Scarcity and Population: Thomas Malthus

Scarcity and Population

Definition of Scarcity

• Scarcity means something is in short supply.

• It can be seen as:

  • Real shortage: Not enough stuff.

  • Idea: Way to organize thoughts.

  • Viewpoint: How we see and talk about the world.

Adam Smith and the Invisible Hand

• Smith's "invisible hand" is about labor and economic growth.

• More people lead to:

  • More workers.

  • Lower pay.

  • Higher profits for owners.

  • More savings and investment.

  • More jobs needed.

• Smith thought economic growth could handle more people.

• Quote: More jobs come from growing wealth, not just wealth itself.

• Quote: A country's success is best seen by its growing population.

Population, Food Prices, and Mortality

• Higher food costs mean more deaths.

• How long people live and how many kids they have depend on food prices.

• Grain prices change with population size.

The Poor Laws

• Settlement Act (1662-1834):

  • Poor people had to stay in their hometown.

• Speenhamland Law (1795-1834):

  • Everyone had a right to live, getting money based on bread prices, no matter their job.

  • Local areas paid for it with taxes on employers.

Edmund Burke's Views

• Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was a well-known conservative who didn't like the French Revolution.

• He was a Member of Parliament from 1766-1794.

• He wrote about scarcity in 1795.

• Burke thought:

  • Workers are like any product; their value goes up or down with demand.

  • Let sellers do their thing; they help both farmers and buyers.

  • Messing with food trade is super risky, especially when things are scarce.

Thomas Robert Malthus

• Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) taught economics from 1805-1834.

• He wrote about population in 1798, updating it many times.

• Malthus said giving more money for food made prices rise faster than they should.

• He also wrote about high food prices in 1800.

The Principle of Population

• Malthus said:

  1. People need food to live.

  2. People will always want to have sex.

• Population can grow faster than we can make food.

• Population grows like 1, 2, 4, 8, while food grows like 1, 2, 3, 4.

Population vs. Subsistence

• Population grows fast: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc.

• Food grows slowly: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, etc.

• This means it's hard to feed everyone.

• Many people struggle because of this.

Malthus on Civilized Society

• Malthus thought rich countries can't let poor people have too many kids because there's not enough food.

• He believed many poor kids die because of this. More people might raise wages at first, but then cause poverty and joblessness, limiting population.

Problematic of Political Economy

• Includes Land, Labor, Money, Capital, Value, Law/Government, and Natural Law.

19th-Century Developments

• Big changes in population happened then.

Conclusions on Malthus

• Malthus's idea is flawed but hard to prove wrong.

• It had some support before 1800, but not much since.

• Malthus thought suffering pushed people to be good.

• He thought high food prices were good and needed free markets.

• He didn't like helping the poor and wanted a national job market.

• He knew demand was important.

Townsend's Parable of the Goats and the Dogs

• Hunger makes even wild animals behave, teaching them to be civil and obedient.

• Hunger makes animals work, but laws stop them from feeling it.

• Source: William Godwin, Dissertation on the Poor Laws (1786).

The Marginal Revolution in Neoclassical Economics

• Key people: William Stanley Jevons (1835-1882), Léon Walras (1834-1910), and Carl Menger (1840-1921).

Marshall Sahlins on Scarcity in Capitalist Societies

• Rich capitalist countries act like they don't have enough.

• They always want more, even though they have a lot.

• The way they do business makes things seem scarce.

• Source: Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (1972).

Michael Watts on Scarcity

• Scarcity controls how we act.

• It's a basic idea in the modern world.

• It shapes how we see the world.

• Source: Michael Watts, Reflections: Scarcity, Modernity, Terror. In Making Threats: Biofears and Environmental Anxieties (2005).

The Scarcity Postulate

• Economics thinks everyone always wants more than they can get.

• Source: Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (1989).

• Economics looks at how people deal with wanting things but not having enough.

• It focuses on how scarcity affects what we do.

• Source: Lionel Robbins, An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932).

Scarcity and Institutions

• Economics sees owning things and buying/selling as normal because of scarcity.

• Source: Nicholas Xenos, Scarcity and Modernity (1989).

Scarcity as Governmentality (Michel Foucault)

• Letting prices go up makes people save and control themselves.

• Scarcity means some people will be hungry or die, but it stops everyone from being in trouble.

• Source: Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population.

William Vogt on Carrying Capacity

• $C = \frac{B}{E}$, where:

  • C is how many people the Earth can support.

  • B is how many people could be born.

  • E is all the things stopping people from being born.

• Source: William Vogt, Road to Survival (1948).

Behavioral Economics

• People make bad choices when they think they don't have enough.

• Referenced works: Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir.

Jonathan Latham on the Myth of a Food Crisis

• Agribusiness says they need to feed the world.

• They say only they can save the poor with their farming.

• This makes farming seem like a moral issue.

• They say we need pesticides, GMOs, and big farms to stop starvation.

• Source: Jonathan Latham, The myth of a food crisis. In Rethinking Food and Agriculture (2021).