Purchase and view. This author is way behind the times.
http://www.demographicwinter.com/

Perhaps "The Demographic Winter" is also a furphy. Even if it is true, it will take quite some time for the world food and resource supplies to catch up with the currently burgeoning population.

I think the odds are currently in favour of Malthus, but I probably won't still be around to find out as I only have less than 25 years to go.

David

Demographic Winter is of course produced by self righteous right wing Catholics and other denizens of the loony right in the USA.
The same kind of self righteous Catholics who pretend that even the use of contraception is a crime, on a par with murder even.

The same kind of mindset that is actively seeking to have the "rights of the unborn child" made into mandatory law in the USA.
Even contraception, and the giving of advice re the use of contraceptive methods would therefore be illegal.
To them even the Planned Parenthood movement is an abomination.

Mark, I read your essay with interest, and agree generally with your demolition.

But Malthus is a straw man. There seems always to be a disconnect between the mouths to feed and the food to sustain them. For the last two centuries Western countries have overcome this problem by industrialising agriculture and developing transport infrastructure to speed the delivery of the food. Other countries lack both the 'industry' and the infrastructure. As I recall it, the great Bengal famine in the 1940s was due more to a lack of infrastructure than to a lack of food.

I generally agree that population increase is the core of our worries, which is why I keep hammering away at the need to educate girls and to provide contraception. And, quite apart from the food anxiety, unequal family sizes present an equity problem in the availability of service of all kinds. But that leads us into another kind of debate.

I think you could make the points you want to make without mentioning Malthus at all.

Mark
I was intrigued to see you base an arguement on population levels in the time of the Napoleonic wars. But this reference does little more than destroy your argument.

Compare population levels in napoleonic times with population levels now. We have obviously far exceeded anything that Malthus could have foreseen as a population cap. But Malthus was right for his time. In fact he was right for most of human history. Something changed. What was it?

The answer is, as far as anyone knows, the rate of innovation. Where previously innovations meant that population levels went up and then stopped at a new level, now the rate of innovation is continually raising the possible population level faster than it can rise to meet it. This is why populations have been continuously expanding for decades.

Is there any suggestion the rete of innovation is slowing down? Not really. Food prices are high at the moment for a range of factors including a sharp increase in income for large numbers in India and China, but high prices stimulates production. If you can see genuine barriers to production increases then I'd be quite interested to know what they are.

Australian exports $46B of food per year and growing. We import about $6B thought reciprocal trade agreements. If you're worried about being hungry, get a job.

Why stick up for Malthus? It's like sticking up for bad maths.The anti-pops have slid off the agenda because of silly articles like this.

The world's population is slowing at a massive rate and has been doing so since the 60s. We are confronted with a world that is both ageing rapidly and wih less people in Western Europe, Russia, American and Japan being born.

These cranks ought to just come out and say they hate capitalism, hate the social welfare system, hate liberalism and almost everything that supports modern life. They are like Andrew Bolt in reverse.

At the core of their bearded gnome engineering/genetics thinking, is a deep hatred of women, of children and probably of Sunday's nights watching Disneyland.

They had their moment with Dick Smith's dreaming of a 1950s Australia.