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Posted on 11/14/2025 4:53:14 PM PST by nickcarraway
No one uses “Malthusian” as a compliment. Since 1798, when the economist and cleric Thomas Malthus first published “An Essay on the Principles of Population,” the “Malthusian” position – the idea that humans are subject to natural limits – has been vilified and scorned. Today, the term is lobbed at anyone who dares question the optimism of infinite progress.
Unfortunately, almost everything most people think they know about Malthus is wrong.
The story goes like this: Once upon a time, an English country parson came up with the idea that population increases at a “geometrical” rate, while food production increases at an “arithmetical” rate. That is, population doubles every 25 years, while crop yields increase much more slowly. Over time, such divergence must lead to catastrophe. But Malthus identified two factors that reduced reproduction and held off disaster: moral codes, or what he called “preventative checks,” and “positive checks,” such as extreme poverty, pollution, war, disease and misogyny. In the all-too-common caricature, Malthus was a narrow-minded clergyman who was bad at math and thought the only solution to hunger was to keep poor people poor so they had fewer babies.
Understanding Malthus in a broader context reveals a very different character. As I discuss in my 2025 book “Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress,” Malthus was an innovative and insightful thinker. Not only was he one of the founding figures of environmental economics, but he also turned out to be a prophetic critic of the belief that history tends toward human improvement, which we call progress.
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What Malthus did not know was that there was already a way to stop population growth in his day. All you have to do is educate girls. Once the girls learn what career opportunities are available to them, they won’t want to spend the best years of their lives barefoot and pregnant. This is part of the reason why population growth slowed down in industrialized countries.
No. What Malthus got wrong was that things like food production does not necessarily increase arithmetically, when human inventiveness comes into play.
What the heck is the line about “barefoot and pregnant” doing on Free Republic?
The traditional Catholic churches I go to have plenty of college educated women who are happy to be mothers of large families. One of my college classmates, Marguerite, didn’t marry until she was 26, and still went on to have 12 children.
The mothers of large families, on average, seem more satisfied with their lives than the typical careerist woman. The “barefoot” part of the expression makes NO sense at all. Although I know one woman who was frequently pregnant and is more frequently barefoot, because she finds it comfortable. “Barefoot and pregnant” is a DUMB expression, and really has no place on Free Republic.
I wonder what he would have thought if someone told him that the poorest people would be the most likely to be obese in the year 2025. Granted folks would find that pretty out there even 100 years ago.
Freegards
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