lostsoul
10th January 2004, 17:37
Thomas Malthus wrote an article "on population" which basically states that we should not help the poor because they should struggle for their survival. since they are not as valuable to society as the upper class, he insisted, hunger, war, death was "gods" way of keeping their numbers in control.
I know it sounds messed up, and there is a simlair trend going on in the science and tech section of this site.
But some cappy friends tried to use Mr.Malthus's work to discourage me from working on socialism or anything that will aid the needy. After closer investagation, it turns out that their universiy's economic class's teachs Adam Smith, Mr.Malthus and many opposers of socialism, while totally ignoring marx. After learning that for the whole year, they spend the last 3 weeks studying a few chapters on marx and have to write a report worth 25% of their mark using everything they learned throughout the whole semester to debunk Marxism.
I was really shocked when my friends could point out thousands of flaws with socialist countries and not one good thing. They said things like famines are everywhere, everyone is peasents, the goverment advocates torturing and yet their sources are all Western writters that they read in their class.
I kind of wanted to debunk Malthus's theory so i am wondering if anyone here can help me point of flaw's in a report i wrote. I spent a few hours last night on it, and actually tried to reverse his theory to prove that socialism is the only way to end the problems he spoke off(instead of the capitalist ways he advocated). Sorry if i'm too biased in this article.
Let me know what you think. I wasn't sure if should post it here or Opposing Ideologies(since i want to email my article to the prof of the university).
Thanks in advance.
Here goes:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++
Thomas Robert Malthus was a political economist who was a minister of the Church of England 1788 and worked in Jesus College in Albury(United Kingdom). During his life, he is the most remembered for his lengthy pamphlet known as “Essay on Population(1798)”
In his most famous work, he outlines his theory that population growth will slowly out grow our ability to have enough resources to support them. He argued that “positive checks”(such as starvation, disease, war, etc) were acceptable because they kept the human population growth in check. Because of his views on the effects of over population he believed that providing assistance to any group in need was fruitless since by aiding them in their survival, we would be adding to the population problem. Instead he suggested we isolate them and not provide people with assistance, therefore allowing them to die(since he believed the poor could be replaced anyways).
Yet in his 1803 revised edition of the essay on population, he adds to his original essay by suggesting voluntary or involuntary abstinence for the poor, in order to prevent them from reproducing. The most shocking contradictory idea he purposed in his 1803 edition was that he suggested, contrary to his original article, that by increasing the poor’s salaries and giving them “a taste for luxury”, they would demand higher living standards for themselves before starting a family and thus reducing the population.
Mr. Malthus firmly believes that the situation was extremely drastic since he wrote that the world could only sustain no more then 100 million. He “foresaw” in the early nineteenth centenary Britain would go through a major famine, which motivated him to write his essay in an attempt to motivate the British government to adapt his theory into their domestic policy.
But history has not supported Malthus' theory: Over the past 35 years, global per capita food production has outstripped population growth by 16 percent. We now have more food per person available on this planet than ever before in human history. In fact for most nations in the world exporting food is a huge market in which foreign exchange is generated.
The world is currently sustaining 6.3 billion people, and most of the famines in modern history were man made, not caused declining resources or over droughts(or other weather conditions). Many of the famines were caused by groups that were motivated by the goal of exporting food to other nations since its value is greater then if sold domestically.
According to a report on population projects released by the United Nations, the fertility rates in wealthy countries (United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, etc) are dropping. According to Berkeley university professor and former assistant US treasury secretary J. Brandforn DeLong, many well educated women are delaying child birth until their thirties(after they establish their career) and hence cannot produce as many children as other women in other countries who start producing children in their teens. According to Professor Delong, the birthrates in poorer nations will decrease depending on various factors such as the growing status of women, confidence in public health, growing prosperity, strong cultural cues to convince people that there are other, better indicators of success than a large family”, etc.
The fact that right wing universities still promote Malthus’s article “on population” as an argument against anything other then their political or economic beliefs shows how deep rooted this lack of compassion for the poor is in richer countries(and also shows the infiltrations of politics into the education system). But educators who try to imprint Malthus’s thinking on an entire society actually are achieving the opposite of their intended results. As rich nations try to fence themselves off from the poverty and misery of poor nations they are creating a new sense of nationalism in these poorer countries. Nationalism is usually strengthen and turned into solid resistance when people perceive themselves being exploited (kept poor and powerless) by other nations to satisfy their own selfish interests. There is an essential flaw in the wealthy nations thinking, because currently more then 80 percent of the world’s wealth is in the hands of less then 6 percent of the worlds population(the majority of them are in wealthy nations), and because of this contradictory statistic, the wealthy and elite of these nations have severely isolated themselves from their countries population but also to the world. They can only achieve their current goals by means of brainwashing the people (through propaganda and falsely educating them) because numerically they are not superior. For example we are told not to provide aid to feed the poor of Columbia, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and so on because these nations “support terrorism” and are full of drug dealers. The Media says this while our western governments bomb them and provide arms to their enemies to slaughter their innocent people.
It is possible that if Malthusianism and capitalism did not exist then Marxism could not exist, since there would be no basis for exploitation of man by man. The revolutions and cold war of his centenary were a result of centenaries and centenaries of oppression and people finally standing up.
One of the fundamental and main reason why Malthus’s theory failed is because he virtually ignored technology and did not take into consideration that while our population grows, our technology will able us to support ourselves with less resources (for example, Malthus’s theory was made before the industrial revolution, and hence all labor was done manually, he could not comprehend machines being used to enable 1 person to do the job that it would take 10 to do manually).
Many Malthusist often try to use Darwinism to back up their beliefs. The essential assumption of the theory of natural selection holds that there is a fierce struggle for survival in nature, and every living thing cares only for itself. At the time Darwin proposed this theory, the ideas of Thomas Malthus, were an important influence on him. Malthus maintained that human beings were inevitably in a constant struggle for survival, basing his views on the fact that population, and hence the need for food resources, increases geometrically, while food resources themselves increase only arithmetically. The result is that population size is inevitably checked by factors in the environment, such as hunger and disease. Darwin adapted Malthus's vision of a fierce struggle for survival among human beings to nature at large, and claimed that "natural selection" is a consequence of this struggle.
Further research, however, revealed that there was no struggle for life in nature as Darwin had postulated. As a result of extensive research into animal groups in the 1960s and 1970s, V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a British zoologist, concluded that living things balance
their population in an interesting way, which prevents competition for food. Animal groups were simply managing their population on the basis of their food resources. Population was regulated not by elimination of the weak through factors like epidemics or starvation, but by instinctive control mechanisms. In other words, animals controlled their numbers not by fierce competition, as Darwin suggested, but by limiting reproduction.
Even plants exhibited examples of population control, which invalidated Darwin's suggestion of selection by means of competition. The botanist A. D. Bradshaw's observations indicated that during reproduction, plants behaved according to the "density" of the planting, and limited their reproduction if the area was highly populated with plants.9 On the other hand, examples of sacrifice observed in animals such as ants and bees display a model completely opposed to the Darwinist struggle for survival.
In recent years, research has revealed findings regarding self-sacrifice even in bacteria. These living things without brains or nervous systems, totally devoid of any capacity for thought, kill themselves to save other bacteria when they are invaded by viruses.
These examples surely invalidate the basic assumption of natural selection-the absolute struggle for survival. It is true that there is competition in nature; however, there are clear models of self-sacrifice and solidarity, as well.
Its actually strange that Malthus’s views are often used to promote and protect “capitalist interests” and yet Adam Smith himself said “Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased”. Adam Smith regarded population as the basis of wealth.
Karl Marx claims that Malthus’s essay on population was simply a plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, & co. and does not contain a single sentence of thought by himself. Marx argues that the pamphlet was released solely due to his party interest, since during that time the French Revolution social revolution had found defenders in the United Kingdom. When reading this article the reader cannot help but feel its political and economic motivation, and any human being with average intelligence can conclude that this article was solely compiled to only rise the living standards of the UK. It was an attempt to protect the upper class’s interests and keep everyone else in their place(which was below the rich).
But Malthus theory is not to be totally ignored. According to the UN although we have more food per person available on this planet than ever before in human history more then 800 million are hungry in the world today (most are actually located in Asia). The U.S. department of Agriculture estimates 36 million of them in the U.S., and yet the United States is arguably the richest nation on earth and the world’s number one food exporter.
So how can a world with so much technologies, synthetic foods, genetically engineered crops and livestock can hunger still exist even though every country in the world has the resources to feed its population?
This is because the food system is controlled by business’s who do not care about humanitarian act ivies and instead are driven by achieving a profit. There a competition to make a profit and to eliminate anyone or group that interferes. The foundation of capitalism and free trade is that the market moves food around the globe in response to money and not human need. So why should how much money we have dictate how well or how much we eat?
Peter Rosset, Ph.d, said it the best in his book “World Hunger: Twelve Myths”
“The problem is not producing enough food -- no amount of genetic engineering will end hunger. The reality is a food system owned by the few, which places profits on top of human needs, and a global economy where corporate rights to unlimited profit-taking take precedence over basic human rights.”
He goes on to say:
“Because hunger results from human choices -- humans decide who has access to the food that is produced -- the goal of ending hunger is attainable. It is no more utopian than was the goal of ending slavery not all that long ago.”
Malthus’s failed theory proves that with co-operation and carefully human planning we can over come any natural obstacles, but today a new problem is upon us. This problem is strictly man made, and can only be defeated by fighting against inequality in the world. By taking the power of food control out of the hands of few and putting in the hands of the people so the interest of food changes from profit to human needs then the situation will change.
To conclude, Malthus’s theory on controlling the population by advocating allowing the poor to die and the rich to multiple is one of the ultimate lows in human thought. We must overcome and fight this type of discrimination against human beings who were not blessed with the same advantages as us. To feed the 6.3 billion(and more in the future) people currently in the world requires our political will. The time has come for the citizens of the world to take back our food system and end the suffering of many caused by the greed of few.
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/malthus.htm
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html
http://dept.econ.yorku.ca/undergrad/course...f2002/4059A.htm (http://dept.econ.yorku.ca/undergrad/courses/f2002/4059A.htm)
http://www.ied.info/books/www/feedingtheworld.html
I know it sounds messed up, and there is a simlair trend going on in the science and tech section of this site.
But some cappy friends tried to use Mr.Malthus's work to discourage me from working on socialism or anything that will aid the needy. After closer investagation, it turns out that their universiy's economic class's teachs Adam Smith, Mr.Malthus and many opposers of socialism, while totally ignoring marx. After learning that for the whole year, they spend the last 3 weeks studying a few chapters on marx and have to write a report worth 25% of their mark using everything they learned throughout the whole semester to debunk Marxism.
I was really shocked when my friends could point out thousands of flaws with socialist countries and not one good thing. They said things like famines are everywhere, everyone is peasents, the goverment advocates torturing and yet their sources are all Western writters that they read in their class.
I kind of wanted to debunk Malthus's theory so i am wondering if anyone here can help me point of flaw's in a report i wrote. I spent a few hours last night on it, and actually tried to reverse his theory to prove that socialism is the only way to end the problems he spoke off(instead of the capitalist ways he advocated). Sorry if i'm too biased in this article.
Let me know what you think. I wasn't sure if should post it here or Opposing Ideologies(since i want to email my article to the prof of the university).
Thanks in advance.
Here goes:
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++
Thomas Robert Malthus was a political economist who was a minister of the Church of England 1788 and worked in Jesus College in Albury(United Kingdom). During his life, he is the most remembered for his lengthy pamphlet known as “Essay on Population(1798)”
In his most famous work, he outlines his theory that population growth will slowly out grow our ability to have enough resources to support them. He argued that “positive checks”(such as starvation, disease, war, etc) were acceptable because they kept the human population growth in check. Because of his views on the effects of over population he believed that providing assistance to any group in need was fruitless since by aiding them in their survival, we would be adding to the population problem. Instead he suggested we isolate them and not provide people with assistance, therefore allowing them to die(since he believed the poor could be replaced anyways).
Yet in his 1803 revised edition of the essay on population, he adds to his original essay by suggesting voluntary or involuntary abstinence for the poor, in order to prevent them from reproducing. The most shocking contradictory idea he purposed in his 1803 edition was that he suggested, contrary to his original article, that by increasing the poor’s salaries and giving them “a taste for luxury”, they would demand higher living standards for themselves before starting a family and thus reducing the population.
Mr. Malthus firmly believes that the situation was extremely drastic since he wrote that the world could only sustain no more then 100 million. He “foresaw” in the early nineteenth centenary Britain would go through a major famine, which motivated him to write his essay in an attempt to motivate the British government to adapt his theory into their domestic policy.
But history has not supported Malthus' theory: Over the past 35 years, global per capita food production has outstripped population growth by 16 percent. We now have more food per person available on this planet than ever before in human history. In fact for most nations in the world exporting food is a huge market in which foreign exchange is generated.
The world is currently sustaining 6.3 billion people, and most of the famines in modern history were man made, not caused declining resources or over droughts(or other weather conditions). Many of the famines were caused by groups that were motivated by the goal of exporting food to other nations since its value is greater then if sold domestically.
According to a report on population projects released by the United Nations, the fertility rates in wealthy countries (United States of America, United Kingdom, Canada, etc) are dropping. According to Berkeley university professor and former assistant US treasury secretary J. Brandforn DeLong, many well educated women are delaying child birth until their thirties(after they establish their career) and hence cannot produce as many children as other women in other countries who start producing children in their teens. According to Professor Delong, the birthrates in poorer nations will decrease depending on various factors such as the growing status of women, confidence in public health, growing prosperity, strong cultural cues to convince people that there are other, better indicators of success than a large family”, etc.
The fact that right wing universities still promote Malthus’s article “on population” as an argument against anything other then their political or economic beliefs shows how deep rooted this lack of compassion for the poor is in richer countries(and also shows the infiltrations of politics into the education system). But educators who try to imprint Malthus’s thinking on an entire society actually are achieving the opposite of their intended results. As rich nations try to fence themselves off from the poverty and misery of poor nations they are creating a new sense of nationalism in these poorer countries. Nationalism is usually strengthen and turned into solid resistance when people perceive themselves being exploited (kept poor and powerless) by other nations to satisfy their own selfish interests. There is an essential flaw in the wealthy nations thinking, because currently more then 80 percent of the world’s wealth is in the hands of less then 6 percent of the worlds population(the majority of them are in wealthy nations), and because of this contradictory statistic, the wealthy and elite of these nations have severely isolated themselves from their countries population but also to the world. They can only achieve their current goals by means of brainwashing the people (through propaganda and falsely educating them) because numerically they are not superior. For example we are told not to provide aid to feed the poor of Columbia, Palestine, Sri Lanka, and so on because these nations “support terrorism” and are full of drug dealers. The Media says this while our western governments bomb them and provide arms to their enemies to slaughter their innocent people.
It is possible that if Malthusianism and capitalism did not exist then Marxism could not exist, since there would be no basis for exploitation of man by man. The revolutions and cold war of his centenary were a result of centenaries and centenaries of oppression and people finally standing up.
One of the fundamental and main reason why Malthus’s theory failed is because he virtually ignored technology and did not take into consideration that while our population grows, our technology will able us to support ourselves with less resources (for example, Malthus’s theory was made before the industrial revolution, and hence all labor was done manually, he could not comprehend machines being used to enable 1 person to do the job that it would take 10 to do manually).
Many Malthusist often try to use Darwinism to back up their beliefs. The essential assumption of the theory of natural selection holds that there is a fierce struggle for survival in nature, and every living thing cares only for itself. At the time Darwin proposed this theory, the ideas of Thomas Malthus, were an important influence on him. Malthus maintained that human beings were inevitably in a constant struggle for survival, basing his views on the fact that population, and hence the need for food resources, increases geometrically, while food resources themselves increase only arithmetically. The result is that population size is inevitably checked by factors in the environment, such as hunger and disease. Darwin adapted Malthus's vision of a fierce struggle for survival among human beings to nature at large, and claimed that "natural selection" is a consequence of this struggle.
Further research, however, revealed that there was no struggle for life in nature as Darwin had postulated. As a result of extensive research into animal groups in the 1960s and 1970s, V. C. Wynne-Edwards, a British zoologist, concluded that living things balance
their population in an interesting way, which prevents competition for food. Animal groups were simply managing their population on the basis of their food resources. Population was regulated not by elimination of the weak through factors like epidemics or starvation, but by instinctive control mechanisms. In other words, animals controlled their numbers not by fierce competition, as Darwin suggested, but by limiting reproduction.
Even plants exhibited examples of population control, which invalidated Darwin's suggestion of selection by means of competition. The botanist A. D. Bradshaw's observations indicated that during reproduction, plants behaved according to the "density" of the planting, and limited their reproduction if the area was highly populated with plants.9 On the other hand, examples of sacrifice observed in animals such as ants and bees display a model completely opposed to the Darwinist struggle for survival.
In recent years, research has revealed findings regarding self-sacrifice even in bacteria. These living things without brains or nervous systems, totally devoid of any capacity for thought, kill themselves to save other bacteria when they are invaded by viruses.
These examples surely invalidate the basic assumption of natural selection-the absolute struggle for survival. It is true that there is competition in nature; however, there are clear models of self-sacrifice and solidarity, as well.
Its actually strange that Malthus’s views are often used to promote and protect “capitalist interests” and yet Adam Smith himself said “Labor was the first price, the original purchase - money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased”. Adam Smith regarded population as the basis of wealth.
Karl Marx claims that Malthus’s essay on population was simply a plagiary of De Foe, Sir James Steuart, Townsend, Franklin, Wallace, & co. and does not contain a single sentence of thought by himself. Marx argues that the pamphlet was released solely due to his party interest, since during that time the French Revolution social revolution had found defenders in the United Kingdom. When reading this article the reader cannot help but feel its political and economic motivation, and any human being with average intelligence can conclude that this article was solely compiled to only rise the living standards of the UK. It was an attempt to protect the upper class’s interests and keep everyone else in their place(which was below the rich).
But Malthus theory is not to be totally ignored. According to the UN although we have more food per person available on this planet than ever before in human history more then 800 million are hungry in the world today (most are actually located in Asia). The U.S. department of Agriculture estimates 36 million of them in the U.S., and yet the United States is arguably the richest nation on earth and the world’s number one food exporter.
So how can a world with so much technologies, synthetic foods, genetically engineered crops and livestock can hunger still exist even though every country in the world has the resources to feed its population?
This is because the food system is controlled by business’s who do not care about humanitarian act ivies and instead are driven by achieving a profit. There a competition to make a profit and to eliminate anyone or group that interferes. The foundation of capitalism and free trade is that the market moves food around the globe in response to money and not human need. So why should how much money we have dictate how well or how much we eat?
Peter Rosset, Ph.d, said it the best in his book “World Hunger: Twelve Myths”
“The problem is not producing enough food -- no amount of genetic engineering will end hunger. The reality is a food system owned by the few, which places profits on top of human needs, and a global economy where corporate rights to unlimited profit-taking take precedence over basic human rights.”
He goes on to say:
“Because hunger results from human choices -- humans decide who has access to the food that is produced -- the goal of ending hunger is attainable. It is no more utopian than was the goal of ending slavery not all that long ago.”
Malthus’s failed theory proves that with co-operation and carefully human planning we can over come any natural obstacles, but today a new problem is upon us. This problem is strictly man made, and can only be defeated by fighting against inequality in the world. By taking the power of food control out of the hands of few and putting in the hands of the people so the interest of food changes from profit to human needs then the situation will change.
To conclude, Malthus’s theory on controlling the population by advocating allowing the poor to die and the rich to multiple is one of the ultimate lows in human thought. We must overcome and fight this type of discrimination against human beings who were not blessed with the same advantages as us. To feed the 6.3 billion(and more in the future) people currently in the world requires our political will. The time has come for the citizens of the world to take back our food system and end the suffering of many caused by the greed of few.
http://cepa.newschool.edu/het/profiles/malthus.htm
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~stephan/malthus/malthus.0.html
http://dept.econ.yorku.ca/undergrad/course...f2002/4059A.htm (http://dept.econ.yorku.ca/undergrad/courses/f2002/4059A.htm)
http://www.ied.info/books/www/feedingtheworld.html