My 16-year-old brother's high school class is studying modern European history. Last week they had to write papers on the Industrial Revolution; my brother argued that Thomas Malthus was stupid and Adam Smith a genius.
Adam Smith is known as the father of modern economics. He wrote "The Wealth of Nations," an influential defense of free trade and capitalism.
Malthus also advanced some seminal economic arguments, namely that population would soon outstrip food production. That was in 1798. It hasn't happened yet.
The Industrial Revolution happened instead. Agricultural efficiency increased exponentially, and we now grow enough food to feed everyone in the world (even if, tragically, it doesn't always get to the people who need it.)
But Malthusian economics still exist. And not just in high school history classes. One of my roommates brought it up last week - after revisiting the theories in an introductory economics class. A Malthusian fear of overpopulation justifies China's one-child policy. A 1968 book, "The Population Bomb," predicted a Malthusian crisis in the 1970s that would decrease American life expectancy to 42 years by 1980.
Yet the catastrophe has never come to pass. The Industrial Revolution intervened in the late 18th century; the one-child policy and economic liberalization combined to create a similar effect in China. Technology and progress have always managed to outpace disaster.
Nevertheless, the predictions continue. Despite our proven ability to consistently avert our own extinction, we seem to have an inborn need to worry about the next thing that might destroy us. When the 20th-century Malthusian crisis was averted by the Green Revolution, it was replaced in the American psyche by communism and nuclear winter. Neither managed to kill us. More recently, SARS and West Nile were proven toothless. But we're still worried: If global warming doesn't cause the end of the world as we know it, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, Colony Collapse Disorder or Peak Oil certainly will.
Unfortunately, the tradition of Malthusian warnings is ingrained in our society without a corresponding memory of their tendency to overstate risk. All the catastrophes predicted were prevented, and we're still here. Yet we continue to issue warnings of our own demise. Again and again, we get into situations we can't possibly imagine a way out of. But then we discover solutions beyond anything we could ever have imagined.
I can't imagine how we'll solve global warming. But I'm confident we will. Progress is the modus operandi of the human race. As we move forward, we're bound to encounter new threats to our way of life. Global warming itself is a descendant of Industrial Revolution-era pollution. Antibiotics have saved millions of lives, but we're facing fatal antibiotic-resistant infections as a result. Fertilizers and pesticides that prevent starvation also imbalance ocean ecosystems and poison drinking water. But human progress is indefatigable. Every time the world as we know it threatens to end, we move on to a new, better world.
Nevertheless, we're always afraid. It's partly because of a lack of imagination and partly because of a lack of historical perspective, but it's also due to a glut of doomsayers. These alarmists are a bit more sophisticated than the crazy man on the corner who proclaims "The End is Near!" Nothing can become a full-blown threat to civilization without its prophet of doom. Widespread fear depends on PR. Thomas Malthus had his graphs and mathematical equations, Al Gore has his blockbuster movie. Without PR, no one is afraid.
Fear is a powerful motivator. It sells newspapers. It gets politicians elected. It justifies oppression in the eyes of the governed. It has a powerful effect on the economy.
Last Friday, a New York Times news alert popped into my inbox. "The economy unexpectedly shed 63,000 jobs in February," the article began, "fueling fears of a recession." Those fears, the article continued, may convince the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates by as much as a percentage point.
Can fear be a force for good? If fear of a recession can make the Fed prevent one, can it save us from other things we're afraid of?
Did the Industrial Revolution occur because Malthus made his doomsday prediction? Did fear of mutual assured destruction save us from nuclear winter? Did invading Iraq prevent Saddam Hussein from obtaining weapons of mass destruction?
We can never prove such counterfactuals. It's too bad, because if we could replay the late 18th century without Malthus, and still not starve to death, we would have some ammunition against the doomsayers. We could go back to using plastic grocery bags without fear of melting the polar ice caps.
But too much faith in progress might very well undermine its ability to prevent disasters. Without conclusive proof one way or the other, we better keep funding alternative energy research and slashing interest rates. But while we're at it, I wouldn't worry too much about the world ending.
Chloe Lutts '08 is building a global warming fallout shelter from plastic bags
