Malthus wasn't Malthusian

Yi Wen, one of my macroeconomics professors, once asked the class why economics was different from physics in the context of a particular model we were covering that predicted certain doom. The answer was that humans have agency to choose to do something other than what was modeled. Adam Martin, guest blogging at Aid Watch, demonstrates that this was something Malthus understood, but that neither his supporters nor most of his critics have realized he did:
Malthus was not arguing in a vacuum. He was responding to William Godwin’s proposal to overthrow basic social institutions like private property and the family. In a free love-fest where no one is responsible for the offspring resultant from their passions, Malthus argued, population growth would run amok. If individuals don’t bear the cost of procreation, they will procreate too much. If they do bear costs of offspring, “preventative checks” such as birth control and delayed marriage will make population self-regulating. In his own words: “Impelled to the increase of his species by an equally powerful instinct, reason interrupts his career, and asks him whether he may not bring beings into the world, for whom he cannot provide the means of subsistence.” An Essay on the Principle of Population, Chapter II). Reproductive choices respond to incentives. The laws of economics are more powerful than the laws of attraction. …

A top-down perspective on population that treats individuals like mindless lemmings will panic: “Unless we reduce the human population humanely through family planning, nature will do it for us through violence, epidemics or starvation.”

Malthus gets right what both his followers and his more technocratic critics get wrong: the institutions within which individuals make reproductive decisions matter. The way to increase GDP per capita is not to cut the denominator. And while today’s scare tactics (Mali is “really in for a Malthusian disaster,”) and recommendations to stop having babies are not as monstrous as those of yesteryear, we should be wary of those who would intrude on one of the most personal and sacred choices individuals confront – whether to have a child.

Update: I was highly entertained when I read the comment section from a Krugamn post last July defending himself against the accusation that his climate change advocacy makes him "Malthusian." He said, great, Malthus was right 58 of the last 60 centuries. Then the kicker:“We only think Malthus got it wrong because the two centuries he was wrong about were the two centuries that followed the publication of his work.”

The first comment came from someone thrilling to the name of mugwump:

Only an economist could say that with a straight face.

Shorter version: “Malthus was wrong because his theory had zero predictive ability”.

Economists always have an explanation (usually several competing explanations) for past events. They’re just lousy at predicting what’s going to happen.

This in from ... Africa: "Think Again: Africa's Crisis"

In preparation for Sec. Clinton's trip to Africa in August, Charles Kinney wrote to try to dispel 7 myths about the development process in Africa. A few of them bear repeating in my usual "it's bad, but not as bad as you've been told" vein:

1. "Conditions in Africa Are Medieval."

Not in the slightest. It's true that some countries in the region are as poor as England under William the Conqueror, but that doesn't mean Africa's on the verge of doomsday. How many serfs had a cellphone? More than 63 million Nigerians do. Millions travel on buses and trucks across the continent each year, even if the average African road is still fairly bumpy. ... About 10 percent of infants die in their first year of life in Africa -- still shockingly high, but considerably lower than the European average less than 100 years ago, let alone 800 years past. And about two thirds of Africans are literate -- a level achieved in Spain only in the 1920s.

2 - "Africa Is Stuck in a Malthusian Trap."

Hardly. Malthus's world was one of stagnant economies where population growth was cut short by declining health, famine, or war. Thanks to the spread of technologies and new ideas, African economies are expanding fast and population growth has been accompanied by better health.

The continent of Africa has seen output expand 6½ times between 1950 and 2001. Of course, the population has grown nearly fourfold, so GDP per capita has only increased 67 percent. But that's hardly stagnation. Indeed, only one country in the region (the Democratic Republic of the Congo) has seen GDP growth rates average below 0.5 percent up to this year -- the run-of-the-mill growth rate when Malthus was writing in early 19th-century Britain. And though there have been all too many humanitarian disasters in the region, the great majority of Africa's population has been unaffected. The percentage of Africans south of the Sahara who died in wars each year over the last third of the 20th century was about a hundredth of a percent. The average percentage affected by famine over the last 15 years was less than three tenths of a percent. Africa has seen child mortality fall from 26.5 to 15 percent since 1960 and life expectancy increase by 10 years.

6. "Development Means Economic Growth."

It's more than that. ... income growth alone is unlikely to be a panacea. Economist Bill Easterly's study of "life during growth" around the world found that changes in per capita income were the driving force behind improvements for perhaps three of 69 measures of broad-based development -- calorie and protein intake and fixed phones per person. But for the other 66 measures -- covering health, education, political stability, and the quality of government, infrastructure, and the environment -- income growth was not the driving force in change. There's much more to life than money, and people concerned with development need to think more broadly if they are to help sustain Africa's progress.

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Speaking of all this, here is an entertaining map of Sec. Clinton's speech topics. By and large, it's the same topics Bush 1, Bush 2, and the other Clinton have been sending their envoys to say also.

(hat tip to those who sent me to the people who gave me this stuff: Texas in Africa for the map, Marginal Revolution for the above discussion, both linked on the left)

World Food Prize Conference - CEO Panel on sustainable agriculture

I am attending the World Food Prize Conference this week in Des Moines, Iowa. Much of tomorrow will be spent on book signings, but today I get to focus on the symposia.

Panel discussion from CEOs (Deere & Co, DuPont, Monsanto, AGRA, and ADM, moderated by WFP President.

1 - How can we feed 9 billion people in a few yhears?

Woertz (ADM): Reduce food waste

Grant (Monsanto): Share private research 

Public-private partnerships

High-tech farming so we use less water and fertilizer

2 - What are the greatest impediments? What does policy need to do?

A1 - What we need most is clarity and stability. Specifying exactly what will be regulated and how up front  improves certainty and planning so is easier to invest. There is more opportunity today and more focus today than at any time.

A2 - All impediments bite more in small countries than in large. We have to invest in Russia because it’s big. “In most markets, the limiting factor is if you have a solid financial system in place.”
A3 – Physical infrastructure slows down ability of firms to get fertilizers and other inputs to farmers and food from farmers to the rest of the market.
A4 – A ton of corn (feed family of 6 for a year) costs $500-600 to deliver to central Malawi as food aid. It costs $50-60 to grow it there instead.

A5 – Work on science regulation because we will need good science to get production up without using poor land. Get science to the market faster, but in an orderly way.

A6 – Policies that address the efficient use of water, particularly in Asia and Africa.

A7 – Ag education and preparing the next generation of farmers.

3 – What about for smallholders specifically?

A1 – The construction of future markets is an “inflection point” for building up capital and investment.

A2 – Markets for smallholders are totally different. Like low-cost 50horsepower tractors, or low-cost GPS. You have to be in that market and figure out how to solve that particular problem. For some things, you need community or cooperative or NGO investment so many farmers can share the investment.

A3 – Zero tillage practice has allowed smallholders to increase their land or reduce their costs and improve productivity.

“Companies cannot do this on their own. To believe that is naïve. Governments have shown they can’t do it either. NGOs are closest to the ground. How do we leverage the technology we have today? Governments and NGOs coming together in a collaborative effort.”

All panelists are optimistic about the future, but emphasize its urgency.

“We spend too much time defining the problem. We all give the same speeches.”

“Agriculture is the optimistic science. Malthus was wrong the first time and he’ll be wrong this time too.”

Babies in Nigeria

The Times decided it had been a good few months since it last sounded a Malthusian warning against population growth in Africa. So they said, let's pick on Nigeria! That's always fun. When I read the good Dr. Blattman asking for additional opinions, I knew it was time for me to break radio silence again.

Nigeria defies a lot of the overpopulation stories. I spend a lecture with my development students on Malthus and overpopulation, and I've got to say, I find the evidence very non-Malthusian.

Nigeria as a whole is less densely populated than New York State (or 6 other US states). Actually, NYS is a very good comparison: there's a large mass of population in one teeny corner, and the rest of the state is vast tracts of underpopulated farmland with a couple rust-belt cities "not living up to their potential," as we recite in far too many student papers over here. In the last governor's election, the top debate topics were the brain drain out of NYS and corruption. They had to put the capitol city outside of NYC to keep it away from the big city politicking, crime, and corruption, just like Abuja. But I digress:

Check out the map for Nigeria's population density. The density in Lagos is 2000/square mile - 1/5 the density of Washington DC; 1/9 the density of Singapore. A couple other states in the south are also fairly well packed. Altogether, 15% of the population lives in high-density states. The vast majority of the country is in the 40-150 per square mile category. If anything, that is underpopulated. By comparison, NY city is up around 5000 per square mile, there are few pockets of high population (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, from west to east) and everything else is in the 1-250 range. At 250/square mile in Ithaca, deer ate all my garden vegetables and raccoons regularly sacked garbage cans without locks on them.

Then we have the difficulty that the overpopulation is higher in areas that have higher GDP/capita. Lagos and Port Harcourt are not the poverty-stricken areas, but the wealthy ones. It's the underpopulated north that has the higher poverty rate.

Because really, the Times (and family) only discover there are actual cities in Africa when it wants to trot out its tired Malthusian stuff. Notice they only talk about fertility rates (6 kids per woman!), not population growth rates (2% last year, because 2 of those kids died before age 5 and the life expectancy is still under 50). Notice they don't mention that food production has kept up with population growth for over 50 years. Notice they don't mention that birth rates have been falling for 30 years, right in line with standard population transition models.

You could make a reasonable story out of all this based on the Harris-Todaro model: the way to solve the overcrowding in Lagos is to provide a little more development in the rural areas. But then the problem isn't too many people, but not enough development shared unequally.

Among my favorite comments on the subject, however, are still Fengler's and Dickens':

Fengler: Many think this is a big problem. ... I am less certain that the rapid population growth in Africa, especially in Kenya, is the fundamental development challenge: ... despite Africa’s rapid population growth and Europe’s stagnation (even decline in few countries) the old continent remains much more densely populated than Africa. If we look at Western Europe – where I come from – there are on average 170 people living on each square km. In Sub-Saharan Africa there are only 70 today. This gap will narrow in the next decades but even by 2050, Western Europe is expected to be more densely populated than Africa. I am following the population debates in Europe, especially in my (densely populated) home country Germany. I have never heard anyone argue that there are too many people in Europe.

Ever and again, I hear the immortal words:

``If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,'' returned the Ghost, ``will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.''
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
``Man,'' said the Ghost, ``if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!''