1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [102]
Eight people would require the help of hired servants; there would be, say, ten people in the household. With the ten-room house and the 100 mu of farmland, I believe they would have just enough space to live in and food to eat, although barely enough. In time, however, there will be grandsons, who, in turn, will marry. The aged members of the household will pass away, but there could still be more than twenty people in the family. With more than twenty people sharing a house and working 100 mu of farmland, I am sure that even if they eat very frugally and live in crowded quarters, their needs will not be met.
Hong conceded that the Qing had opened up new land to support China’s population. But the amount of farmland had
only doubled or, at the most, increased three to five times, while the population has grown ten to twenty times. Thus farmland and houses are always in short supply, while there is always a surplus of households and population.…
Question: Do Heaven-and-earth have a way of dealing with this situation? Answer: Heaven-and-earth’s way of making adjustments lies in flood, drought, and plagues.
Five years later, in England, a similar notion came to another man: Rev. Thomas Robert Malthus. A shy, kindly fellow with a slight harelip, Malthus was the first person to hold a university position in economics—that is, the first professional economist—in Britain, and probably the world. He was impelled to think about population growth after a disagreement with his father, a well-heeled eccentric in the English style. The argument was over whether the human race could transform the world into paradise. Malthus thought not, and said so at length—55,000 words, published as an unsigned broadside in 1798. Several longer versions followed. These were signed; Malthus had become more confident.
“The power of population,” Malthus proclaimed, “is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.” In textbooks today this notion is often depicted by recourse to a graph. One line on the graph represents the total food supply; it slowly rises in a line from left to right as people clear more land and farm more efficiently. Another line starts out low, quickly curves to meet the first, then soars above it; that line represents human population, growing exponentially. Eventually the gap between the two lines cannot be bridged, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse pay a call. Every effort to increase the food supply, Malthus argued, will only lead to an increase in population that will more than cancel out the increase in the food supply—a state of affairs today known as a Malthusian trap. Forget Utopia, Malthus said. Humanity is doomed to exist, now and forever, at the edge of starvation. Forget charity, too: helping the poor only leads to more babies, which in turn produces increased hardship down the road. No matter how big the banquet grows, there will always be too many hungry people wanting a seat at the table. The Malthusian trap cannot be escaped.
The reaction was explosive. “Right from the publication of the Essay on Population to this day,” the great economic historian Joseph Schumpeter declared, “Malthus had the good fortune—for this is good fortune—to be the subject of equally unreasonable, contradictory appraisals.” John Maynard Keynes regarded Malthus as the “ beginning of systematic economic thinking.” Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the other hand, derided him as “a eunuch and a tyrant.” John Stuart Mill viewed Malthus as a great thinker. To Karl Marx he was a “plagiarist” and a “shameless sycophant of the ruling classes.” “He was a benefactor of humanity,” Schumpeter wrote. “He was a fiend. He was a profound thinker. He was a dunce.”
Hong, by contrast, was ignored. Unlike Malthus, he never developed his thoughts systematically, in part because he devoted his energy to criticizing the corrupt officials whom he believed were looting the Qing state. Appalled at the