Was Malthus Right?
Posted: Wed Jun 27, 2018 5:06 pm
By Thomas Dichter 26 Jun 2018
Thomas Malthus, whose most famous work The Principle of Population was published in 1798, did not believe that society’s improvement is inevitable. Indeed when things do improve, he thought, the resultant population increase becomes an obstacle to further progress.
But on the other hand, yes, Malthus was right, or at least he was on to something, because as my recent foray to eight developing countries suggests (China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, India, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and South Africa), wherever population growth has exploded (e.g., India, Ethiopia) while economic growth may well be impressive looked at statistically, development for the many is thwarted – they don’t benefit from that growth.
But what is clear to any field veteran of poverty alleviation work is that these statistics do not tell us about the daily life of a huge number of people on the planet, largely poor, or near poor, whose struggle to survive, much less get ahead, is fraught with difficulty.
These millions are not being swept along by the tide of high economic growth and while the reasons why have to do with each country’s particular historical, natural resource, and socio-political context, surely one cross-cutting explanation is the lack of capacity of governments and the accompanying institutional framework to outpace population growth (and especially the rapid movement of rural people into the cities).
Full article https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/06/26/ ... hus-right/