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Rudi Hoffman's avatar

Another BRILLIANT chapter by one of the most important thought leaders on the planet, Jason Crawford. Having deeply absorbed in my clueless college days (early 70s) the prevailing intellectual zeitgeist of "Limits to Growth", the writings of Deutch and Pinker were paradigm shifting. Crawford has summarized the pardigm that "sustainable" is a perjorative, not an unallowed good. We must have a GROWTH mentality for the future to be open, bright, and exciting for humanity.

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Taylor Dotson's avatar

Your argument may be fine, but I couldn't get past the common but ultimately inaccurate interpretation of Malthus that you begin with. Could someone who wrote the following be an advocate of population control?

"The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its poverty or its riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its being thinly or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted population."

Giorgi Kallis's book "Limits," even if you disagree with his argument about the environment, does a great job of extracting what Malthus was all about. He saw population as growing geometrically, if unchecked, but natural checks are plentiful. He opposed family planning, because he saw it as a "vice." He attacked ideas to "prevent breeding, or to something else as unnatural," because "to remove the difficulty in this way will, surely, in the opinion of most men, be to destroy that virtue and purity of manners." Those are the good reverend's own words.

Malthus opposed the poor laws not because it caused unchecked population increase but because it removed the misery that was the impetus for industriousness, and therefore reduced the potential for economic growth. Malthus's book is a celebration of inequality and attack on redistribution, not a paean to limits.

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