Arguments for Anti-Malthusianism

  1. ÑóẊîöʼn
    ÑóẊîöʼn
    What are they? I'm kind of on the fence about the issue - while I hardly think overpopulation means the end of the world, it does seem to me that it can represent a local problem where a combination of poor policy and high population density can combine to make life a misery for the less well-off. As opposed to sparsely populated areas where poor policy would, I imagine, be mitigated somewhat by being able to live off the land to a degree (not that people should have to).

    What are your thoughts?
  2. Sarah Palin
    Sarah Palin
    I think Thomas Malthus was right and wrong in a lot of what he said. He wrote that while populations grow exponentially, food supplies grow arithmetically in most cases. This means that at some point, the food supply will not be able to support the population. So, he thought that there needed to be some checks on the population. This is where he looses me. He says that positive checks are natural occurances; war, famine, and disease. These are ways he thinks the population should be kept in order. But his negative checks include birth control, people marrying later, or people simply deciding not to have children. I think the population could be kept in check with just birth control and the choice to have less children, if disease and war are eradicated.
    From what I understand, Malthusians think that if the population is too large, development, or evolution, will stop or slow greatly. Anti-Malthusians disagree.
    Basically though, Anti-Malthusianism is a way to perceive how the population will grow. I think I lean heavily towards the anti-malthusian thought. In the past 30 years, a group of Malthusians were horribly off in their assumption that a large chunk of the human population would die off due to famine and disease. The very opposite happened. Current trends show fewer and fewer people dying of those causes. One may say though, look at the famines in Africa. Many of the people who die of famine in Africa are victims of famine as a weapon, particularly in the Darfur region. In much contrast though, in the United States, people are now dying of obesity; overeating.


    The Malthusians and Anti-Malthusians all had views on how the population would grow. While I believe that the Anti-Malthusians are the most correct, each position has its own studies and statistics that support it. As the world population continues to grow, figuring out whether or not the population needs to be restricted has been a controversial topic, and will continue to do so until one side is definitely proven correct.
  3. Vanguard1917
    it does seem to me that it can represent a local problem where a combination of poor policy and high population density can combine to make life a misery for the less well-off. As opposed to sparsely populated areas where poor policy would, I imagine, be mitigated somewhat by being able to live off the land to a degree (not that people should have to).
    Poverty is caused by lack of social and economic development, not the number of people. As reality in much of the Western world shows, high population density need not mean (relatively) low living standards. It shows that densely populated areas can also be relatively very rich areas. Reality also shows that sparsely populated areas can suffer from the highest levels of poverty. The most sparsely populated country in the world -- Mongolia -- has about a third of its population living below the 'poverty line'. And although life is no doubt very hard in densely populated areas of the developing world like Mumbai, Karachi and Beijing, it tends to be (contrary to your assumption) a lot worse in the less densely populated, rural areas of the developing world, where there is no development and people 'live off the land' (e.g. subsistence agriculture).

    This is not to say that overcrowding is not a problem. It is, and it's caused by uneven economic development. Millions of people rush to the few large cities precisely because life, however downtrodden, is relatively better in them. If economic development in places like India and China, and indeed the UK, was more widespread and even, overcrowding would be less of a problem.

    In the past 30 years, a group of Malthusians were horribly off in their assumption
    Malthusians have never been right -- and they have existed in their modern form for over 200 years! Over and again, their assumptions and speculations about the future have been proven to be completely wrong. Perhaps with the exception of 'intelligent design', I struggle to think of another 'scientific' theory which still manages to have a mainstream existence despite having been debunked so thoroughly.
  4. JimmyJazz
    JimmyJazz
    I wrote a blog post on overpopulation (attacking the Malthusian view of it, in which the problem is the existence of people and not the distribution of goods). Some guy I don't even know commented on my blog and then we got in a small debate about it:

    http://therebelwaltz.wordpress.com/2...verpopulation/
  5. ChrisK
    ChrisK
    I'll have to look around for it, but in debate we had a card that cited Malthus himself saying that he was wrong about food production and that technology growing would counter starvation.
  6. S.Artesian
    Just a couple of things by way of introduction: First, I strongly recommend the book The Legacy of Malthus by Allan Chase which tears apart the veneer of "science" slapped over Malthus.

    Secondly, the "modern version" of Malthus is the real content behind "peak oil" theories and theorists.
  7. S.Artesian
    Vanguard1917 is right-- the thing to keep in mind about Malthus and Malthusianism is that it's always been wrong. The very notion of productivity, of labor, the ability to produce surplus is anti-Malthus. What Malthus does provide is an ideology for class rule, a la social darwinism. There are too many people, meaning there are too many of those people as oppose to not enough of my people.

    The famines of the past 200 years have not been the result of overpopulation, but of deliberate social policies
  8. A.R.Amistad
    A.R.Amistad
    An interesting thing is that, I have looked at the demographics of world population. It is really shocking to see that half of the world's population lives in either India or China! These are nations with relatively low standards of living, but with growing economies. I think by improving living conditions and winning worker's rights is key to population control, not genocide. In fact, genocide might actually perpetuate and encourage overpopulation in the long run, since a demographic that is devastated will try to repopulate itself. I always get the "world is too populated" cop out from reactionaries, when it is the policies and system that they support which perpetuates overpopulation, not progress.
  9. Ismail
    Ismail
    August Bebel on population and socialism: http://www.marxists.org/archive/bebe...alism/ch30.htm
  10. electro_fan
    electro_fan
    because they completely ignore inequality and their "points" seem all to be about hand wringing about poor people breeding too much and destroying the planet, some of their arguments could even be called fascist