How To Achieve Sustainable Growth – Part 1.

Hello!

This is the first of two posts in which I will talk about growth. As a committed member of the Green party, this is a subject that interests me, since many in the Green Party claim that sustainable economic growth is impossible. Is this true?

The most famous figure to raise questions about growth in modern times was Thomas Malthus. In around 1800 he observed that since food production grew linearly, and population grew geometrically, at some point population would overtake food production and hundreds of millions would die in a “Malthusian Catastrophe”. I will dig into the maths a bit more in the next post, but first I want to explore this prediction.

We now live in a world where much of the most fertile land is used for non-foodstuffs such as tea, coffee, chocolate, tobacco and ethanol. Much food production is very wasteful (baby sweetcorn?). About half the food we grow is thrown away before it reaches our plates, and more is disposed of before it reaches our mouths. And yet in spite of all this, most people in the west will die of diseases related to obesity. Many have concluded from this that Malthus was mistaken. But Malthus was just doing the math, so what went – right?

It is often said that Malthus was debunked by the explosion of food created by the post-war Green Revolution. But this is not so as we can easily see from a bit of arithmetic. It is estimated that the world population reached 1 billion in 1804. The population is currently doubling every 12 years, but let us suppose that the natural doubling rate is 20 years. Then starting from 1800, the population should now be – 1000 billion. Since the world’s population is actually less than 10 billion, we can conclude that it was was not extra food that proved Malthus wrong, but a deficit of 99% of the expected population. What happened? I don’t know exactly, but we can make some guesses.

The immediate problem identified by Malthus was solved by the almost total extermination of the existing (unknown) population of North America, and gorging on the enormous riches that had accumulated over the previous centuries in the form of plains teeming with bison, rivers teeming with fish and forests teeming with life of all sorts. This accelerated from about 1850 – by 1910 it was pretty much all gone. At the same time, 30 million died in wars in China, and at least 10 million were killed by the British in the Indian Mutiny.

In the early part of the 20th century 50 – 100 million died worldwide of Spanish Flu, 20 million died in the Russian revolution and 10 million in WW1. Another 65 million died in WW2, and a little later 40 million died in China as a result of the “Great Leap Forward”, whilst another 20 million died under Stalin. During this whole period, uncounted tens or hundreds of millions died of want,  violence and preventable disease in Africa, India,  South America and South East Asia. And the violence and starvation across the world continues to this day.

It is true that the discovery of oil made it possible to effectively consume the enormous mountain of food laid down 400 million years ago by using it in fertilizers and agricultural machinery – but no amount of fossil fuel could feed 1000 billion people. The way in which the Malthusian Catastrophe was averted is – hundreds of millions died.  Mathematics turns out to work after all.

The good news is that, finally, after 200 years we have discovered how to avoid this horrible death toll. Enormously reduced infant mortality in wealthier countries means that it is no longer necessary to have 12 children in order to hope that 2 survive. And modern contraceptives make it easy to avoid unwanted births,  providing a source of moral pain only to the most sensitive and scrupulous. As long as we ensure certain basic, decent minimum standard of wealth and health care for the worlds population (a level easily attainable with a more just system of international trade), population growth is a solved problem.

But economic growth is another matter – and the subject of the next post.