Malthus Was Not a Malthusian

Why would anyone today recommend reading Thomas Robert Malthus’s two-centuries-old Essay on Population (1798)? My gosh, we’re in the twenty-first century. The population crisis that Malthus predicted did not happen, thanks to human ingenuity providing scientific, technological, and moral progress. Malthus famously claimed that human population grows geometrically and food production grows arithmetically. Therefore, at some point population overtakes food production. The Malthusian warning was and still is for disciples such as Paul Ehrlich that unless we take steps to control population, we will find ourselves in a crisis with mass starvation. But history reveals that Malthus and his followers were wrong. Malthus had a nice little model for the preindustrial and pre-electronic world in which he lived, but we have abundant food and, thanks to readily available artificial birth control, below-replacement fertility rates. Even in the poorest areas of the globe, rates of undernourishment and deaths from famine are historically low. Caloric intake, not population, is growing exponentially around the world. The United States is in a crisis of obesity, not hunger! Only someone whose view is blinkered by ideology could remain a Malthusian today.