The Editor, The Times
9 October 2011
Sir,
Malthus, it seems from your editorial and article today, is widely known only in comic strip version. Malthus made many errors but to suggest that ‘Malthus was always wrong’ because his ‘forecasts of apocalypse’ through ‘starvation and disease’ have not engulfed all the world is a caricature. Those checks have been common enough, but in his mature work, Malthus emphasised that as societies developed, families would curb their reproduction to protect survival and living standards from poverty through ‘prudential restraint’. In his day that meant delaying or avoiding marriage until a family could decently be supported. The biggest ever historical social scientific enquiry, by Cambridge University, supported his model of the regulation of population in the pre-industrial period through feedbacks between marriage, fertility and wages.
The huge increase in productivity which he failed to foresee has only delayed a renewed adjustment. We are (almost) all Malthusians now. Well over half the world’s population practices ‘prudential restraint’ in the modern guise of family planning, protecting family and society from the poverty and want that follows from excess growth and numbers. Those that are slow to do so suffer the consequences, as we see too often in the news. Most governments in the developing world have developed policies to initiate or reinforce fertility decline and the moderation of growth, communist China being the most enthusiastically ‘Malthusian’ of all, although with methods of which that good man would fiercely disapprove.
And how interesting to see the 18th century utopian speculations of M. Condorcet, with their promise of the perfectibility of man and the extinction of all wants, strife and sexual passion, risen from the dead in your editorial. Astonishing to find such stuff in a newspaper which purports to be serious.
Yours faithfully,
David Coleman, Professor of Demography, Oxford University