Posted on 09/29/2005 2:21:03 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
"Welfare to the needy would only increase their dependence and encourage the breeding of still more hungry mouths to feed, said critics."
167 years later, nothing has changed
Malthus held technology constant, which is silly. Subject to his assumptions, Malthus was correct, but his assumptions were flawed. Though, with what we knew of economics at the time, Malthus was cutting edge.
His name has become so closely associated with the zero-population growth fanatics, that it's too often forgotten that Malthus was one of the first economists to powerfully criticize the welfare state and to foresee the cycle of economic dependence which resulted from it.
there is a hard ceiling to food production, though Malthus (in ignorance of future technologies) greatly underestimated it.
We have not reached it, yet.
doesn't mean we won't. If/When we do, Malthus' nighmare scenario will come to pass.
What, are you a slow reader or something?
Kind of like associating Christians with Jim Jones.
What's wrong? Only you evolusheviks can post your religious debates in the News section, but Christians should be confined to the religion forum? You really don't like hearing any opposition to your dogmatic faith, do you?
Indeed. The great insight that Malthus had was that populations either check themselves, or the environment does it for them. For this we are apparently supposed to revile him, along with Darwin, and if the original poster's second link is to be believed, along with Edmund Burke. I'm not sure what we're to make of this when that same page says that Marxists rejected Malthus - apparently, here on the New Free Republic, Darwin and Edmund Burke are bad, because they were influenced by Malthus, and Marx is good because he rejected Malthus. And this is somehow "conservative". What a mess.
evolusheviks ? Name calling again?
Social Darwinism had a pretty good run, but it was over in America early in the 20th century.
This is activism, pal.
True, but there are still a few fans here and there. Elvis sightings, Saddam sightings, Enron sightings.
In 1871, after others had publicly drawn out the implications of evolutionary theory for human beings, Darwin published his Descent of Man. If we just read the Origin we can believe the standard story. If we read the Descent, it is all too clear that Darwin reconceived ethics on the basis of survival of the fittest, and that the unfit individuals and races were evolutionary dross and should be left behind for the good and purity of the human species. The Descent is full of the most startling eugenic and racist quotes, softened at times by Darwins illogical appeal to sympathy. ...From the first appearance in German of Darwins Origin of Species, the intellectual elite understood quite clearly the eugenic and racial implications. ...Darwinism as applied to the moral sphere was a movement not of brown-shirt thugs, but of the intellectual upper classthe top medical doctors, chemists, economists, botanists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, ethnologists, jurists, and even geographers in Germanys best universities. The call for eugenic elimination of the unfit and for war as a means of evolutionary purification did not ring from the beer halls but from the halls of academe.
And so, against the standard story, in which ignorant Nazi eugenicists and racists had illicitly borrowed from Darwin,...Nazi barbarism was motivated by an ethic that prided itself on being scientific. Given the acceptance of evolution as an established fact in biology, the German intelligentsia drew the logical consequences: a new ethic, with a new definition of good and evil.
The evolutionary process became the arbiter of all morality. Whatever promoted the evolutionary progress of humanity was deemed good, and whatever hindered biological improvement was considered morally bad. Multitudes must perish in this Malthusian struggle anyway, they reasoned, so why not improve humanity by speeding up the destruction of the disabled and the inferior races? According to this logic, the extermination of individuals and races deemed inferior and unfit was not only morally justified, but indeed, morally praiseworthy. Thus Hitlerand many other Germansperpetuated one of the most evil programs the world has every witnessed under the delusion that Darwinism could help us discover how to make the world better. - LINK
just gonna watch
Malthus warned against shortages of food at just the exact time when the industrial revolution was paving the way for an undreamed of increase in the ability to produce it.
I am not at all sure that the premise of this article that the industrial revolution by 1838 had made only the capitalists rich. There was clearly a displacement of labor, and the creation for the first time of an urban, as opposed to a rural, underclass, but many people moved to the cities because they thought it would improve their lot in life. I think we tend to exaggerate the benefits of rural living.
Finally, there is evidence all over the world that industrial populations tend to self-limit. The consequences of underpopulation [expressed in the aging of populations] threatens to be as big a problem as overpopulation.
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