The Malthusian Trap of the 21st Century
In a world where it feels like every dollar is being squeezed, every penny is being pinched, inflation is soaring, corporate profits are at all-time highs, and skyrocketing rents are making cities unlivable, there is a lot of blame to be tossed around. People will argue over capitalism and socialism. They will blame immigrants for the increasing rent prices. They will blame greedy corporations. Conservatives will say leftists are to blame, leftists will say conservatives are to blame. Populists will say the establishment is to blame, and the establishment will say that populists are to blame. There is perhaps some truth to be found in these arguments, but what if there is a radical alternative explanation — one that suggests that humanity is doomed to subsistence?
The first time I came across the concept of the Malthusian Trap, I was reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. The book examines scenarios in which humanity develops superhuman intelligence (either through human augmentation or powerful computers), in the hope that we may work towards a beneficial outcome for humanity if such a development occurs. It is an book pregnant with interesting ideas, but I want to focus on one specific idea that was brought up. The following is an excerpt from the book:
The human population has increased a thousandfold over the past 9,000 years. The increase would have been much faster except for the fact that throughout most of history and prehistory, the human population was bumping up against the limits of the world economy. An approximately Malthusian condition prevailed, in which most people received subsistence-level incomes that just barely allowed them to survive and raise an average of two children to maturity. There were temporary and local reprieves: plagues, climate fluctuations, or warfare intermittently culled the population and freed up land, enabling survivors to improve their nutritional intake — and to bring up more children, until the ranks were replenished and the Malthusian condition reinstituted…
A sad and dissonant thought: that in this Malthusian condition, the normal state of affairs during most of our tenure on this planet, it was droughts, pestilence, massacres, and inequality — in common estimation the worst foes of human welfare — that may have been the greatest humanitarians: they alone enabling the average level of well-being to occasionally bop up slightly above that of life at the very margin of subsistence. (Superintelligence pg. 199)
The Malthusian Trap
The Malthusian Trap is the theory that as population growth is ahead of resource growth, there must be a stage at which the resource supply is inadequate for sustaining the population.
It Seems Much Better Than It Used to Be
We can see throughout history that many large-scale disasters have taken place that have significantly reduced the human population. For example, the Black Death killed about half of all Europeans in the mid-1300s. Weirdly, the Malthusian Trap seems not to hold true for recent history, the past hundred years or so. Large-scale wars and famines seem to be a thing of the past. Of course, we do still have such disasters, but relative to the total human population the impact of such events are much smaller than they used to be, and the numbers of humans dying to things like famine continue to decrease every year.
We have developments on many fronts to thank for this scenario. On the agriculture side, we have developed technology that greatly amplifies the amount of yield produced per farmer. We have also developed effective pesticides, herbicides, and genetically engineered plants so that more food can be extracted from each plant. On the infrastructure side, we have developed sewage systems to decrease our exposure to diseases spread through human waste. We have developed mass water filtration systems to give a large number of people access to clean water. We put fluoride in our water and toothpaste to improve dental health. On the geopolitics side, we have developed alliances and large international organizations to promote peace and cooperation between countries. Countries have advocated for more open trade agreements to assure mutual prosperity. We also have nuclear weapons to thank. For example, it is unlikely that a country will invade a member of NATO because nuclear weapons may be used against the invader. On the healthcare side, we have developed vaccines and eradicated smallpox.
A Radical Idea
From all this information, it seems that life might be much better now than it used to be. By most metrics, this is a true statement. It is much less common nowadays to die from a horrific disease or famine or war, especially if a person lives in an advanced economy. However, I think it is important to keep in mind these words from Bostrom:
We must remind ourselves that this modern age is a brief slice of history and very much an aberration. Human behaviour has not yet adapted to contemporary conditions.
It is only since the Industrial Revolution that economic growth became so rapid that population growth failed to keep pace.
I want to propose an interesting claim: that the Malthusian Trap still holds today, but the dynamics have changed. I think that humans will probably no longer die on a mass scale due to scarce resources, but rather that scarce resources will prevent humans from being born.
If we ignore the humanitarian perspective and only focus on population numbers, there is not really a difference between a person dying and a person not being born. The net effect on the future population is the same in both scenarios: -1. My theory is that instead of people actually dying, we simply prevent future people from being born.
Most people probably believe that the development of life-saving technologies such as the ones I have outlined previously (advances in sanitation, healthcare, etc.) are an absolute good. I do think that these are good things, but they are not an unqualified good. There are potentially negative consequences to allowing the most amount of people to live the longest and healthiest lives possible.
If we take a look at the COVID pandemic, about one million Americans have died from COVID so far. In the natural state of things, as population increases and a larger percentage of people gravitate towards large urban centres, you would expect more new diseases to develop, and for those diseases to have a much easier time spreading to a large number of people and killing them. Without the advances in modern therapeutics, vaccines, and epidemiology, the death toll could probably have reached 10 million or higher in the US.
The freedoms that modern society have provided to women have also probably contributed a very significant role. There are many ways for couples to prevent births nowadays, such as the various methods of birth control and abortions. The modern woman is also more financially independent, which means that there is less of a need for women to find a man and raise a family. Many women choose to prioritize their careers, leading to them choosing to delay having children or forgoing children altogether.
Less deaths, less births.
The Outcome
So, what does this new dynamic mean for the future of humanity? Of course, humanity must cease to grow at some point since the universe has limited resources. Think about why pyramid schemes cannot work forever — at some point, you have recruited all the humans on earth into your scheme and you run out of people to keep the scheme going. The important question to ask is whether that point in time is near or far into the future, and what humanity should do to prepare for such a scenario.
Barring a major scientific revolution such as the colonization of other planets, it is probably the case that humanity will stop growing sooner rather than later. This year, the population of the world reached eight billion, but it is starting to plateau. The growth rate of the world population is starting to decrease. Population scientists expect the human population to peak before the end of the century.
The bottom line is, we must accept that at some point that humanity will stop growing. No species can keep growing forever. What we see in nature is that species come and go regularly. Population dynamics apply to humans as much as they apply to horses and birds. What we have to address as a species is the following trade-off: do we have less people with more resources and a better quality of life, or do we have more people with less resources and a worse quality of life?
If we take a look at the country of Japan, we can already see a population crisis on the horizon. Japanese people have some of the longest life expectancies of any nationality. They are receiving pressure from both sides: people are living very long lives, and young people are not producing enough children (1.3 births per woman). Their population pyramid is inverted, and there are simply not enough young healthy workers to support the elderly people.
This pressure can be felt in America as well: in 1935 when FDR introduced the Social Security program, the age to receive full retirement benefits was 65 and the average life expectancy for a male was 60. In 2016 the age to receive full retirement benefits was 67 and the average life expectancy for a male was 76 (more on this topic). The Social Security trust fund reserves will only be able to pay retirees “in full on a timely basis until 2037, when the trust fund reserves are projected to become exhausted”.
This video explores the areas where infinite growth assumptions are found in our institutions, and the damage they are causing. Although Eric Weinstein and Peter Thiel are controversial figures, I still very much respect their intellect and I would highly recommend watching the whole discussion and judging the ideas on their own merits.
Counterarguments
Many of the arguments over poverty and how to improve conditions for the lower class tend to center the conversation around “improving the system”.
A leftist might say, “The real reason the economy is broken is because company profits are funneled towards the executives, and workers are not paid a fair wage. Investment firms like Blackstone have large real estate funds that buy up homes and artificially inflate the housing market. How can you expect people to raise a stable family when they are barely getting by without children?”
A libertarian might say, “Government intervention in the free market has led to artificial monopolies and crony capitalism. Over-regulation of markets has made it impossible for small business owners to compete with the large corporations. The government is stifling the possibilities for innovation and improvements to the general quality of life.”
But the problem is that even in a perfect scenario where the economy is maximally efficient or wealth is distributed to one’s preference, the “perfect system” would only delay the inevitable. It would only be a matter of a few decades or maybe a couple hundred years before the Malthusian dynamic re-asserted itself.
What if We Could Actually Achieve ”Infinite Growth”?
There are only so many trees we can harvest, so many fossil fuels we can dig up, and so much fish we can capture. Anything based in the world of atoms is limited. But what if there are resources that are so plentiful and have such low marginal cost for extraction/production that they could basically be used forever?
One such example is the land of bits — technology. There’s no reason we couldn’t make software and hardware more efficient until basically infinity. Okay, technically there are physical limits to the universe like Bremermann’s limit, but these are so far into the future that it is almost inconceivable that humans will ever reach those limits. At its most basic level, playing a video game or minting an NFT is not much more than shifting some bits around on some computers. What little resources it takes in terms of compute power and energy consumption can be made even more efficient if desired. It is conceivable that we could simulate billions of wonderful experiences in the metaverse, for basically zero marginal cost.
The energy that powers those experiences will come from renewable sources. Chamath Palihapitiya argues that the cost of producing energy will basically go to zero over the next few decades (watch more). If humanity achieves nuclear fusion, we will basically have infinite energy.
The things that impact the quality of a person’s life can be split into two categories: things that cost money, and things that are basically free. The things that cost money are mostly material things such as healthcare, food, shelter, and clean water. But I think often people overlook the things that aren’t material, and these are the things that are “basically” free, such as forming meaningful relationships. There are ways to increase the quality of life for people without spending much money. What if we could leverage technology to educate, connect, and empower people for basically zero cost?
Conclusion, TL;DR
The past hundred years of human history has produced enormous wealth and prosperity, which has greatly increased the quality of life for billions of people around the world and has simultaneously allowed for the human population to expand dramatically. This has given us a false impression that this trend will continue forever. Whether you examine capitalism, retirement benefits, or healthcare, many of the assumptions baked into our institutions and models are rather short-sighted: they assume a pattern of “infinite growth” that continues indefinitely. The reality is that we live in a world of finite resources and thus limited population, and sooner or later we will have to confront the reality that we need to adopt more long-term sustainable models and/or find new areas of growth, rather than keep passing the buck to the next generation.
