participate in the human garbage food chain. Through no fault of their own, many species have been, and will be lost to climate change and human encroachment on their ecosystems.
I suppose we could structure our growth more wisely to leave ample space and available to maintain some level of biodiversity with appropriate management (see E.O. Wilson's Half Earth initiative, for example) but it certainly hasn't been a priority thus far, and it's not clear that it ever would be.
I guess I'm a softy, but it's upsetting to see this get overlooked so often in these discussions, and to see literal laughing off people's concerns about bad outcomes from climate change. I have not doubt that humans will survive climate change and perhaps thrive well into the future. Some of value more life than just human.
I think the solution to this is going to have to be cheap fusion power, however long it ends up taking us to develop it. Once energy is nearly free, things like hydroponics and lab-grown meat start to make a lot more economic sense, allowing us to drastically reduce humanity's collective land use footprint. Then we can support the current human population and more with a mix of high-density cities, agricultural factories, some resource extraction sites, and smaller towns dotting the countryside, and will be able to afford to re-wild most of the world (if we choose to, as you rightly point out).
(This is not my original idea by the way, I got it from a recent Noah Smith podcast.)
I completely agree with you that we have a moral responsibility to preserve the environment for the non-human life we share the planet with. But I believe the way to get there involves *more* development, not less — denser cities, solar and wind farms, and a scientific push for fusion power. The only way out is through.
This makes me think that "soft skills" while denigrated and seen as "soft" in a Malthusian world, are adaptions and needed for survival in a hyper-modern world. Essentially, if you are around a lot of people all the time, and it's benefical to have lots more people, you need ot learn to live with them. Generosity, kindness, civility and related qualities makes things a lot easier in this sense.
I'm skeptical this has anything to do with Malthusian thinking. It's explained simply by a few facts:
1) People often fear change and they move to the kind of place they want to live. Worse, it's easy to appreciate what might be lost and hard to imagine what might be gained.
2) People tend to be relatively selfish. They might give all sorts of justifications but there is a overall pressure to pick the view which makes them feel comfortable.
3) The economic arguments are sufficiently complex and detailed that they don't slap you in the face with the fact that your anti-growth position is hurting people.
As evidence for this I cite the fact that when you ask people about the national level they are rarely anti-growth (except for a few far left environmentalists). It's usually just that there is some reason growth shouldn't happen where they are.
Malthusian instincts may not be very irrational when it comes to transport (at least in large cities). Transport, and not housing, can frequently be the bottleneck for city populations. Updating an existing transport network or building new ones in an area already densely populated is significantly harder than building new homes/commercial areas (welcome an interjection from anyone with numbers on this or have knowledge of relevant laws), and population spikes could cause transport networks to fail.
Speaking anecdotally, in London, where I live, subway trains are mostly saturated, or close to saturated (coming in every 2/3 minutes), and during peak hours it is common to be unable to board carriages because they're too full. Even pedestrian areas aren't spared - walking through chinatown on a weekend, you'd have a whole 3 square feet to yourself. Jakarta, where I grew up, is a similar story - the roads barely move in peak hours.
I guess the point is that there are critical parts of a city, transport networks chief among them, that are not labour limited (as opposed to, as you say, commerce and healthcare). For these cases, population spikes from removing zoning laws could genuinely make people's lives worse, even if the cities become more economically prosperous on paper.
Your comment regarding toll roads brings to mine those which have been constructed in my living area. I see them utilized so sparingly that I cannot believe they will ever pay for their construction. They were supposed to be a means to alieve congestion but they have not done so. Specifically I'm speaking of those around Atlanta Georgia and Jacksonville Florida. Do you know of anything that suggests that this intervention has been successful?
I find it somewhat fitting, somewhat ironic that the more we make farming output a function of the built environment (think equipment and fertilizer manufacturing, irrigation and water management systems, and maybe increasingly indoor agriculture) rather than land, the more the same kinds of restrictions that make population growth less beneficial in cities today could end up inhibiting growth in food production itself, too.
What with Christmas dinner on many people’s minds, I don’t think I have seen a comment on the humble potato yet. Far from just being a great way to convey butter and gravy from fork to mouth, or deep-fried and dipped in ketchup, the introduction of the potato to the Old World did a lot to improve living conditions. I somehow stumbled across all this in research for another project, and, the whole idea that we might not have had the Industrial Revolution without potatoes is something to contemplate.
Potatoes are an easy to grow staple crop that provide far more nutrition than grains. They were something of the world’s first “superfood.” They stored well, and could provide a complete diet when supplemented with dairy and a green vegetable like cabbage. Unless the crop was destroyed by a blight (we all know what happened to Ireland) it helped a lot more people have more kids who lived to grow up, so they didn’t need “all hands on deck” (or, rather, farm) and could send some to work in factories and mills. And thus a way of life was born and Malthus probably had to re-think some things. (Also, the quintessential British dish of fish and chips was the OG value meal for the urban poor who didn’t have stoves or fireplaces in their tenements and flophouses. Fish and potatoes were more nourishing than bread and dripping.)
How the potato ushered in an era of peace: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/how-the-potato-ushered-in-an-era-of-peace (Basically, you didn’t need as much land to grow potatoes, so far fewer small-scale wars over land. And potatoes were harder to steal; you could pillage what you found in a storehouse, but marauding armies are not going to stop and dig around in the fields to find potatoes, nor can they burn the crops, because, again, underground.)
How the potato reversed demographic decline in Europe: https://qz.com/quartzy/1148452/potato2 (Scurvy, for instance was common in 17th century Europe, but potatoes are rich in vitamin C, so that was that. You could feed a lot more people a lot better with a lot less land, and now peasants had an easy and nutritious source of animal fodder as well (potatoes could feed pigs and other livestock very well) and so more people had meat in their diet. And so we have a healthier population who had more surviving children, and went to work in those dark satanic mills, and the rest is history. (And an interesting aside from Adam Smith on how Irish women were, so to speak, spud muffins, being the most beautiful women in Britain because they ate potatoes.)
Think about this the next time you pass the mashed potatoes!
Good post. And it is not just about immigration. Malthusian intuitions are incredibly widespread and seriously undermine our ability to understand modern society. There is a great book -- "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling that opened my eyes on this.
This is by far my most rightist take, so I apologize, but I am becoming convinced that we, as humans, have forgotten that it takes 3 children per couple, or we will all die as a species. I get that for most of human history this wasn't an issue, and for some places it still isn't, but it seems like the general goal of civilization is to make those places wealthy enough eventually to be like us. Not to sound all alarmist, but when you do population decline studies in test animals, sometimes those species just undergo population collapse, and they don't recover even if, after a big die off, access to space and food resources dramatically increase. No, it's like they are psychically damaged by the whole process and let themselves die. Birth rates seem only to be falling in the developed world. The reason why this is my most rightist take, is that feminism, as it currently manifests, is one of the culprits, but there is plenty of blame to go around. The irony is that women bare all of the burden of those 3 required child births, so in many ways as a man, there isn't that much I personally can do about it. Pro growth policies seem like the bare minimum of effort to help with this.
I think that part of the problem is that children are a *societal* good once they become productive adults, but *raising them to that point* is mostly the parents’ very expensive and time-consuming responsibility. Yes, we have public education and so on, but so much in the way of time, effort, and money (oh, the money) falls on the individual parents. And when what is called “intensive parenting” is THE way to raise a kid…Sure, a lot of people get joy and satisfaction from that parenting experience! But 1) many others don’t, and 2) since “the parenting experience” has replaced “more hands on the farm” as a reason to have kids, then you can get that experience (and love and joy and whatever else) from having just one or two kids. You can also have two kids and be almost guaranteed both will be alive 20 years later.
Asking people to sacrifice lots of time, energy and money in the name of “future taxpayers” is… complicated. I do think we need to make it easier to have and raise kids, especially in the early years when it’s more a slog. But even Scandinavian countries which heavily subsidize children (child care, baby boxes, home visitors, etc.) are still seeing declines in family size.
For a long time, immigration - all the tax paying adults without the bother of raising them! - filled the gap. But now, sending countries have lower birth rates too. How to get people to believe that putting in at least 18 and now more like 25 years of hard work and lots of money is worth it is one of the big questions of our time.
Anti-Malthusian pieces are my favorite pieces. I like when Matt writes them. I like when Brad DeLong writes them. I like when Noah Smith writes them. Being able to escape Malthusian limits, understanding HOW we did it, with the ethics to continue it sustainably is truly incredible. Humans from the past could perceive us as gods yet wonder why we're so disgruntled (though I suppose most gods of antiquity were often pretty mad).
You argue that everyone is better off with increasing population, but that is only true *on average*. So of course you're going to get resistance from those who are worse off, which often outweighs the support of those who are better off (perhaps because of loss aversion). But economics knows how to fix this---transfer payments to move value from those who benefit to those who lose. Why isn't this broadly used to encourage housing? The losers are generally the people closest to the new construction, so why not pay them off with cash or with lower property taxes, paid for by the property taxes on the new construction? Couldn't this turn them into supporters?
One thing is Malthusian logic was always a choice not a necessity even prior to Adam Smith. The reason China was poor was not technological but because of bad governance/institutions. The problem is that the Malthusian instinct and aversion to trade and profit is incredibly deeply rooted.
Fascinating ideas here, thank you
As far as I can tell, Malthusian political leadership may return the economy to those zero-sum dynamics. In Putin’s Russia and many other nations, gangsterism reigns supreme, and those parties who create wealth thru innovation generally get robbed by the gangsters, if they even bother. While benefits come from tech innovation developed elsewhere, wealth does not. So those economies are generally purely about capturing resources and tolling
Sociologist Kamil Galeev has an excellent concept of violent entrepreneurs vs non-violent entrepreneurs. He calls the latter “hot house flowers” only flourishing when the violent entrepreneur are continually uprooted.
It legit frightens me what American dictatorship could do to our economy. How much innovation might move elsewhere? Or never arrive in the first place.
Whenever Matt goes after Malthusian intuitions, my tech-questioning intuition keeps asking why do we have to keep taking away jobs by automating everything? Perhaps industry's hatred of paying real people living wages is deeply incompatible with a growing population.
mostly agree, but "Between 1798 and 1898, technology advanced a lot, to the point where living standards genuinely rose. And in modern countries, this is what drives prosperity: the pace of technological innovation, but also the speed at which those innovations can be deployed."
yeah, obv innovation increased. BUT the demographic transition as the real kicker. malthus did not anticipate that ppl would have smaller families. we could be in a malthusian world right now even with our fertilizer; ppl could choose to have massive families and push themselves back to subsistence.
How much of the higher birth rate in preindustrial times was offset by a higher child mortality rate?
i mean, almost all of it. that's why the population didn't grow
my only point is malthus is right that agricultural output would grow geometrically. he was wrong about how long exponential growth would happen. he didn't realize the demographic transition was a thing (though it was starting in france in a small way already)
In some history book or another, I read that London’s population only grew due to immigration right up to the mid 19th century or thereabouts. Child mortality was so high due to crowded, unsanitary conditions, (and syphilis!) that it was not uncommon for every single child in a family to die before age 5.
Yep, not just London. Cities the world over were population sinks possibly since the very beginning. Pre-industrial Europe may have been particularly bad because very few agricultural and medicinal inventions had occurred yet, but nearly all the major pathogenic killers (measles, smallpox, TB, etc..) had occurred.
this. it took until about 1900 and public health to make cities > 2 TFR but even now they lower again
Somewhat, yes. But he also didn't anticipate how much technological progress we can make and part of the reason we have so much is we _have_ a lot of people who can be employed making that progress.
I won't deny that there must be limits at some point without _major_ technological change (moving everyone to Mars/moon/w/e), but one difference is that the existence _of_ those more people pushes the line back farther as well through innovation at scale.
marx was more right on technology than malthus
without haber-bosch there could only be 4 billion or so of us. no one could imagine 8 billion in 1900
Great piece.
Occurs to me that MAGA and nationalist attitudes in general seem to rely on this zero sum thinking, especially among rural/farming communities that are especially sensitive to population influx. There’s only so much to go around, so goes the mentality, especially as it concerns government spending and public resources. The thinking fails to consider increases to tax base and long term benefits of population growth.
It occurs to me also that much anti-immigrant status is really just coded racism. Or perhaps to be more generous, fear of cultural change due to influx of foreign cultures.
You know who are experiencing Malthusian and worse pressures from human population growth? Our plant and animal friends... at least those that don't participate in the human garbage food chain. Through no fault of their own, many species have been, and will be lost to climate change and human encroachment on their ecosystems.
I suppose we could structure our growth more wisely to leave ample space and available to maintain some level of biodiversity with appropriate management (see E.O. Wilson's Half Earth initiative, for example) but it certainly hasn't been a priority thus far, and it's not clear that it ever would be.
I guess I'm a softy, but it's upsetting to see this get overlooked so often in these discussions, and to see literal laughing off people's concerns about bad outcomes from climate change. I have not doubt that humans will survive climate change and perhaps thrive well into the future. Some of value more life than just human.
I think the solution to this is going to have to be cheap fusion power, however long it ends up taking us to develop it. Once energy is nearly free, things like hydroponics and lab-grown meat start to make a lot more economic sense, allowing us to drastically reduce humanity's collective land use footprint. Then we can support the current human population and more with a mix of high-density cities, agricultural factories, some resource extraction sites, and smaller towns dotting the countryside, and will be able to afford to re-wild most of the world (if we choose to, as you rightly point out).
(This is not my original idea by the way, I got it from a recent Noah Smith podcast.)
I completely agree with you that we have a moral responsibility to preserve the environment for the non-human life we share the planet with. But I believe the way to get there involves *more* development, not less — denser cities, solar and wind farms, and a scientific push for fusion power. The only way out is through.