Malthusianism Quotes

“Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) had a growth schema with only two factors of production—natural resources and labour—with no allowance for technical progress, capital formation, or gains from international specialization. In 1798, he portrayed the general situation of humanity as one where population pressure put such strains on the ability of natural resources to produce subsistence that equilibrium would be attained only by various catastrophes. His influence has been strong and persistent, largely because of his forceful rhetoric and primitive scaremongering…He would have been very surprised to discover that Britain in 2003 would have only 1.2 per cent of its working population in agriculture and a life expectation of 78 years.”
― Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History

“Preindustrial living standards are predictable based on knowledge of disease and environment. Differences in social energy across societies were muted by the Malthusian constraints. They had minimal impacts on living conditions. Since the Industrial Revolution, however, we have entered a strange new world in which economic theory is of little use in understanding differences in income across societies, or the future income in any specific society. Wealth and poverty are a matter of differences in local social interactions that are magnified, not dampened, by the economic system, to produce feast or famine.”
― Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World

“The statistical rate of mortality means nothing. It is the rate of invisible mortality that counts. That is much higher, but incalculable, since death is here, growing everywhere and mounting up in the social body as a whole.
In the same way, there's no comparison between the index of visible corruption and that of invisible corruption (which it contributes to masking). The rate of political indifference is much higher than the abstention rate. As for the rate of invisible stupidity, it is far beyond the stupidity that actually shows up.
But perhaps the rate of secret intelligence and the rates of passion and imagination are also far higher than they appear?”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“bourgeois scientists found it necessary to invent the intraspecific struggle. They say that a fierce struggle for food, of which there is an insufficiency, goes on in nature, within the species, among its individual members – a struggle for the conditions of life. The stronger, fitter individuals win. The same thing, they aver, goes on among human beings: the capitalists, you see, are brainier, are more capable by nature and heredity. We Soviet people know full well that the oppression of the working people, the domination of the capitalist class and imperialist war have nothing in common with the laws of biology. These phenomena are all governed by the laws of decaying bourgeois, capitalist society, which has outlived its day. Nor is there any intraspecific competition in nature itself.”
― Trofim Lysenko, Agro Biology

“The supporters of the racist theory preach such reactionary ideas as the primary division of mankind into higher and lower racial groups; the ancient, inborn aristocratic nature of the ruling classes; the necessity for maintaining the purity of the higher race; the need for the propagation and perfection of the higher race; the planned mass destruction (genocide) of the lower race. The racists make extensive use of the Malthusian idea of ‘overpopulation.”
― Mikhail Nesturkh, The Origin of the Man