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Malthus and the three card trick

By Mark O'Connor - posted Monday, 21 November 2011


Also, did Malthus in fact prophesy, or merely warn? (In which case the second card is even falser.) And then, how specific were his predictions of human numbers exceeding food supply, and how often has what he warned about in fact occurred? (It's said that 300 million people have died of hunger or related causes since 1967.) Would you refuse to believe eye-witness accounts of famines on the grounds that someone once predicted a famine or famines that didn't occur?

By the time I've run though these points, and then suggested the opposition should apologise for using this misleading argument, they tend to look "tolerably foolish". But note that it is important to start with the two good-as-gold logical points: that one prophet being wrong doesn't mean all prophets are wrong, and that if Malthus was simply the false prophet they claim, he would not deserve the pre-eminence they have pretended to give him.

If you start instead with the last point, and defend Malthus by saying that he wasn't necessarily prophesying and wasn't necessarily wrong, it will sound like you are defending a weak point in your own position. They will then contest your defence of Malthus, and you may find yourself in the glue-pot, since the more you defend Malthus the more you will seem to be conceding their basic (and illogical) contention, that unless Malthus can be exonerated, no subsequent prophesy or even observation of famine should be believed. Target that absurdity first, and they can be left to argue their rather jaundiced view of Malthus, if they insist, against that of the encyclopaedias and the scholarly articles.

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And don't forget to make the most obvious point of all: that the three-card trick is a distraction from today's far more advanced debates. Most agricultural experts say that Australia's food security cannot be guaranteed if we head for "big Australia". Those who think they can prove them wrong should not be seeking to detour via what Malthus thought two hundred years ago. They should look rather at whether they can answer the detailed arguments advanced in Michael Lardelli's Online Opinion piece Can we feed a 'Big Australia'? Or in the ABC Landline program The Future of Food, 26 June 2011. Or in the recent report to the Department of Immigration on the Long-term physical implications of Net Overseas Migration (e.g. p. 109)

Incidentally, the main reason Malthus's expectation of continuing famines in the UK (as future population outstripped future food supply) did not come true, is that during and after the Napoleonic wars Britain and France emerged as pre-eminent colonial powers, and proceeded to bleed each other white of young men. They did this via a long series of land battles and sea battles, not to mention the practices of sending troops and bureaucrats to tropical colonies where they often died like flies. Since in those days single women tended not to have babies, population growth was much reduced. As well, relations with the United States improved, so that even though the US was lost as a colony, it obligingly took off a substantial proportion of the UK's population (including the Irish who continued to flee their country for decades after the Potato Famine).

Further Britain happened to emerge as the dominant colonial power, with complete control of the seas, and so could afford to import food from other countries - which to this day is the only thing that keeps its bloated population from starving. It was not improvements in C19th agriculture that kept up with population growth and prevented the Malthusian famines occurring; it was the combination of death in war, death from colonial diseases, and massive emigration to North America. This unlikely combination of factors was not inevitable, and could not in Malthus's day have been given a high probability of coming true.

Not that Malthus denied a country could reduce its population by emigration, or by war. His rather general prophesies were confined to countries where population did outgrow food supply. Malthus's view was that if none of the other horsemen of the apocalypse, like War or Plague, then got in first, it was likely that Famine would.

But don't waste your breath explaining all this to those who don't want to know.

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About the Author

Mark O'Connor is the author of This Tired Brown Land, and co-author of Overloading Australia: How governments and media dither and deny on population, by Mark O’Connor and William Lines. He blogs at He blogs at http://markoconnor-australianpoet.blogspot.com/.

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