Malthusians in the news
I always like to poke fun at Malthusians as
#1) - they have such silly ideas and
#2) - they are always wrong.
Snork, writing over at The Blogmocracy
has this to offer:
Malthusians � Doing What They Do
Really good article here, about the cranium-in-posterior Chicken Little syndrome known as Malthusianism, after the mad professor Thomas Malthus.
Much has been written about the crisis de jour that seems to show up every generation; this time being global warming climate change. What this author shows goes beyond that observation of the obvious, and shows another pattern:The projection of statistical trends into disaster scenarios is as old as the modern science of statistics. People once worried that England�s nascent industrial economy would come to a sputtering halt because forests were disappearing at increasing rates, driven by the need for charcoal. The Peak Charcoal scenario yielded in time to Peak Coal worries before morphing into today�s Peak Oil and Peak Gas scenarios. My favorite Malthusian crisis scenario is the horse manure problem. Nineteenth century statisticians calculated how much cargo a horse could carry, and then looked at the daily needs of London�s population for food and other material goods. From there it was a short step to calculate the amount of manure produced by each cart horse, the number of horses required to operate the manure removal carts, and basically to calculate a choke point: the point where cart horse manure would pile up so high in London�s streets that urban life would come to a crashing halt.
Heh -- the link is great and yes, I stand by my thought that not one Malthusian prediction has ever come true. If anyone can link to proof that one did, I would love to hear about it
How otherwise serious people can spend so much of their time and effort on thinking about something that will never happen is beyond me. You only need to look at history to see this spectre never manifests...
Posted by DaveH at May 20, 2010 8:38 PM