Thomas Malthus
I woke up to the news the South Korea’s population has fallen for the first time in its history. Wars and famines have been just as prevalent in the country’s history as anywhere else, but it turns out that demographics is the thing that really counts. An ageing population who choose to avoid having too many children is enough to bring down the population rate.
This is part of a worldwide pattern. As humans become rich they change their lifestyles and find that they no longer need the large families that they used to. At the moment there is enough poverty around to ensure that population growth will continue for the planet as a whole for decades to come. But it is already easy to conceive of a world where the number of humans isn’t going up but down.
This will lead to some considerable changes in attitudes. At the moment people living in rich countries are not on the whole particularly keen on the arrival of people from poor countries. Nobody welcomes competition for resources and there is always something of a clash between cultures when they mix. Racism is the extreme form of this, but only the most liberal of people positively welcome large numbers of people they don’t know arriving in their neighbourhoods.
But looked at from an economic point of view, immigration looks completely different. If your population are getting older and fewer in number they are not going to consume or produce as much. For that you need youngsters. So if you are South Korea your economic indices are going to look much better if you can bring some working age people in from abroad. And the same goes for all other countries large and small. It may well be that the time isn’t too far off when countries will compete with each other to attract as many migrants as possible.
That will be quite a big change. For more than two centuries we’ve been following the ideas of Malthus, ideas so pervasive that even people who’ve never heard of him follow his thinking.
Thomas Robert Malthus was an English cleric and scholar who, in 1798, published “An Essay on the Principle of Population,” a work that would profoundly influence economic and social thought for centuries to come. Born in 1766, Malthus was writing during a period of rapid social change in Britain, as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace and urban populations swelled. His central argument was deceptively simple yet deeply troubling: whilst population grows geometrically (doubling every generation), food production increases only arithmetically (by steady additions). This mismatch, he argued, meant that population growth would inevitably outstrip food supply, leading to what we now call a “Malthusian catastrophe” – widespread famine, disease, and social collapse.
Malthus believed that only two types of checks could prevent this disaster: preventive checks, such as moral restraint and delayed marriage, and positive checks, including war, famine, and disease. He was particularly concerned about the poor, arguing that welfare systems like England’s Poor Laws actually worsened the problem by encouraging the poor to have more children than they could support. His ideas influenced the development of classical economics and even shaped Charles Darwin’s thinking about natural selection, though they also attracted fierce criticism for their pessimistic view of human nature and apparent callousness towards the suffering of the poor.
The Malthusian worldview experienced a dramatic revival in the late twentieth century, most notably through Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller “The Population Bomb.” Writing at the height of the post-war baby boom, when global population growth had reached its fastest rate in human history, the Ehrlichs painted an apocalyptic picture of the immediate future. Their opening statement was stark: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.”
The Ehrlichs went far beyond Malthus in their proposed solutions, advocating for aggressive government intervention including forced sterilisation programmes, luxury taxes on baby products, and even adding temporary sterilants to water supplies. They proposed a system of international “triage” where food aid would be withdrawn from countries deemed beyond saving, specifically mentioning India as hopeless. The book sold over two million copies and profoundly influenced environmental thinking and policy debates throughout the 1970s.
However, the catastrophe the Ehrlichs predicted never materialised. Instead of mass starvation, the decades following their book saw remarkable improvements in global food security. The Green Revolution, led by scientists like Norman Borlaug, dramatically increased crop yields through improved varieties and farming techniques. Countries the Ehrlichs had written off, particularly India, achieved food self-sufficiency. Global death rates continued to decline, and whilst hunger certainly persisted, it was increasingly recognised as a problem of distribution and political instability rather than absolute scarcity.
Perhaps most significantly, the population explosion itself began to slow. The global population growth rate peaked around 1968 at just over 2 per cent annually and has been declining ever since. This wasn’t due to the coercive measures the Ehrlichs advocated, but rather through what demographers call the “demographic transition” – as countries develop economically, birth rates fall naturally as people choose to have smaller families.
Today, we face a dramatically different demographic landscape than either Malthus or the Ehrlichs anticipated. Far from explosive growth, many developed countries now grapple with declining populations. Japan’s population has been shrinking since 2010, whilst countries from Italy to South Korea face birth rates well below replacement level. Even China, once synonymous with overpopulation fears, now worries about rapid ageing and has abandoned its one-child policy in favour of encouraging larger families.
The implications of this demographic reversal are profound and still being understood. A declining population presents its own challenges: who will care for ageing societies when there are fewer working-age people? How will economies based on growth adapt to shrinkage? What happens to innovation and dynamism in ageing societies? Some environmentalists welcome population decline as reducing pressure on natural resources, whilst others worry about the economic and social disruption it may cause.
The story of Malthusian thinking, from its origins through the Population Bomb to today’s demographic transition, offers important lessons about prediction and human adaptability. Both Malthus and the Ehrlichs underestimated humanity’s capacity for innovation and the complex ways societies evolve. They assumed that existing trends would continue indefinitely, failing to account for technological progress, social change, and human agency.
Yet their concerns weren’t entirely misplaced. Environmental degradation, climate change, and resource depletion remain serious challenges, even if they haven’t manifested as the simple population-driven catastrophes these thinkers feared. The question for the twenty-first century isn’t whether we can feed a growing population – we’ve largely answered that – but whether we can create sustainable, equitable societies that provide good lives for all whilst respecting planetary boundaries.
As we move into an era of stable or declining populations in much of the world, we face new questions that neither Malthus nor the Ehrlichs anticipated. The challenge is no longer preventing overpopulation but managing the transition to a world with fewer people, ensuring that this transition enhances rather than diminishes human flourishing. In this sense, while their specific predictions proved wrong, Malthus and the Ehrlichs were right about one thing: demography matters profoundly to our collective future, just not in the ways they imagined.
