Was Malthus Right?

[yby1]

All this talk about Thomas Malthus centuries old essay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_the_Principle_of_Population) about population growth and sustainability has led me to post this thread for opinions here. I've been reading a bunch of doomsday "the world will end in 10 years" type of articles

like this one - http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/0406vip-mcpherson0406.html#

or this
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

along with some WSJ and NYT articles on the subject
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120613138379155707.html
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/malthus-was-right/

If you do a news search on Malthus there are plenty of op-ed articles on the subject.

I think the fears are very real, but the "doomsday" scenarios seem a bit over the top.

[miel]

No, Malthus was wrong in almost every way. But about the population problem he was wrong because it is possible to have sustainable policies if the political will exists.

At current population, there are enough resources for everyone to subsist without suffering but only if live is lived very differently than we live it now.

The political will unfortunately is not currently here. It will require some kind of massive crash.

Malthus also thought that a kind of survival of the fittest exist in the social context. Thus, the rich are fit and the poor are not fit.

I don't think anyone from the 19th century anticipated the current situation of overconsumption. No one really thought about how people would live now because it did not seem possible. For us, inability to consume is the same as scarcity but there is no need for scarcity because the only thing that causes such suffering from scarcity is severe inequality.

No one anticipated the current technology. We could grow even more food in the U.S. The U.S. alone would be able to feed the entire world if it expanded food production. It's economic structures that won't let this happen (I'm not saying it should). In other words, the upper limit of resources isn't known.

Humanity could restructure its way of living and if they don't Malthus is probably right there will be scarcity for the unequal and then conflict, etc. will occur. But it's not inevitable. It's the result of a choice.