Yes of course Malthus was wrong.

His prediction that population would expand to absorb any increase in resources is not compatible with the evidence. If Malthus was right, then families, classes and countries where resources are abundant would experience faster population growth than those where resources are scarce. In fact, the reverse is true. Whether comparing countries, within a given country over time or through time-series trends, there is a strong NEGATIVE correlation between prosperity and fertility. When people have a good chance of raising their offspring to successful adulthood, they choose (on average) to have fewer children.

Fertility rates worldwide have halved in the past 50 years and are now below replacement rates in many developed countries, including Australia. Demographers expect this trend to continue, to the point where global population may stabilise late this century.

All this is the opposite of what Malthus’ theory predicted.

Rhian,

History didn't start 50 or 100 years ago. Malthus was clearly right about his own time. Compare the population growth rates in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries with those in the American colonies, where the abundant resources resulted in exceptionally high fertility rates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_the_United_States

See also Prof. Paolo Malanima on the historical inverse relationship between population and wages in Northern Italy

http://www.paolomalanima.it/default_file/Articles/Wages_%20Productivity.pdf

What has changed over the last 100 years or so is development, which has pulled some (not all) countries out of the Malthusian trap. Developed countries can defend themselves with technology rather than numbers. Developed countries need an educated, high quality work force, so they enforce compulsory education and child labour laws, breaking the nexus between large families and economic benefits for the parents. They can also afford to pay pensions to their elderly. As one American blogger put it, "Social Security is a small price to pay not to have my parents or my wife's parents living with us." Modern contraception makes it easy to avoid unwanted births.

I don't think it is possible, though, to make everyone rich, even if population growth stopped tomorrow, due to resource limitations and problems with pollution of various sorts. We are already in environmental overshoot, using up renewable resources faster than they can be replenished. See (especially p. 21)

http://issuu.com/globalfootprintnetwork/docs/ecological-footprint-atlas-2010/1?mode=a_p

If resources account for population growth, why was the USA’s indigenous population low and stable before white colonisation?

The article says that high birth rates and low death rates both contributed to population growth. This accords with the demographic transition model, predicting rapid population growth as developing countries transition from a fairly stable pre-industrial population (in America’s case, its indigenous population) to a low fertility, high life expectancy developed state. As the transition model predicts, both birth and death rates declined rapidly as the USA became more prosperous. And – in contradiction of Malthus – the white population, with its greater prosperity and longer life expectancy, had birth rates consistently below the black (largely slave) population:

http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/haines.demography

I agree that a Malthusian trap was more plausible in pre-industrial societies that it is today, and nowadays may be more plausible in poor than rich countries. But taking the world as a whole, the global tendency towards higher life expectancy and lower fertility rates suggest that the transition model is a far better explanation for demographic trends than Malthus’s grim theory.

Can everyone be “rich”? That depends on what you mean by “rich”. In the past 100 years we have made stunning progress in improving life expectancy. The overall incidence of famines is declining, as is the rate of absolute poverty and its effects such as malnutrition. We still have a long way to go, but trends are heading in the right direction. I see no reason to expect them to stop.

If you conceive of economic growth as producing more and more of the same stuff, then resources might one day provide a limit to growth. But economic growth is driven ultimately by productivity and innovation, and the possibilities for improving these are limitless. People in developing countries use satellite telecommunications services in places that could not hope to pay for the copper wires network that would have been needed a few years ago to access such services. Where people use telecommunications networks, we no longer need scarce and expensive copper but can use silicon-based fibre at many times the efficiency

"But economic growth is driven ultimately by productivity and innovation, and the possibilities for improving these are limitless."

Unsubstantiated drivel!

Its a THERMODYNAMIC FACT: Growth is always driven by FREE-ENERGY. Reality: Finite energy, more people, less free-energy per capita, less GROWTH per capita and less growth PERIOD. Except of course, for those on salaries 100-1000 times the average citizen. Ah but they don't exist. In your theory of everyone is EQUAL - HA HA!

2012 is going to be an interesting year for people who still believe in SANTA~! Or those who would try to make others believe in such fantasies for some competitive edging.

How can anyone believe that current world population is not a problem when you consider what is happening to the world environment? That is of course unless you don't consider world environment to be important - but only people, is that it? Damn the environment, we can do without it - is that it?

Just how important is Homo Sapiens, that more and more is better and better? Forests being destroyed, with oxygen loss, habitat loss, species extinction - including many species as yet unknown to science, plants and animals which might hold the key to fighting disease, or are just a source of amazement and splendour.

Land clearing for food or oil production, to sustain subsistence communities in abject poverty while the West revels in its cleverness; habitats destroyed or changed irreversibly by over-grazing by domestic herds, with ever-diminishing returns; land raped to exploit fossil fuels; the marine environment raped beyond sustainability to feed ever increasing masses of humanity; the world increasingly put at risk to feed fossil fuel consumption; toxins released into the environment in the name of progress. We kill the world, that we might live. How clever we are.

While some caring people and organisations are working hard to bring a few species back from the brink of extinction, so many other species go to the wall unseen and unheard, in the name of progress. And, this makes sense?

Before fossil fuel usage some communities reduced their environment to desert by over-exploitation; now we have floods, landslips and mudslides because of lack of ground-cover. Ever increasing demand, and ever diminishing returns. We kill all before us, to maintain an illusion of progress and satisfaction.

Too smart for our own good? Reckon.

Rhian,

The demographic transition model merely describes the process of getting out of the Malthusian trap.

It is worth looking at an article by Debora MacKenzie in the Jan. 7 New Scientist on the Limits to Growth model World3 and recent work that has followed on from it. Such models have been run to test technological optimist scenarios:

"In some runs, they gave World3 unlimited, non-polluting nuclear energy - which allowed extensive substitution and recycling of limited materials - and a doubling in the reserves of non-renewables that could be economically exploited. All the same, the population crashed when industrial pollution soared. Then fourfold pollution reduction was added as well: this time, the crash came when there was no more farmland. Adding higher farm yields and better birth control helped in this case. But then soil erosion and pollution struck, driven by the continuing rise of industry... Only when the growth of population and industry were constrained, and all the technological fixes applied, did it stabilise in relative prosperity."

The bottom line is that we are in global environmental overshoot and would be set to hit the wall even with no more people. Due to overextraction, the water table under Punjab's wheat belt has been falling at a meter a year. India has started importing grain again. Even if everyone cut their fertility to replacement level tomorrow, we could still expect 2-3 billion more people, just due to demographic momentum. (If the young adult generation is much bigger than older generations, there will still be more births than deaths, even if family sizes are small.) I have seen calculations that India's population would double under that scenario before stabilising. 42% of the children are malnourished now. Fertility rates have also remained stubbornly high in a number of places, the reason why the UN has raised its medium population projection to show a peak at 10 billion instead of 9.