{"id":34111,"date":"2016-01-15T03:00:41","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T08:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34111"},"modified":"2016-01-14T11:35:24","modified_gmt":"2016-01-14T16:35:24","slug":"malthusian-thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/01\/15\/malthusian-thinking\/","title":{"rendered":"Malthusian thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Ridley<\/a> on how horrible implementations of the ideas of Thomas Malthus have made the world an even more cruel place:<\/p>\n

For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. It centres on the question of how to control human population growth and it answers that question by saying we must be cruel to be kind, that ends justify means. It is still around today; and it could not be more wrong. It is the continuing misuse of Malthus.<\/p>\n

According to his epitaph in Bath Abbey, the Rev Thomas Robert Malthus, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population<\/em> (1798), was noted for \u201chis sweetness of temper, urbanity of manners and tenderness of heart, his benevolence and his piety\u201d. Yet his ideas have justified some of the greatest crimes in history. By saying that, if people could not be persuaded to delay marriage, we would have to encourage famine and \u201creprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases\u201d, he inadvertently gave birth to a series of heartless policies \u2014 the poor laws, the British government\u2019s approach to famine in Ireland and India, social Darwinism, eugenics, the Holocaust, India\u2019s forced sterilisations and China\u2019s one-child policy. All derived their logic more or less directly from a partial reading of Malthus.<\/p>\n

To this day if you write or speak about falling child mortality in Africa, you can be sure of getting the following Malthusian response: but surely it\u2019s a bad thing if you stop poor people\u2019s babies dying? Better to be cruel to be kind. Yet actually we now know, this argument is wrong. The way to get population growth to slow, it turns out, is to keep babies alive so people plan smaller families: to bring health, prosperity and education to all.<\/p>\n

Britain\u2019s Poor Law of 1834, which attempted to ensure that the very poor were not helped except in workhouses, and that conditions in workhouses were not better than the worst in the outside world, was based explicitly on Malthusian ideas \u2014 that too much charity only encouraged breeding, especially illegitimacy, or \u201cbastardy\u201d. The Irish potato famine of the 1840s was made infinitely worse by Malthusian prejudice shared by the British politicians in positions of power. The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, was motivated by \u201ca Malthusian fear about the long-term effect of relief\u201d, according to a biographer. The Assistant Secretary to the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, had been a pupil of Malthus at the East India Company College: famine, he thought, was an \u201ceffective mechanism for reducing surplus population\u201d and a \u201cdirect stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence\u201d sent to teach the \u201cselfish, perverse and turbulent\u201d Irish a lesson. Trevelyan added: \u201cSupreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil.\u201d<\/p>\n

In India in 1877, a famine killed ten million people. The viceroy, Lord Lytton, quoted almost directly from Malthus in explaining why he had halted several private attempts to bring relief to the starving: \u201cThe Indian population has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil.\u201d His policy was to herd the hungry into camps where they were fed on \u2014 literally \u2014 starvation rations. Lytton thought he was being cruel to be kind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Ridley on how horrible implementations of the ideas of Thomas Malthus have made the world an even more cruel place: For more than 200 years, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, based on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. It centres on the question of how to control […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,74,7,23],"tags":[374,308,91],"class_list":["post-34111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-food","category-history","category-india","tag-children","tag-malthusianism","tag-poverty"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Sb","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34112,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34111\/revisions\/34112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}