In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), an Anglican priest with an interest in economics, was irritated by the extravagant and anticlerical claims of the French revolutionaries and their British allies that a new day had dawned, without religion, a day overflowing with utopian promise. “Bliss it was in that [French] dawn to be alive,” sang William Wordsworth, “But to be young was very heaven.” To which the Reverend Malthus retorted: rubbish.
Malthus undertook to explain for the first time why the enrichment of the poor had not happened by then, and why, according to the logic of the newly invented and previously optimistic political economy, even a modest enrichment would not happen ever, especially with the Poor Law subsidizing poverty, unless people adopted what he called “preventive checks” on population growth, what came to be called “birth control.”[1] Even these, he said, would not do all that much for the average person. In the first, 1798 edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (later editions were less pessimistic, but it is the first edition that has for two centuries ruled people’s minds) Malthus claimed that what had kept people poor since the caves was not divine malevolence or royal extraction but human sexual intemperance and irremediable economic scarcity—which is to say, original sin and loss of Eden and all our woe.[2]
Up to 1798 the Malthus of the first edition was correct. Zero-sum ruled. As Malthus’s inspiration, Joseph Townsend, had put it twelve years earlier, “In the progress of society it will be found that some must want; and then the only question will be this: Who is most worthy to suffer cold and hunger, the prodigal or the provident?”[3] Townsend argued on the basis of animal models (which later inspired Darwin by way of Malthus) that “the quantity of food . . . regulates the numbers of the human species.” And the quantity of food, as some modern Malthusians still believe, was strictly limited. The “principle of population,” as it was known among the classical economists of the early nineteenth century, had kept most of our ancestors since the caves living on that $3 a day, and many on less. In the slums of Edo or Calcutta they slept on mats in the street. People wandered the veldt or the outback or the jungle. They were hungry, crowded into tenements in Naples or Glasgow or Guangdong. They lay sick for weeks on a straw cot. They died young, ignorant though clever, violent if strong.
The average income seldom pushed much above $3 a day, and always temporarily, because betterment had come slowly, not at the frenetic pace after 1800. Here some betterer would devise a new use of iron or of Roman roads, there another could devise a new use of coal or of accounting. But the betterments were too small to wrench incomes up and—startlingly—to wrench birth rates down. Again and again, then, population growth and the consequent diminishing of returns were given time to overwhelm the too-slow accumulation of new ideas. As the economic historians Nico Voigtländer and Hans-Joachim Voth put it recently:
In a Malthusian economy the race between technology and population size is the turtle against the hare—technological change can almost never rise fast enough to overcome the deleterious effects of population growth. The same logic applies for institutional improvements. They, too, can improve the mapping from resources to output, just like technological advances—but it is highly unlikely that institutional improvements outpaced the ability of human populations to grow.[4]
They observe that before 1800 the average rate of betterment was never higher than half a percent per year, and according to the economist Oded Galor more like one-tenth of one percent, yielding at best a rise of 64 percent per century.[5] But populations could grow at 3 percent per year, which is 1,800 percent per century. The turtle didn’t stand a chance.
In engineering lingo, the $3 a day—plus or minus $2, say—was a “homeostatic equilibrium” and worked the way your thermostat does. Average income in olden days might occasionally rise a little above $3, as it did in Holland and Britain during their commercial thrusts of the early modern era, or in many places worldwide when potatoes from the New World were suddenly introduced. But soon the rise would lead women to have more children, and more of the children would survive to have children themselves. In Ireland at the time Malthus was writing, for example, such a rise in population was happening, fueled by Ireland’s (in fact) nourishing diet of milk and potatoes. At length the Famine of 1845–1850 descended.[6]
What the Malthus of 1798 could not have known, considering the frailty of social statistics in his time, is that the falling birth rate in France betokened a demographic transition to smaller family sizes; or, indeed, that in Britain itself the recent rapid population growth, without sharply falling wages, had already betokened quick enough betterment through new ideas for sawmills and seed drills and colonizing overseas to offset diminishing returns.
The usual story had been that the supply of labor grew too fast, that when wages rose so did birth rates, and then in a generation or two, according to the Malthusian logic of entry to an ecological niche in a world of diminishing returns, the real wage would be pushed down again to subsistence, to $5 or $3 or even $1 a day. Predator-prey relationships work that way. If foxes can freely enter a place temporarily abundant in rabbits, the foxes will eventually kill and eat so many rabbits that the return on hunting falls and the new, overlarge, fattened population of foxes gets pushed back to its former level by starvation and, especially, by infertility.[7]
So it was with people preying on the land, or on one unreliable crop, such as potatoes in Ireland: “The praties they grow small over here. / We dig them in the fall / And eat them skin and all / Over here.” Perhaps British incompetence, and long-standing British malice in protecting British interests against Irish competition, worsened an Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger. But there is no doubt that with Irish fertility unrestrained—the original Malthusian sin—population had exceeded the carrying capacity of Ireland. The crop had done poorly many times before, as early as 1739. Mokyr and Ó Gráda have shown that up to 1845, a 50 percent failure of the potato crop had usually meant merely that the pigs starved (which is why highlanders, who were mainly herders, survived dearth better than lowlanders wholly dependent on field crops: if the highlanders’ crops they ate or sold failed, their pigs or cattle were a store of value, and of food). In the Great Hunger, though, the crop failure was 90 percent, and the people starved too.[8] In the late 1840s one million out of Ireland’s eight million souls died of starvation and disease. Another million—especially those with the money to do so, or relatives established abroad—escaped to Boston or Liverpool, to Canada or Chile. Irish population has never recovered its level in 1845, unless you include the tens of millions of Irish descendants in land-rich places abroad, such as my father’s family. Malthus was confirmed.
Diminishing returns on labor applied to fixed land would always be immiserizing, said the Malthus of 1798. The notion was taken up with grim enthusiasm by other classical economists, such as David Ricardo and Karl Marx. True, Malthus in later editions, beginning in 1803, as the historian of economic thought Ross Emmett has argued, believed that a rational restraint on procreation could permit some modest growth of income. “Biology could never be conquered,” Emmett writes, “but within the right institutional context, reason could interrupt its career.” For a time, that is. But the classical economists came to believe that there would soon be an end to conquering, a “stationary state.” As Anthony Waterman puts it, “Malthus’ first [1798] Essay made land scarcity central, and so began a century-long mutation of ‘political economy,’ the optimistic science of wealth, to ‘economics,’ the pessimistic science of scarcity.”[9]
And in historical fact, diminishing returns in a nonglobalized world had been in the past powerfully immiserizing, in just such a simple Malthusian way. When the population of Europe rose by a factor of two between 1000 and 1350 CE, real wage fell by a third. (Remember that in the shorter period since Malthus the population has not merely doubled but grown by a factor of seven.) After the Black Death of 1348–1350 and its recurrences, which drove the population in many places down by a third or a half, real wages of farm laborers doubled. But when, by 1600, population recovered, European real wages again collapsed, to half their previous peak.[10] Dante’s time and, after two centuries of rise and one of heavy fall, Shakespeare’s time were two low points in how much bread the wage of an ordinary European could buy. Think of India and China in their worst eras, with coolies pulling rickshaws, the way porters in Italy and England once carried the rich in sedan chairs.[11]
The only hope, said Malthus, and that a faint one, was to keep population down by restraining reproduction, the preventive checks, an exercise of reason in the right institutional context, about which Emmett notes Malthus was a tiny bit hopeful. A grim form of state-enforced preventive checks, far from Malthus’s preferences in the matter, became in the 1960s the policy of India and China, I have noted, inspired by eugenic ideas hatched in Germany, Britain, and the United States in the late nineteenth century and implemented wholesale in Scandinavia and Germany and some U.S. states by fascists and progressives in the 1930s. Yet with fixed land and turtle-slow technological change such preventive checks could not in the long run help all that much. No wonder the classical economists were pessimistic about the prospects for a significant betterment in the human condition. “No possible form of society,” Malthus had written gloomily in 1798, “could prevent the almost constant action of misery upon a great part of mankind, if in a state of inequality, and upon all, if all were equal.”[12]
No wonder, too, that Malthus-out-of-Townsend was the inspiration for Darwin’s brutally accurate theory of natural selection. Plants and animals have no way of applying “reason” to interrupt the career of nature. Their rate of betterment, being slow and biological rather than quick and social, is never frenetic enough to overcome the immiserizing force of diminishing returns after entry into a niche. Therefore adult coots (Fulica atra) have evolved to grow impatient after a few days with their large broods, and to drown the weaker chicks, leaving two or three out of the eight or so hatched.[13] Preventive checks. Humans do the same, as one can see from the imbalances in many poor countries between surviving girls as against boys. Drown the infant girls.
An alternative mechanism of homeostasis (Greek: “identical position”), tending to the same, sad, $3-a-day conclusion, posited that larger populations made for denser settlements, which by overcoming fixed costs of movement made for cheaper transport, which had the unhappy side effect of spreading disease.[14] Smallpox was spread by such densities of humans and of their domestic animals, as later was the White Plague of tuberculosis. Look at ebola in 2014, leaping from country to country by airplane. The Black Death may be another case in point. It arose in densely populated China, or perhaps among the Mongols further north and west, spreading during the 1330s throughout the Chinese Empire and undermining the prestige of the Mongols ruling there. By 1348 it spread widely in Europe, killing, as in China and intermediate points, more than a third of the population and shaking the social order.[15] The Black Death, by Malthusian logic, sharply raised the real wage all over Eurasia. And in dense places the recurrences of the plague, which ended in northern Europe only around 1700, kept people fearfully off balance. The economic historian Guido Alfani argues that Italy continued to be hit by plague even after 1700, in the countryside as much as in the towns, at the moment that northwestern Europe was beginning to prosper a little.[16]
The other mechanism keeping the poor in poverty was class violence, such as Rousseau adumbrated in his seminal attack in 1754 on private property. Half a century later, Malthus, though a friend of private property, viewed property as characteristic of the uneven distribution of income in a “civilized,” that is, an arable-crop, society.[17] Although bands of hunters-gatherers and independent-minded herder/highlanders might escape lordship, arable farmers in their dense and fixed populations in the lowlands could not. If you followed the plow you followed the local lord, perforce. Marshall Sahlins and other anthropologists have long observed that compared to an arable farmer a hunter-gatherer typically had an easier life, at least in the Holocene, after the ice, and in warm places. He worked fewer hours a week for his food than someone tied down to the abundance of crops. The abundance, according to the logic of lordship, went to priests and knights and other people able to make good with sword and horse their claim to ownership of the land. It did not go to most of our ancestors, the poor.[18] The philosopher Gerald Gaus notes the consequence, namely, “the extraordinarily rapid displacement over most of the world of small-scale egalitarian culture with agricultural-based states and empires that were hierarchically organized. This political development almost reversed, in the blink of an eye, the egalitarian culture in which humans evolved.”[19]
Farmers were ideal victims for any specialist in violence who happened along, expropriating any surplus over $3-a-day bare subsistence.[20] That a temporary surplus in the ripening fields was easy to detect added to the hazards of immobility.[21] Land-based nomads on horses, such as the Mongols, led by a Mongolian Genghis or a Turco-Mongolian Tamerlane, preyed on farmers such as the Iranians or the Chinese or the Russians, becoming their long-term khans.[22] Sea-based nomads or pirates likewise went where the money was, as did the mysterious Sea Peoples of the late second millennium BCE in the eastern Mediterranean, or the Vikings two millennia later in the North Sea and the Baltic and beyond, or the well-organized descendants of the Vikings, the Normans, who ranged even further afield. In short, if diminishing returns or disease-breeding density didn’t do the sad trick of keeping most of us at $3 a day, violent hierarchy did.
§
Why during the long, long run before 1800 did ordinary people do no better? Because, considering the stately pace of betterment before the Great Enrichment, the Malthusian, homeostatic equilibrium was about $3 a day. Until 1750 or 1850, and even later in the poorest places, the Reverend Malthus of the first Essay looks sadly wise.
The text above is an excerpt from Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World, the third volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Lepenies 2014 shows that Malthus’s logic, and elevation of the logic to a “natural law,” was taken from another anti-poor-law pamphlet by Joseph Townsend thirteen years earlier.
[2] Ross Emmett and Anthony Waterman set me straight on the differences between Malthus Mark I and Malthus Mark II.
[3] Quoted in Lepenies 2014, p. 450.
[4] Voigtländer and Voth.
[5] Galor 2005.
[6] On the excellence of potatoes with milk, see Cook 2013.
[7] Startlingly, Townsend articulated exactly such a model in 1786 (Lepenies 2014).
[8] Mokyr 1983 and Ó Gráda 2010.
[9] Waterman 2012, p. 425.
[10] G. Clark 2007a, Table 4 and Figure 10.
[11] G. Clark 2007a, Figure 8.
[12] Malthus 1798, Chapter 2, end.
[13] Attenborough 1998.
[14] McGuire and Coelho 2011 is an excellent recent treatment of a large literature using such an argument.
[15] Haensch et al. 2010. In 2015 it was claimed by students of the matter that the Plague was spread from Central Asia not by flea-bearing rats but by, of all things, flea-bearing gerbils.
[16] Alfani 2013, for example on p. 427.
[17] Ross Emmett emphasizes Malthus’s notions here, Emmett n.d., p. 3.
[18] Sahlins 1972 (2004).
[19] Gaus 2013, p. 13.
[20] Olson 1993 is the seminal paper. Thus Scott 2009, and for a West African example, from my beloved colleague the late James Searing, Searing 2002.
[21] Mayshar, Moav, and Neeman 2011.
[22] Weatherford 2004; Perdue 2005, Hellie 2003, McNeill 1964, Lattimore 1940.