Fiddling whilst Malthus Burns

The 19th Century economist Thomas Malthus is perhaps best remembered for his study on population. He conjectured that in an Industrialised Society, birth rate would increase and death rate would decrease, for a variety of logical reasons. Firstly, wages rising would allow more children to be supported. Secondly, these higher wages and advances in public health would allow better and more drugs to be bought, decreasing the deathrate further. All logical assumptions, especially the latter with the boom in the Victorian period and prior in Aspirin and other over the counter drugs. I first came across his name when studying the Mid-Tudor Crisis period, a time when population was rising and food stock was lowering- the population finally recovering after the Black Death and other waves of plague. However, Malthus has been proven wrong since the formulation of his theories. In Britain, the United States of America, Italy, and perhaps most drastically Japan and Germany, the elimination of the plight of the poor as the biggest social ill, and the raising of wages, medical care has in-fact led to a decrease in the birth rate. Elsewhere in China we have seen population grow so large that it is now partly controlled by government. We must face up to the fact that this coming century will be dominated by one central problem: overpopulation.

Overpopulation causes many problems, which don’t need to be elaborated on. And the construction of federations like the European Union, and surely more in future (‘The Shape of Things to Come, Part 2′) means immigration is becoming more likely, and so large countries like America and Britain won’t have their population go down as the birthrate should suggest, they will have their populations rise.

The answer to this problem is incredibly simple. Barring certain cultures, it seems that higher living standards and industrialisation lowers the birthrate. And in countries in Africa and others where famine is not a defeated beast, resources are the supreme decider of who lives and who dies. We must stop dithering around in trade rounds like Doha. The action is needed soon and quickly. Kofi Annan in an interview with Newsnight described the transition of Zimbabwe from “a breadbasket” to “a basketcase”. The answer to this is simple, we must liberalise farming, tear down subsidies and tarrifs, and stop playing politics with foodsupply. In the Ukraine, by law farmland cannot change hands, and thus there are literally tens of thousands of acres growing weeds. This was designed to protect the Ukrainian farmer from foreigners swooping in on the country’s greatest resource. This plan has failed spectacularly, just as the farm collectivisation plan of Mugabe failed in Zimbabwe. How can people produce and buy themselves out of poverty by their own merit if we have such restrictions beating them down simply to subsistence level? Forget the ‘Make Poverty History’ Campaign’s demands on world debt. We must not give guarantees to corrupt or inefficient African leaders that they can borrow irresponsibly and simply have it wiped out. The West can neither afford this during the current economic turmoil, nor can it allow it for the reason stated above.

Malthus has taught us a valuable lesson, and in-fact if his theory was true, then the next century would probably be the end of the age of plenty and the beginning of an age of limits, possibly even leading to world wars over resources.

We must abolish the Common Agricultural Policy in the EU, firstly. The ‘butter mountains’ and throwing away of milk has ceased as a problem, and there is a world crisis in food supply emerging. America, too, should abolish its protectionist policies- all such policies have failed spectacularly in the long-run, as evidenced by the health of agriculture and its below-needed output worldwide; the blame for this is not on the farmers, farmers in countries where such policies are in effect are no less fundamentally industrious in constitution than farmers in nations where such policies aren’t ruling. The failure, here, is of protectionist economics, not farmers.

Even if we out-produce Africa on a world level, they will be freed on a regional level, and with the spread of technologies like mobile phones, fairer trading is already happening, peasant farmers able to discover the current prices from hundreds of miles away with the help of the mobile phone. The liberalisation of farming will lead to standards being raised because a larger market will be for the taking by peasant farmers now on mere subsistence level. More and more people will be able to reach higher than subsistence levels, and the selling of their surplus grain on a local, regional and world level will lead to more money for such farmers- leading to more education and living standards. In an agrarian based economy as more technology is brought in, less workers are needed. This will invariably mean that population will decrease as a matter of course, but the growth in other, more service-based businesses as a result will surely mean that more Western-like countries spring up in Africa- this will mean less famine, and less wars, as less raw competition for resources will be needed. Furthermore, the growth in food production by Africa will lead to less demand for rainforests to be cut down in Brazil for farmland. This free-market driven leap forward can mean that Africa and other developing regions will be able to adopt cleaner, more advanced technologies which we have developed since our leap forward.

The answer, then is clear. Liberalisation of farming and other businesses is the beginning of population settling to a more manageable level. One answer for why it happens, suggested by Milton Friedman, was that seeing as in more advanced families children individually cost far more to raise (more luxuries being demanded rather than simply food) than in subsistence-level families. Developing countries must stop being black holes and be white holes, instead of pulling in money they must expel money and produce. Rather than resorting to China-like population controls, its clear in the observation of the failure of the Malthusian model to emerge that such measures are draconian and not needed. The short-term disasters of collectivisation programs and the long-term failure by protectionist polices like the Common Agricultural Policy to secure healthy agriculture is clear, and when something has failed then it should be hacked away. Too long have countries like France’s farmers had an unfair deal giving them advantage, while farmers in other countries have had an unfair deal causing disadvantage. Fair-trade and other such initiatives do nothing to cure the underlying ailment: that food is being used as an unfair political weapon, well into the 21st Century. It looks now that the long-term Doha round of trade talks will not complete its ambitious aims in any way, and what has already been achieved may be undone by the next generation of governments. We shouldn’t put economic power centrally in the hands of politicians, or let them decide where they don’t have the expertise to as in Zimbabwe; by raising living standards worldwide in such a basic, and immediately do-able way will go some way to getting on the right track to solving the huge problem of over-population: the statistics and examples are there to prove it will work. It’s time to stop fiddling while Malthus burns.