People create resources.
Not anymore they don’t. They’ve all been told to stay at home.
Fortunately another few hundred million of them are likely to die in poverty, so Malthus wins. Yay!
On a less flippant note, lower wheat prices don’t translate to more people being fed, and it certainly doesn’t translate to them being healthier.Wheat isn’t even an important foodstuff for humans, and it takes up an awful lot of land that could be used much more productively. These days, humans grow wheat these days the way beavers build dams: we’re not entirely sure why we do it, but we know that we must.
With a bit of luck lower wheat prices will simply result in more and more farmers exiting the wheat market, and a few million hectares of disastrously degraded land can be reclaimed and brought back into useful production. It’s going to be an uphill struggle, though.
You got Malthus backwards. Malthus’s thesis is that if the population continues to grow, you’re gonna run out of food. If people are wiped out by disease, the population shrinks, the people left will have more food.
Again, according to Malthus, if the population grows, you’ll run out of food. If you’re running out of food, the supply-demand imbalance will cause the price of wheat to rise. Just the opposite is happening, so he is wrong, wrong, wrong.
It doesn’t cover how much wheat people choose to produce.
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The population is growing as fast as it ever was. 2018: 7.592, 2019: 7.674, 2020: 7.794, 2021 (estimate) 7.9 approx. Nobody has been “wiped out by disease”.
Food production has been disrupted by the usual causes of famine (i.e., governments), so people are going to die of poverty-related causes.
Unless, of course, you’re suggesting the UN have got their numbers back-to-front?
That only works in a free market. Wheat is one of the most heavily-rigged commodities on the planet, which is why we keep producing it even though the return on investment is often zero or negative: the shortfall is made up via subsidy, insurance payouts, or other financial jiggery-pokery.
In any case, most wheat is used for animal feed, so although changes in the supply and price of wheat might affect the economics of industrially-produced meat, it doesn’t affect how many people are fed, or how well.
Yeah, but you’re the one who brought it up.
Famines are easily prevented (see Amartya Sen). That’s because of dumb decisions, not because we’re out of food.
The wheat price is indicative of how abundant food is, it doesn’t cause anything germane to this discussion.
Based on everything you said, we have plenty of food to feed everyone and more, in spite of the population explosion (and I agree), so Malthus is dead wrong.
Indeed. But for whatever reason, the food supply isn’t keeping up with population. So Malthus wasn’t exactly wrong. He just failed to predict the exact mechanisms, which I think is forgivable.
Fair enough. I guess all those starving people are a mirage, and the population growth likewise. Because wheat prices.
Not sure what that has to do with poverty in the third world, or Malthus in general. And you still haven’t explained why wheat prices have anything at all to do with the “creation of resources” that will keep Malthus sedated. Wheat cultivation is a prime driver of the destruction of resources.
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I think the proplem with your example is we arent done yet. Just wait. Shits gonna get awkward soon enough, though millions are already starving so its a weirdly simplistic idea.
Arable land alone is about to get pretty fucked. The dust bowl, amazon, borneo, china etc are all in different stages of soil loss, water issues etc and eventually the inputs required are going to drive prices up again. They already sort of are in some places.
In short, i dont see food getting.muhc cheaper until we have mastered lab grown food and.scaled up to a couple billion peoples worth of it. Then another crash in prices perhaps. But in the next decades watch a small increase. Nothing compared to 1800s as they didnt have lots of tech. That is just silly.
Though i look a it as if we can waste this wholesale quantity of food, it is too cheap. We are pretty disgusting, like the fox in the hen house killing everything and walking away. We are pretty irresponsible as a whole.
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As has been said, Malthus’ problem was he was writing at exactly the time when his theory was being falsified, for good reason. He was correct about all human history up till that point- any gain in food production was quickly wiped out about by the resultant increase in population.
This connection was broken in the 18th C. by the Scientific Revolution. (Of course it was that same revolution that gave him the statistical tools to do his work.)
Unfortunately deaths by starvation and disease went down earlier than people changing their habits, resulting in the population explosion, a “one time” event that is still playing out in sub-Saharan Africa.
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According to Malthus, if the potential technology you’re speaking of is realized and used, the population will just get bigger again and you’ll have another shortage.
Is that not what is happening? Loads of people are without food, you cant just make an average world wide when county A has no water and country B is constantly flooded. Though one can blame logistics. Politics. Corporations. Climate. Or whatever. Point is, the problems of food are not a 2 point poblem (eg. Wheat cheap, population xyz). To think it is so simple is absolutely not understanding how the current world works.
Regardless, price of food and population isnt tier one on the we are fucked level. Arguably land manaegment, water resources, top soil erosion, gclimate change etc are FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR bigger concerns that will no doubt cause real issues with second tier issues like food prices.
As always, prevention is better than the cure. seems no one really gives a shit anyway until THEY ar starving… so not sure why we even waste our breath anymore to be honest
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Of course there are other factors, e.g. droughts, other than poulation.
Malthus lived in a world where there was no birth control- well, there were reusable sheepskin condoms, so it may stand to reason he labelled every form of sex outside of reproduction as “vice”(he was an Anglican priest, after all.)
We live in a post-Malthusian world, starting from about 1830. Food production outstripped population growth as more and more countries were brought (often brutally)into the world system. I grew up in the world of The Population Bomb-we powered through that on the base of the Green Revolution.
Currently people are worrying about a population bust; when they can control their fertility, most people are happy to st their own one or two child policy.
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Even sex for reproductive purposes was a sin for him. He urged restraint so to slow population explosion.