It appears, in retrospect, that Malthus was wrong. Over the past 200 years, the population has grown in most countries and worldwide, but (again in most countries) people by and large have not gotten worse off, but better off, in material terms. Food is more plentiful, and many other kinds of goods and services are available that were not available 200 years ago. The reason is that technical progress in the production of food and in other fields has not been rare and accidental, but rather more or less continuous and cumulative. And this improvement in technology has outrun population growth, leaving more and more people better off.
Looked at in detail, technical progress over this period has not been so continuous or regular. Before Malthus, about 1700, Britain had experienced an "agricultural revolution," a major surge of technical progress in agriculture. In the nineteenth century, however, agricultural productivity seems to have remained relatively stagnant, while manufacturing and transportation surged ahead. But cheap manufactures made it possible to outfit more farmers more cheaply, and the improvements of transportation made is possible to bring food from further away, as new agricultural land was settled. Once again, in the twentieth century, agricultural productivity surged into the lead with large, continuing increases in agricultural productivity, together with some growth in manufacturing productivity.
From the Malthusian viewpoint, this looks like a series of lucky accidents, and a Malthusian might say that there is no scientific reason to believe that the luck can continue -- that such a belief is no more than an act of faith. But from the anti-Malthusian viewpoint, things look quite different. An anti-Malthusian might ask how long a trend has to continue before it stops being a lucky accident and starts to be a general rule. If three hundred years is not long enough, how long? And how many times must the Malthusians be wrong before they realize that their ideas are flawed?
These differences have not been resolved in two hundred years and it is safe to assume that readers of these pages will not agree on them either.
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