Foreign affairs 2019 09-10

The Population Bust

September/October 2019 217

than the world could feed, dooming most

o‘ society to suer from food scarcity

while the very rich made sure their needs

were met. In Malthus’ dire view, that

would lead to starvation, privation,

and war, which would eventually lead to

population contraction, and then the

depressing cycle would begin again.

Yet just as Malthus reached his

conclusions, the world changed. Increased

crop yields, improvements in sanitation,

and accelerated urbanization led not to an

endless cycle o‘ impoverishment and

contraction but to an explosion o‘ global

population in the nineteenth century.

Morland provides a rigorous and detailed

account o– how, in the nineteenth century,

global population reached its breakout

from millennia o‘ prior human history,

during which the population had been

stagnant, contracting, or inching forward.

He starts with the observation that the

population begins to grow rapidly when

infant mortality declines. Eventually,

Capitalism as a system is particularly

vulnerable to a world o– less population

expansion; a signi¿cant portion o‘ the

economic growth that has driven

capitalism over the past several centuries

may have been simply a derivative o‘

more people and younger people consum-

ing more stu. I‘ the world ahead has

fewer people, will there be any real

economic growth? We are not only

unprepared to answer that question;

we are not even starting to ask it.

BOMB OR BUST?

At the heart o‘ The Human Tide and

Empty Planet, as well as demography in

general, is the odd yet compelling work o‘

the eighteenth-century British scholar

Thomas Malthus. Malthus’ 1798 Essay on

the Principle of Population argued that

growing numbers o‘ people were a

looming threat to social and political

stability. He was convinced that humans

were destined to produce more people

The next generation: at a daycare center in Florida, February 2000

ED
KASHI

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