The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [95]
Despite the wave of secularization experienced over the past hundred years, I suspect the world might be about to become more religious, not less. Since the Industrial Revolution, growth has been humanity’s solution to virtually every problem. As technological progress enabled more efficient and intense use of resources, it ushered in a period of prosperity unlike anything the world had seen.
That period, however, might be coming to a close. Global warming suggests we are running against rigid resource limits in our pursuit of economic prosperity. As we deplete them, economic growth will become more difficult to achieve. Two centuries after the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus claimed that “the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man,” the Malthusian trap appears like a plausible future.
Were we to hit the limit of our resources, God would likely come back in demand. Halting economic growth wouldn’t just boost poverty. As people and societies were forced to compete fiercely for economic output, religion’s set of ethical norms would come in handy to help societies cohere. God would be called upon to provide a supernatural narrative, a balm that reconciled humanity to its un-improvable lot; or maybe to help in war and conquest as access to resources became a zero-sum game.
To many in this dystopian future, faith would be worth the price, whatever sacrifices religion demanded in return.
CHAPTER NINE
The Price of the Future
FOR MORE THAN a century, economics has been known as the dismal science, peddling doom and despair, with little hope to offer. It owes this reputation to the work of the Scottish reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, who two hundred years ago delivered a crippling blow to his era’s burgeoning optimism about the prospects for human progress. In An Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society, published in 1798, the economist and demographer shook the self-confidence of the British Empire by arguing that the limited nature of the earth’s endowments would condemn humankind to poverty. Civilization would be kept in check by an inevitable scarcity of food.
The process was straightforward: unable to control their reproductive urges, families would respond to any increase in their income by having more children. Feeding and clothing them would eat up their income gains, ensuring that they remained at the edge of subsistence forever. Human misery was the unavoidable outcome of a population that was growing geometrically—Malthus expected it to double every quarter century—yet was dependent on a food supply that grew much more slowly as new land was added to production and agricultural productivity increased at a snail’s pace.
The price of food, of course, had to rise as demand expanded much faster than supply, until the “lower classes” couldn’t afford it any longer. Either people killed each other off in some other way, or enough would die of hunger to bring the head count back into line with what the earth could feed.
“The vices of mankind are avid and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors of the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves,” Malthus wrote. “But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence and plague, advance in terrific array and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow, levels the population with the food of the world.”
This kind of writing gave Malthus a gloomy reputation. The Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle characterized the controversy about population dynamics sparked by Malthus’s work as “dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or next.” But Malthus’s prognostications were entirely reasonable. His brand of catastrophe had visited other corners of the world. The classical