PITY THE POOR LUDDITES:

The authors start by comparing today's Malthusians to Thanos, the villain of the blockbuster movie Avengers: Infinity War, whose goal was to kill half of all living beings in the universe to preserve its allegedly scarce resources. They then go on to show in considerable detail why, in the modern world, such thinking is not only deeply evil but completely counterfactual. That is, while human numbers have quadrupled worldwide since the 1950s, in virtually every category human wellbeing has radically improved. Average personal income has risen 315 percent in the USA, 278 percent in the UK, 82 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, 690 percent in India, and 1,936 percent in China, for an average of 307 percent overall. So, whereas Malthusian theory would predict that per capita income would decrease when the population quadrupled, it actually multiplied fourfold--and total worldwide income increased sixteenfold. Malthus said that population growth would outrun food supply, because population increases geometrically while food production increases arithmetically. But for the past 70 years (in fact, for the past 200 years), total worldwide income has increased as the square of the increase in population!

As the authors show, Malthusian projections of population growth leading to impoverishment have proven equally wrong in all other metrics of human wellbeing, including average global lifespan, which increased 38 percent over the period in question; infant mortality, which decreased 55 percent; per capita caloric intake, which increased 38 percent; battle deaths, down 95 percent; secondary school enrollment, up 90 percent; extreme poverty, down 75 percent;  and deaths by natural catastrophes, down 99 percent. Et cetera, et cetera.

The abundance of natural resources has also greatly increased. The authors show this by measuring the price of goods measured in average wage labor hours. This is a fair approximation, but it actually understates the authors' case, because the advance in technology has eliminated the need for people to engage in huge amounts of unpaid labor, especially in the area of housework. For example, a couple living in a house with running water, gas heat, and a washer and dryer can now spend time earning money that their ancestors would have previously needed to devote to hauling water, chopping wood, and washing and drying clothes by hand.

Nevertheless, even measured by this conservative metric, the average "time price" of 26 natural resources and commodities for US blue-collar workers has fallen by 98 percent (i.e., dropped by a factor of 50) since 1850. Globally, the increase in abundance has been even faster, with the average time price of the 37 top commodities tracked by the World Bank reducing by a factor of 14 since 1960. The statistics the authors advance to support their thesis of rapidly growing abundance in virtually every category of good for the past two centuries is encyclopedic, with over 180 pages of charts and tables of data presented. If anyone ever needs data to prove that the application of Malthusian theory to the modern world is total nonsense, they will find it in this book.

The book also has many other valuable features, including tracking the antihumanist conceit across history in the literary and philosophical genres. It also contains a collection of absurd apocalyptic predictions by arrogant Malthusians that offers so much fun as to make it alone worth the price of the book.

Tweet   @brothersjudd