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Human populations do not typically sit and starve. They migrate first, and the migration is likely triggered by poverty long before absolute starvation sets in. Sometimes this is peaceful, but historically it is one of the common causes of wars. This is so constant that it can be overlooked: taken for granted as a chronic background factor. The wild tribes roll down from the hills or sweep in from the deserts or steppes; the Vikings come prowling up the rivers; the clans live by cattle raiding and die by feuds; half of Mexico moves to the U.S., and Araby moves to Europe. The Malthusian dynamic isn't the whole story, but it plays an important role. Carrying capacity does matter.

For the last couple of hundred years, western science and technology have done a spectacular job of boosting productivity and expanding our carrying capacity at a pace far exceeding population growth. How long this can continue, no one knows. At some point, there is presumably an absolute limit. The doom and gloomers see this limit just around the next corner. They've been crying wolf for so long that they've made themselves look foolish, but that doesn't mean the wolf isn't out there somewhere.

The interesting thing now is that every developed society is experiencing plummeting birth rates and the prospect of population decline, apart from immigration. The reasons are familiar enough: years of additional schooling; delays in family formation; the emancipation of women and their incorporation into the labor force; declines in infant mortality; and the much higher costs of raising children in middle and upper-middle class splendor in modern technological society. It may turn out that we have permanently outrun Malthus, and that prosperity is the reason. That would be good news if it happens.

Malthus does not argue that this catastrope is going to happen.

He says that without checks, it’ll happen. And poor people are a check. DWI deaths are a check. Wars are a check.

Checks are like bad things that are actually good because although they might be sad because people are dying, them dying then keeps everyone from starving.

The neo Malthusians seem to ignore the checks, and focus on Malthus’s population science.

Malthus was against Marx and Lenin, believing that because we get starvation without checks, we should be building a system with checks, instead of a system without, because if for some reason the checks were gone, that’s when you get the starvation. Abortion is on his list of checks, and there are tons of checks in place.

Malthus was also wrong about population. Rich people, not poor people, tend to have fewer kids. I guess the idea there is that rick people are more likely to have their kids survive. Poor people have to worry about their kids surviving, many didn’t, so they had more. He assumed that the richest person in the world would have a million kids if he could support them. It might’ve worked that way then, but it just doesn’t work that way now.