Confronting Economic and Social Realities, 1980–1999 195
DOCUMENT 146: Donella Meadows on the Complexity of the
Malthusian Debate (1993)Donella Meadows became a prominent voice in the Malthusian debate with the 1972 publication of her book
Limits to Growth. Writing in The Economist in 1993, she pointed out that “If a debate persists with passion for
nearly two centuries, it must be true not only that the evidence is complex enough to support both sides, but
also that each side is actively sifting the evidence, accumulating only that which supports preconceived notions.”
Meadows warned that it is time to stop arguing and start to take action.[I am] a person who has been active in the
Malthusian debate but who has become less inter-
ested in winning than in understanding the intran-
sigent nature of the discussion. I assume the argu-
ment resists resolution partly because the issues it
raises are so complex and partly because they are
so emotional. What I wonder is, what would we
see if we were willing to approach the question of
human population growth and planetary limits
purely scientifically? What if we could divest our-
selves of hopes, fears, and ideologies long enough
to entertain all arguments and judge them fairly?
What we would see, I think, is that all sides
are partly right and mostly incomplete. Each is
focusing on one piece of a very complex system.
Each is seeing its piece correctly. But because
no side is seeing the whole, no side is coming to
wholly supportable conclusions.
In short, to resolve the Malthusian conun-
drum and to find a way of thinking and acting
that can guide a growing population to a suffi-
cient and supportable standard of living within
the earth’s limits, we need all points of view. We
need to treat them all with respect. We need to
integrate them.
There are more than two points of view....I
will describe four sides of the debate here, with
the understanding that many people put ele-
ments of these four together in their own unique
combination, and that there are other points of
view as well.
* * *The Blues
The Blue view of the Malthusian question
focuses on the possibility of keeping capital
growing faster than population, so everyone
can be better off. Progress, as defined by this
view, comes from the accumulation of produc-
tive capital, from the building of infrastructure
(roads, dams, ports) to make that capital more
effective, and from the education of humans to
make them more skilled and inventive in produc-
ing output from capital.
An important part of the Blue model is the
assumption that capital grows most efficiently
in a market system, where it is privately owned,
where those who make it grow are directly
rewarded, and where government interferes
minimally.* * *The Reds... What the Reds see more clearly than
anyone else is the way societies systematically
enrich those who already are rich, leaving the
poor behind.
Reds do not assume that the enriched
ones reap just rewards of superior productiv-
ity, while the left-behind ones fail because they
are unwilling to work or invest. They point out
many social processes, from interest payments
to differential education to the distribution of
political power, that reward those who already
have won and condemn many to lives of con-
tinuous losing.
Reds want to fix these inequities and oppres-
sions. They envision a community of people
working together to control resources and pro-
duce goods....