Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…No, no. This is a widespread misinterpretation of Malthus, that Malthus is about low living standards. I think my earlier book, A Farewell to Alms — one of the actual innovative elements of that book was to say, “Let’s take apart these two different elements of Malthusianism.” One is the element that you’re forced to an equilibrium where the birth rate equals the death rate. The second is that that equilibrium does not necessarily imply relatively low living standards. The way this shows up is, after the Black Death in Europe, which increased mortality rates, living standards in somewhere like Britain in 1450 were not again equal till the end of the Industrial Revolution. But you could tell this was a static population in England at that period. There were tiny numbers of people. There were less than 2 million people in England by 1450. It was consequently a Malthusian economy, but an incredibly rich Malthusian economy, where people, when they talked about their diet, they talked about the daily meat that they would eat. So, they really were living at high material living standards. We can go back and look at the houses they constructed in that period. People here in Arlington would be happy to move into some of these medieval houses. [laughs] Under your current view, is foreign aid to sub-Saharan Africa counterproductive? I’m not talking about corruption or siphoning it off. Those are clearly problems but just aid as a brute, abstract concept. Does it counteract itself through Malthusian, or what I would call Clarkian mechanisms? I think you used to believe that. There are societies like Malawi in sub-Saharan Africa where there is consistent economic progress, but that progress gets eaten up in terms of population growth. So, the living standards really have not managed to increase for 50 or 60 years in these societies because they still depend very heavily on agriculture. There’s a limited agricultural area, and better technology then induces more people. How could you best help such societies? It would be somehow by breaking that link between resources and population. Industrialization, if it’s possible to achieve, would be fantastic in these societies. The second thing would be limits on population growth. It looks like those limits are coming, and that we are going to see such a transformation, but there’s —…

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