Living Within Limits - Chapter 10

What Malthus Missed

"Each new mouth brings with it a new pair of hands"...

So goes an old European saying, and so often goes the popular criticism of Malthus's predictions of imminent human misery.  Since his works were published, Malthus has been shown to be wrong, fairly consistently.  World population has sky-rocketed, yet at the same time, wealth per capita (adjusted for inflation) has also grown miraculously (living standards have improved on average in each successive generation).

This hard-to-ignore truth defies (Malthus's) conventional wisdom, and seems to imply that all 'hands' are immune ot the law of diminishing returns, which socio-economically states that 'normal persons seek to minimize the time and effort he expends on essential work' (default position of psychology).

Feeding of the five thousand... thousand, thousand, thousand...

The production factors necessary for human sustenance can be broken down into 6 elements:

1. Inherent fertility of soil
2. Genetic quality of the seeds
3. Amount and quality of cultivation
4. Amount of fertilizer
5. Amount of pesticides
6. Amount and timing of water inputs

According to diminishing returns, as the human population has grown, we are quickly using up the available farmland, beginning with the most fruitful, and then moving on to the less.  Lacking fundamental changes, this policy has been present for long periods of human history, and has helps to explain the relative slow growth of human progress prior to the industrial revolution.

However, thanks to technology, 'the diminishing returns caused by the policy of using the best lands first have been overshadowed by the increasing returns resulting from improvements in other production factors.  Yet with each factor there finally comes a level of application at which diminishing returns dominate the results.'  Lacking the discovery of other factors through which to leverage greater efficiency, we will eventually exasperate all means of further increasing the output of the resources we have.

Perhaps then we may return to more biblical roots, and turn to the Lord God to give to us our daily bread.