The Meta-Malthusian Manifesto

Malthus was famously wrong. He wrote a whole manifesto about how England (population then: 9 million) couldn’t possibly support a growing population (today it’s 66 million). Whenever the country generated enough surplus food to prevent famine, people would have more kids, use more marginal land, and be right back at the risk of famine again.

This theory was perfectly logical: food production fluctuates unpredictably, and people have short memories. Food supply has been a meaningful economic constraint until surprisingly recently. In the 1840s, for example, the British railway…