The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [96]
The Rapa Nui of Easter Island, famed carvers of huge monolithic heads called Moai, also collapsed after it exhausted its physical limits. A population that reached a peak of ten thousand in the early fifteenth century had withered to about two thousand when Captain James Cook visited the island in 1774. The surviving civilization had no idea how the monumental stone heads had come to be there.
The world in which Malthus lived seemed to have been stuck for years in a Malthusian quagmire. Over the prior two and a half centuries the world’s average income per head had inched ahead at a pace of about 0.1 percent per year. Between 1500 and 1750 the world’s population increased by only two thirds—to 720 million people. Humanity wasn’t thriving.
Malthus’s England was more prosperous than most of the world at the time. Still, an English baby born in 1750 could expect to die by his or her mid- to late thirties. England’s population in 1750 remained roughly the same as in the year 1300, constrained by war, disease, and the food supply. It was virtually impossible to get ahead. Londoners in 1800 made about the same wages, in real terms, as their forefathers had four centuries before.
Nonetheless, Malthus got the future wrong. He made his predictions just as England and the rest of Europe were embarking upon a sustained period of unprecedented economic growth that would spread around the globe and drastically improve humanity’s wellbeing over the following two centuries.
THE REVOLUTION IN productivity in Lancashire’s cotton industry started as early as the 1730s, with a series of new inventions to spin yarn, such as John Kay’s “flying shuttle,” and continued through the 1770s with inventions such as Samuel Crompton’s “spinning mule.” The yarn revolution was followed by a weaving breakthrough. By the late 1700s Britain was starting to transform from a mostly rural nation into an industrial power, exporting textiles and metals. Then the spread of the steam engine in the nineteenth century led the Industrial Revolution to its apogee. Infant mortality declined sharply as living standards rose. But population growth was no match for the pace of material improvement. Between 1801 and 1901 the English population more than trebled, to around 30 million. Yet Londoners’ real wages more than doubled over the period.
It is hard to overstate the importance of this economic transition. With the exception of newly settled colonies, never before had a country been able to achieve the double feat of a growing population and rising living standards. Yet England’s prosperity spread in the nineteenth century as the ships made with British steel brought Europe closer to the abundant natural resources and the sparsely populated land of the New World. From 1820 to the year 2000 economic activity sustained by the planet multiplied by almost sixty: the world’s population grew sixfold, to roughly 6 billion. Per capita income jumped by a factor of almost ten. Malthus’s thesis about the world’s grim future was buried under an avalanche of progress.
Overcoming the Malthusian nightmare more than two hundred years ago put spring in civilization’s stride. The feat underscored the power of human ingenuity to overcome its environmental constraints. Yet despite our past success, the dismal reality predicted by Malthus over two hundred years ago seems once again to loom in the offing. Despite enormous advances in productivity, civilization appears to be reaching the physical limits of our natural environment, stretching the carrying capacity of the planet. This could portend a dire future. Just as China, India, and other developing countries seem poised for a surge of economic growth that would lift billions of people out of poverty, rising prices of oil, food, and other commodities suggest the earth’s resources may not support all