histofthought1

486 Economic thought before Adam SmithZeitgeist. But a third element explained his instant renown: the spurious airof the 'scientific' that his alleged ratios gave to a doctrine in an age that wasincreasingly looking for models of human behaviour and its study in mathematicsand the 'hard' physical sciences.For spurious Malthus's ratios undoubtedly were. There was no proof whateverfor either of these alleged ratios. The absurdly mechanistic view thatpeople, unchecked, would breed like fruit flies, cannot be demonstrated bysimply spelling out the implications of the alleged 'doubling itself everytwenty-five years', e.g.:Taking the population of the world at any number, a thousand millions, forinstance, the human species would increase in the ratio of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64,128, 256, 512, &c, and subsistence as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, &c. In twocenturies and a quarter, the population would be to the means of subsistence as512 to 10.In a few more centuries, at the same rate, the 'ratio' of population to subsistencewould begin to approach infinity. This is scarcely demonstrable in anysense, certainly not by referring to the actual history of human populationwhich, in most of Europe, remained more or less constant for centuriesbefore the Industrial Revolution.Still less is there proof of Malthus's proclaimed 'arithmetical ratio', wherehe simply assumes that the supply of food will increase by the same amountfor decade after decade.Malthus's one attempt at proof of his ratios was extraordinarily feeble.Priding himself on relying on 'experience', Malthus noted that the populationof the North American colonies had increased for a long while in the 'geometricratio' of doubling every 25 years. But this example hardly demonstratesthe fearful outstripping by population of the 'arithmetically increasing'food supply. For, as Edwin Cannan astutely notes, 'This population musthave been fed, and consequently the annual produce of food must also haveincreased in a geometrical ratio'. His example proved nothing. Cannan addsthat by the sixth chapter of his Essay, Malthus 'seems to have had someinkling of this objection to his argument', and he tries to reply in a footnote,that 'In instances of this kind, the powers of the earth appear to be fully equalto answer all the demands for food that can be made up on it by man. But weshould be led into an error, if we were thence to suppose that population andfood ever really increase in the same ratio'. But since this is precisely whathad happened, Malthus is clearly totally unwitting that the second sentence inthis note is in flat contradiction to the first. 2Malthus's pessimistic conclusion about man thus contrasted with the optimismof his beloved Adam Smith as well as with Godwin. For if the inexorablepressure of population growth is always and everywhere destroying any