PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

Malthus was, of course, wrong. For one thing, he never considered that the resources available to support populations might exceed expectations. Consider the work of the 20th-century American economist Norman Borlaug, whose "green revolution" dramatically increased crop yields and garnered him the Nobel Peace Prize. Some have even suggested that Borlaug saved more lives than any single human being who has ever lived. Malthus also failed, though understandably, to anticipate the introduction of contraceptives. More significantly, he failed to foresee the possibility that, enabled to control their own fertility, people might choose to limit their fecundity in order to increase their standard of living. In general, richer nations such as the US, Germany, and Japan have relatively low fertility rates. In fact, to increase standards of living, such nations need not fewer but more births.

Yet it was not only as a forecaster that Malthus was wrong. He was also wrong in a moral sense, and in large part because of the influence he exerted on other thinkers, such as Darwin. Malthus's closed-fisted nature, in which resources are never sufficient, played a crucial role in shaping Darwin's conception of a biological world dominated by a principle of competition. If the earth provides enough for every organism, then each can live and let live. But in a world characterized by scarcity, a struggle to survive inevitably ensues, in which organisms better adapted to prevailing conditions survive and those that do not perish. It was but a small step from Darwin's "survival of the fittest," repeatedly recharged by Malthusianism, to eugenics, the effort to rebalance the fit and unfit.

Malthus evinces an awareness of the possibility of something very much akin to eugenics but dismisses it as impractical. Considering the notion that some enlightened families might take steps to protect their best characteristics, he writes,

I know of no well-directed attempts of this kind, except in the ancient family of the Bickerstaffs, who are said to have been very successful in whitening the skins and increasing the height of their race by prudent marriages, particularly by that very judicious cross with Maud, the milk-maid, by which some capital defects in the constitutions of the family were corrected.

Inspired by Darwin, many intellectual descendants of Malthus entertained no such laments, and instead advocated heartily for both negative eugenics--programs to reduce the numbers of people bearing undesirable traits--and positive eugenics--programs aiming to increase the numbers of people with desirable traits.

Perhaps the most baleful feature of this benign man's theory is the scarcity mentality it both posits and reinforces, and which has crept into contemporary thinking in biology, environmentalism, and economics. 

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